Gilles Dauvé and Denis Authier
The Communist Left in
With texts by:
Laufenberg, Wolffheim, Gorter,
Roland-Holst and Pfempfert
Original Title:
La Gauche Communiste en Allemagne (1918-1921)
(First published in France in 1976)
Translator’s
Note
This revised edition of The Communist Left in
M. DeSocio
Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………..p.
6
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Origins of the German Workers
Movement……………….p. 25
Chapter 3.
The German Left before
1914……………………………..p.
49
Chapter 4.
War and Radicalization……………………………………p.58
Chapter 5.
The 1918 “November
Revolution”…………………...........p.
70
Chapter 6.
Before the Confrontation: The Relation of Forces……..….p. 75
Chapter 7.
The Confrontation: November 1918 to May 1919……….p. 85
Chapter 8.
The International and Domestic Situations: May 1919 to March
1920…………………………………………………………………p.
96
Chapter 9.
Revolutionary Syndicalism and
Unionism…………………p. 101
Chapter 10.
The KPD: January 1919 to March
1920………………….p. 111
Chapter 11.
Between the First and the Second Congresses of the Communist
International…………………………………………………………p.
118
Chapter 12.
The Kapp Putsch and the
Chapter 13.
The
VKPD……………………….……………………..p.
139
Chapter 14.
The KAPD and the AAUD-E…………………………..p.
144
Chapter 15.
The March Action
(1921)………………………………p.
152
Chapter 16.
The German Left and the Third
International…………p. 161
Chapter 17.
The “International Communist
Left”………………….p. 175
Conclusion………………………..………………………………….p.
203
Appendix I.
The Groupuscular
Phase………………………………p.
207
Appendix II. Bibliography of Topics Addressed
by the German Left during the
1930s…………………………………….……………………..p.
219
Appendix III. Note on “National
Bolshevism”………………………p.223
Texts
Foreword……………………………………………………………….p.
229
The
Factory Organizations or Trade Unions? (Fritz
Wolffheim)……………p.252
The Opportunism of the Communist Party
of the
Resolution of the Conference of the
Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party……………………….……………………p.
286
The Communist Left and the Resolutions
of the Second Congress of the Communist International (Henriette Roland-Holst)………...p. 291
The Lessons of the “March
Action”—Gorter’s Last Letter to Lenin…….p. 295
The KAPD’s Report on the Third Congress of the
Communist
International………………………………………….p.
301
Program of the AAUD (December
1920)………………..…………..p.
313
Extracts from the Guidelines
of the AAUD (December 1920)……….p. 316
Guidelines of the AAU-E (June
1921)………………………..………p.
326
Lenin’s Infantile Disorder… and the Third International (Franz
Pfempfert)………………………………………..…p.
328
Leading Principles of the KAI (Extracts)
(1922)…….………………p. 338
Epilogue
(2004)………………………………………………………..p.
345
Some Websites of
Interest…………..…………………………………p.
354
“It
is not those who fell wrapped in the unfortunate flag of the defeated Revolution
whom we consider to be fraudulent squanderers of the Revolution, but those who
afterwards, from their desks of wisdom or from their podiums as mentors of the
masses, were unable to derive from that sacrifice anything more than a few
phrases of demagogic admiration, accompanied by a defeatist commentary.”
Bordiga:
From the Commune to the IIIrd
International, 1924
The fact that the Russian
Revolution of 1917 was only one aspect and one of the effects of a much broader
movement, whose center was
There is no “particular
situation” with a unique meaning in the history of society. Given the
“period”, or, more precisely, given all the elements which directed
the revolutionary drama, the revolution failed and had to fail. It can be
lamented, and we lament it, but it is of no use to evoke the Bolshevik-style
party or any other deus ex machina
for explaining the development of an unreal past. It would, however, be just as
false, and would also misrepresent the period, to replace the consequences of
the abstract absence of the “party” or any other factor with the
false plenitude of “it could not have been otherwise”; this would
have been tantamount to negating the possibility of revolution. It would be yet
more false, obviously, to present everything as a function of a necessary
failure. We are determinists, of course, but determinism is not a historical
factor which can intervene “a posteriori” in the explanation of
events.
Such a procedure would foist
a meaning upon even the most radical actions which these actions did not in
fact possess, and would interpret the various revolutionary attempts as simple
convulsive motions of capital’s adaptation, as outcomes of economic
crises.
The “lessons” of
the German Revolution? A historical analysis of the revolutionary movement
would be interested in, among other things, discovering the reasons for the
failure of the previous attempts, but not in such a way as to derive from the
latter a guarantee for future victory. We do not consider revolutions as simple
“experiences”. We discover in them, beyond their time, men who live
in community with today’s subversive tendency. And this discovery is
consolidated by discovering that this tendency has always existed and has
always occupied the front ranks of the historical stage on various occasions.
It is not, then, a matter of learning simple “lessons” or of
considering history as a school, but something quite different.
“We know only one
science: history”, means that the other sciences, based upon
“experience”, are not sciences at all. The transformation of
Marxism carried out by its followers, starting at the end of the 19th
century, which made Marxism into a “science”, reduced it to one of
those pseudo-sciences which are not at all subversive of society, in order to
accommodate to the latter and to seek nothing more than the reproduction of
particular “reactions”; it was a question, for the orthodox
Marxists, of socializing capital or, expressed differently, of subjecting it to
real organization and regulation, to prevent some of its annoying effects,
thanks to their Marxist “science” of economic reactions; but they
did not speak of socialist production, or of socialist economics; they
preserved the categories of political economy, such as value and all the rest,
but forgot the only true science: human emancipation. The stance of the proletarian revolutionaries was
identical with the confrontation with real history as it was unfolding. Some,
like Gorter, felt quite profoundly that, with the unleashing of the world war,
the bourgeoisie had dealt an almost irreparable blow to the proletariat; that
the war meant, in the final analysis, the accession of capitalism to world
domination (see Imperialism, the World
War and Social Democracy, 1914); and from that moment (Autumn of 1914) he
foresaw that a revolution, breaking out after the war as a result of misery,
would face nothing but difficulties. Just like Marx who, viewing the general
situation, had “counseled against” the insurrection of the Commune,
saying that it was condemned to failure. Certain individuals in our camp thus
possessed the elements necessary to predict failure. But this did not prevent
Marx, Gorter and Pannekoek (who may very well have shared Gorter’s views)
from participating in the movement from its very first moments; unlike
Luxemburg, they did not apply the brakes (see below, for the increasingly
negative role played by Luxemburg from the beginning of the war); they were
present wherever the human community was being created, contributing their
powers of classification and, while not holding back, not feeling the need to
offer themselves as sacrificial victims to the holocaust, either.
If events are conceived in
the light of their outcomes, all proletarian movements could be interpreted as
phases of the social system’s self-adaptation. From this perspective, the
proletariat has failed up to this point, because capital was not sufficiently
developed and dominated neither the entire world nor life as a whole; today,
however, the total rule exercised by capital will lead to a rebellion which
will be just as total. This vision of a finally pure communist revolution to be
unleashed against a capitalism which is the absolute lord and master of
everything skips over the present and past contradictions of the movement of
capital and the communist movement. Furthermore, in order to provide this total
rebellion of pure negation with a certain coherence, an effort is made to
discover some faraway movements (obviously despised and falsified by the
official “communist” movement which only knew how to speak of the
insufficiency of the productive forces) towards the end of discovering within
them the “ne plus ultra”
of the total revolution, in comparison with which the Commune, the Russian
Revolution, the German Revolution, etc., would be mere child’s play.
Peasant uprisings are sublimated, while the KAPD is reduced to a transitional
step towards the real domination of capital.1 This dual movement,
which on the one hand looks towards the past for truly radical movements,
further back into the night of time, and on the other hand seeks to
“demystify” more recent movements (this second aspect being a
result of the first) only shows that it has “demystified” the most
recent of all revolutionary movements: the future revolution, which is to say
that it has renounced it.
It is not from the
perspective of an unrealized ideal perfection, but, to the contrary, from that
of the contradictions within which the revolutionary movement of 1917-21
developed, that this history is intended to be written. The German Revolution
interests us precisely because it is the disturbance which, due to its extent
and its social-economic background, most closely resembles the situations which
we may be called upon to confront. The problems faced by the German
revolutionaries remain, without having been solved in practice. Capital has
today managed to perfect its new and specific forms of domination, forms which
it had begun to experiment with in the First World War.
II
It is symptomatic that the
“German Revolution” has long remained in oblivion. The
revolutionary movement, both within and outside of
It is quite surprising that Socialisme ou Barbarie, over the course
of its 40 issues (1949-65), did not publish even one study, however brief, on
this theme.2 A whole series of obstacles prevented the comprehension
of the phenomenon of the communist left. It is known how Stalinism (and Stalin
himself) rejected “Luxemburgism” as an infantile disorder, worthy
of sympathy but not very strong compared to its “Bolshevik”
brother. Luxemburg, for her part, became for many people the symbol of the
German Revolution and the best fruit of the movement in the West. The Luxemburg
cult has survived not only because of the social democrats who remember nothing
about her except her democratic side (Spartacus, Masses) but also because of the revolutionaries who were
misinformed concerning the gap which existed between Luxemburg and the
communist left. The use of the term “Spartacist” to designate the
movement’s most radical current was based on the simplified version of
events provided by the bourgeois counterrevolution. The use of this term has
mystified the history of its time, much as the use of the words “Marxist”
and “anarchist”, employed anachronistically, were used to describe
positions which were incompatible with their original meanings. Retrospection
falsifies perspective.3 Finally, the Italian communist left, linked
to Leninism, by interpreting the German Left as a variety of
anarchosyndicalism,4 has sowed much confusion, abetted by the
remnants of the German Left who were no more capable of understanding their own
past.
German historians offer
little information about the revolutionary movement after 1918. The works of
Badia (Histoire de l’Allemagne
contemporaine (Ed. Sociales, Vol. 1, on
These two works are
nonetheless proof of the growing interest in the German events.
Flechtheim’s volume on the German Communist Party7, despite
Weber’s final contribution which comprises a comparative study of the
social bases of the SPD and the KPD, is, rather than a history of a social
movement, the history of an organization. But even this book gives short shrift
to the communist left. Flechtheim falls into one of the two traps which lie in
wait for the academic faced with the temptation to write either a political history or history plain and simple. The former is centered
on the institutional expressions of social movements, and results, in the worst
cases, in considering everything in the light of the evolution of one or
another political group. The latter, with its preoccupation to avoid dogmatism,
accumulates facts without any organizing principle. In the case of the
proletarian workers movements, on the pretext of avoiding a
“totalitarian” conception of history, it privileges a putative
spontaneity (preferably not too violent or else only violent in the past) over
centralized action and organization. The first procedure frequently proclaims
itself to be Marxist and in fact constitutes an institutional theory of class
struggle. The second is careful to take
no position in regard to theoretical communism, it has a pretense to being
independent and joyfully proclaims itself—outrageously enough—to be
in favor of the formula whereby Marx declared that he was not a Marxist. It
ignores the movement’s center of gravity: the passage to communism, which
is, however, essential; the proletariat can only be victorious by making that
passage and organizing itself in accordance with that goal.
The Anglo-Saxon historians,8
who have often written about
Broué’s
monumental work, La révolution en
Allemagne 1917-23 (Minuit, 1972) is an excellent example of a political history. It is true, of
course, that the author, in a recent article10, denied “having
composed a history restricted to the level of the
‘leadership-elite’.” His objective is to study the
“German communists in the light of their form of organization, within the
framework of their party and their International, a framework which they,
within that same movement, tried to construct in order to be
victorious.” Note his
declaration: “their party” is, of course, the KPD; “their
International” is the CI. He has thus written a history of the KPD and
the CI, the latter in the context of its relations with
Studying the revolutionary
events in
Broué’s
Trotskyist inclinations lead him to ignore “leftist” and
“infantile” organizations and to instead treat the diverse
vicissitudes of the social democratic left as a communist movement. For our
part, it is not a matter of opposing our version to a Trotskyist version, or of
correcting one theoretical con game with another. We declare right from the
start that we are studying one aspect—for us, the most important
aspect—of the events in question. The reader will understand on his own
that he has not read merely the chronicle of the “communist left”,
but that of the epoch’s most profound social movement. Broué has
undertaken a partial study with general pretensions: we shall undertake a
partial study of general interest. One will, of course, find an infinite
quantity of useful information in Broué’s book. But its erudition
takes the form of mystification. Fixated on the theoretical expressions and
established organizations but not on the contradictory social agitation and its
more or less articulated manifestations, he devotes himself to the examination
of parties and trade unions (especially the KPD), scorning to bother with a
multitude of significant developments. So, how can it be doubted, after having
perused his impressive bibliography, that he has told the whole truth? The method
chosen, however, comes with a lie, by omission. His work on
From a revolutionary
perspective, the volume of selected texts of Pannekoek, ably presented by S.
Bricianer, has cleared the way and disseminated knowledge of the German Left
beyond a small circle of initiates.13 A serious historical work, it
is nonetheless primarily a biography of Pannekoek presented through his texts,
and devotes few pages to the period 1917-1921, focusing above all on the
lessons derived from those years by Pannekoek, especially in World Revolution and Communist Tactics
(1920). This focus, which is perfectly legitimate in a work of this kind,
ultimately fails to portray the reality of that epoch’s communist
movement in
This persistent focus on form (council, party) facilitates the
current efforts on behalf of capital’s adaptation, which requires both
the authoritarianism and regimentation transmitted by the degraded notion of
the party so dear to the CP and numerous leftists, as well as the
workers’ pseudo-self-management and the illusory freedom which the idea
of the “council” denotes for other leftists. The concept of
self-management is even more dangerous when it is stripped of its workerism:
“if (this conception) is to be true to its postulates, it must assert that with the evolution of
capitalism—which is constantly socializing all human
activities—those organizations which are responsible for realizing the
principle of councilism will have to be located outside of the
factories.”14 The demand for workers’ management refers
to the management of everyday life.15
The real content of the communist
movement lies elsewhere and is replaced by questions of form.
Previously denounced, the
German Left enjoys a relative celebrity today thanks to its most flaccid and
well-known aspects. This was only made possible by disconnecting its texts from
their historical context. As an illustration of this tendency, we can be grateful
for the work of R. Gombin16, who undertakes the task of fusing a
series of different and contradictory
contributions into a whole which is presented as the very trademark of what is
most radical: but this is only possible after having separated these
contributions from their respective sources. The essence of modernism consists
in mixing the most radical aspects of revolutionary thought into an original
synthesis while these aspects are, however, stripped of what makes, or made
them, subversive, and taking delight in mere novelty. His secret lies in having
associated Pannekoek with H. Lefebvre: this monstrous cocktail could only have
been mixed by carefully erasing the roots
of Pannekoek’s ideas. Evoking the mass media in support of this
connection would be superficial. Society has always fed on revolutionary
thought, which, in turn, has also caused the latter to become insipid. It was
not at all strange when the magazine Minuit
published an extract from Pannekoek’s Workers
Councils in its seventh issue, having selected a section from that work
which deals with democracy. But the councilist illusions of certain
revolutionaries also facilitate this absorption, as is demonstrated by the
Preface to Workers Councils written
by former members of the ICO.17 An introduction to the texts of P.
Mattick situates Sorel among the “ultra-left”, alongside the
“socialism of the producers”, “self-management” and
“popular self-government”.18 The German Left defined
itself precisely in contradistinction to syndicalism, including the
“revolutionary” variety and, having suffered the effects of
reactionary violence, did not accept the overabundant and misunderstood myths
of the various experiences with soviets, councils or workers’
pseudo-autonomy. In 1919 and 1920, left communists knew quite well that the
“party-form” had contributed no more than the
“council-form” to the defeat of the revolutionary movement. In any
event, the publication of Workers
Councils signaled the recognition of the German Left, in its councilist form,
by the intellectual world. The “official daily newspaper of the
powerful” even devoted almost an entire page to a good exposition of
Pannekoek’s work.19 Following in the footsteps of Djilas,
Lukàcs and Garaudy, the German Left, in turn, joined the family of
Marxist heretics considered to be worthy of notice. An obsession with
“recuperation” (a superficial myth) would be absurd. The
fashionable interest in the German Left is accompanied by a revolutionary
curiosity and a positive concern with information and clarification. The
phenomenon of vulgarized distortion is inevitable. It is precisely this real
and new interest which obliges us to set the record straight.
The councilists have done
little to shed light on the period of 1917-1921. But the German Left was one of
Bordiga’s obsessions. It is surprising to consider that it was the
journal Invariance, descended from
the Italian Left, which in 1969 first republished a few essential texts, in
particular almost all of Pannekoek’s text, Révolution mondiale et tactique communiste.20 A
subsequent issue of the same journal is almost entirely devoted to the German
Left: it comprises a study, both historical and theoretical, which heralds the
further evolution of the journal, which we shall examine in another work currently
in progress.21 During the same period, a Danish group, also
descended from the Italian Left, wrote an original study with a particular
focus on the unions. A mere fifty pages long, it is one of the richest texts on
this subject.22 Significantly, it is unfortunately little-known. It
has been photocopied and distributed on a small scale, and we have made ample
use of it despite its Leninist vestiges.
A long article in Number 58
of Programme Communiste, organ of the
International Communist Party (the “orthodox” descendant of
Bordigism), published in April 197323, dedicated to reassuring the
faithful who remained in the ICP after the schism brought about by the
sanctions imposed upon the Danes and Invariance,
who had demanded and practiced “free inquiry” (particularly in
regard to its principle opponent, the German Left), highlights the principle
points of the German Left’s defeat. However, whereas the Danes consider
the German Left as a product of the proletariat, the ICP’s article is
primarily a study of the theoretical positions of the various actors, totally
separated from their contexts (which confirms an absolute bad faith when it is
compared to the pains Bordiga took to exculpate-explain, by means of endless
expository forays, the most insignificant—and the
not-so-insignificant—theoretical deviations of Lenin).24
Proletarian action (quite well-perceived elsewhere) is nothing but a backdrop
in this article. The Left is judged on the basis of its
“principles” and its adversaries are preferred for the rigor of
their profession of the Marxist faith.
A collection edited by one of
the authors of the present text, La
Gauche allemande, Textes, reveals a German Left which is much more strict,
dictatorial and “party-centered” than today’s councilists, as
well as the image the latter entertain of their progenitor. This
collection’s postscript focuses on the involution of council communism to councilism.25 We should also
mention a good collection of biographies, recently published in French and
brought together in one volume by the councilists.26 But this list
is already out of date.
Everything we have said up to
this point sheds light on our method. This work on the German Left is obviously
an intellectual work—and its authors are in this case
intellectuals—but, just like other studies of this subject, even the most
academic, this study is not the fruit of pure intellect, of the closed logic of
“research”; the German Left’s anti-intellectualist critiques
were perfectly justified when they attacked the domination of the
intelligentsia, when they targeted the pretension of a certain kind of
intellectual of being superior to the rest of mortal mankind, and especially
the working class “rank and file”, when such intellectuals fought
for their alleged right to lead the movement. Our work has no pretension to
autonomy27, which for us is not a goal in and of itself; it has no
meaning except as part of a movement which goes far beyond it. The renascent
radical movement must appropriate its own history. Nor do we frame what we see
in the forms in which spoiled intellectuals take pleasure:
“Our purpose is not
literary or aesthetic production. Comrades and readers do not have to waste
their time evaluating a passage, a page or a text which we publish, but they
should always take into account the relation between the different parts of the
labors undertaken by our small movement. . .”
(Bordiga, El Programa Comunista, 1953)
In the following text, the
reader will not read the history of the German Revolution, or even a reference
work on the German Left. Our procedure consists in an attempt to extract the
leading thread and the essential mechanisms from our field of study. We have
not hesitated to go over facts already studied by others, often in detail, or
to rapidly pass over some realities which have since become more accessible in
more recent works. These works are “points of reference” for
following the history of the left. Another kind of approach, which is also
useful, would consist in giving more depth to the immediate reality of these
movements by conducting a study of their everyday activities, based, for
example, on their press and available archival documentation.
It is not enough to
rehabilitate a hidden past. A subversive movement has existed, and still
exists, whose action and expression have been “hidden” by official
“discourse” (state, trade union, bureaucracy, politicians,
academics, judiciary, schools, etc.). But the simple unveiling of its
expression is not in itself revolutionary. Its mere expression, that is, the
only thing that remains of it, is not revolutionary unless it is put to a new
use: not necessarily in the form of “action” in the strict sense of
the word, but simply as a theory which once again embraces events within its
framework. It is of little account that a “liberation” movement
existed long ago: capital placidly accepts the reestablishment of the truth
concerning Luddism or the German Left as long as this changes nothing. The
world begins to tremble when the revolutionary facts of the past resurface in
the practice of a renascent subversive movement. Only the dead bury the dead.
Fashion and pedagogy (often united), on the other hand, take advantage of ideas
when they are dead, or in the form in which they are no longer alive
(councilism, for the German Left). Ideas die, too. A theory is dead when the
movement which gave it life has disappeared, but it can be reborn when a
movement arises which is its authentic continuation; then, however, it appears
in the unpleasant form of a movement of “left fascists”,
“hooligans”, “a society of thieves”, and other
barbarians, like those who were called “Spartacists” in the epoch
which concerns us in this text. Socialism
or Barbarism, ignored when it was subversive, is becoming fashionable, now
that its old theoreticians (Chaulieu, Lefort and Lyotard) have submitted to the
rules of the game of modernism.
Any expression which is not
an action, in the sense that it does not contribute to the clarification of
current revolutionary problems, situates itself within capital. It shows that its author has no real need to change
his situation. The record of the past plays the same ideological role for him,
one of substitution and illusory excess, which politics plays for others. This
past could be a future: one could take pleasure in the description of what is
to come. What contributes to the revolution is neither the evocation of the
past, nor of the world of the future, but the present effort to connect reality
to both. It is not our intention to give lessons to historians. They can only
be what they are. But one can and one must say what they are, and distinguish
between thought which is merely critical and thought which is revolutionary. It
is subversive to show how slavery constituted a form of progress for both the
slaves and for humanity as a whole; it is conservative to restrict oneself to
denouncing it. The same thing is also true within a mode of production,
especially when one takes into account the shrewdness and adaptive capabilities
of capital. Who defends Thiers against the Commune these days? Who reduces the
War of 1914 to the activities of the Pan-Germanists? In relation, however, to
anything that still has a direct role to play in the preservation of the social
order, the issues remain obscure; the war of 1939-45, for example, which proves
that it is the most important and the most anti-revolutionary war, whose
consequences are still with us today and which must by all means be preserved.
This is particularly true of anything which refers to “fascism”,
where clarification is still a threat to the established order, and where
mystification rules.28 There is an abundance of intellectual methods
to avoid such subjects: quantitative
and statistical history fit perfectly with a “liberated” history
operating at the level of everyday life, or with a history of opinions. One
need only consult the catalogue of history journals to see that everything is
studied, but almost never what is essential.
To its own misfortune,
revolutionary theory plays a double role: revolutionary and . . .
non-revolutionary. By seriously presenting the real problems faced by society,
it helps society adapt to these problems. The mass media accumulate information with the intention of incessantly reproducing
capitalist relations. How could one not take a position in relation to all the
critiques, including the most virulent ones, which form part of capitalist society’s auto-critique,
despite the occasional honesty of their authors? Each major capitalist country
has its own way of absorbing revolutionary theory. In
1.
See C.
Juhl’s preface to L’Internationale
Communiste Ouvrière by Gorter, in Invariance, No. 5, New Series.
2. For
a critical study of Socialisme ou
Barbarie, particularly in regard to
3. See
4. Bordiga,
Les fondements du communisme
révolutionaire, Programme Communiste.
5. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, Maspero, 1965.
6. Nettl,
Rosa Luxemburg,
7. Flechtheim:
Le PC allemande sous la République
de Weimar, Maspero.
8. See,
for example, the various volumes of Communism
in Europe, edited by W. Griffith, MIT Press; F. Borkenau, World Communism, University of Michigan
Press, Ann Arbor, 1962; B. Lazitch, Lénine
et la IIIe Internationale, La Baconnière,
Neuchâtel, 1951; as well as the journals Problèmes du Communisme, Est et Ouest, and Le Contrat Social edited by B.
Souvarine. The common basis for the thought of all these authors resides in a
cultivated pessimism, which is quite well-expressed by the following formula of
Montesquieu, quoted by Plamenatz in German
Marxism and Russian Communism, Longmans, London, 1945: “One can,
moreover, establish, as a general maxim, that every revolution which was
predicted in advance never arrived.” For another perspective, see D.
Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage, J. Cape,
9. Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for
Power in
10. Le mouvement social, July-September
1973, pp. 89 and 95. For a critique of Broué’s book, see Cahiers de l’ISEA, December 1972,
pp. 2454-56, and D. Authier, La gauche
allemande (cf. infra No. 23).
11. A.
Kriegel, Aux origenes du communisme français,
Flammarion, 1969, p. 329.
12. Volumes I and II, Albin Michel,
1964.
13. Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, EDI,
1969. English translation: Pannekoek and
the Workers’ Councils, Telos Press,
14. Programme Communiste (abridged), No. 56, p. 32.
15. “Pourquoi nous quittons
ICO”, January-February 1973.
16. Les origins du gauchisme, Seuil, 1972.
English translation: The Origins of
Modern Leftism, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1975.
17. Bélibaste, 1974.
18. R.
París, Introduction to P. Mattick,
Intégration capitaliste et rupture ouvrière, EDI, 1972.
19. Le Monde,
20. Invariance, old series, No. 7, which
also contains: Manifestes des CP et CLP
des EU (1919), La victoire du
marxisme (Gorter, 1920), Pensée
et action communistes dans la IIIe Internationale (S. Pankhurst,
1919) with an editorial note by Il Soviet,
Le mouvement communiste internationale
and La situation en Allemagne et le
mouvement communiste, published in 1920 in Il Soviet, Le KAPD au IIIe
Congrès mondiale and the report of the KAPD’s Central
Committee of July 31, 1921, Le principe
de l’antagonisme entre le gouvernement des Soviets et le proletariat (KAI),
Pour la question du parlementarisme
by Lukàcs (1920), the Thèses
sur le parlementarisme by the Amsterdam Bureau and the Thèses of the Congress of the Belgian communists (May 1920).
21. Ibid., new series, No. 1, “Le KAPD
et le mouvement prolétarian”.
22. Kommunistik
Program, La question syndicale et la
gauche allemande dans la IIIe Internationale, Bagsvaerd, 1972.
See also Note No. 1.
23. Journal
of the International Communist Party (“Bordigist”), No. 58,
“La gauche marxiste d’Italie et le mouvement communiste
internationale”. The same issue also reproduces a series of articles published
in 1920 in Il Soviet concerning
24. Structure économique et sociale de la
Russie d’aujord’hui, L’Oubli, 1975.
25. Invariance, supplement to No. 2 (n.d.),
with a postscript by D. Authier, where one can read: the 1920 Program and the Appeal to the German Proletariat of the
KAPD; the KAPD’s interventions in the 3rd Congress of the CI; the Program
of the AAUD and extracts from its Guidelines;
the AAUD-E’s Guidelines;
Rühle’s The Revolution is Not
a Party Matter; and an extract from the Guidelines
of the KAI. See Part Two of this book, below, for English translations of these
AAUD, AAUD-E and KAI texts. English translations of the interventions of the
KAPD delegation in the 3rd Congress of the CI may be viewed at Wage Slave X’s Revolutionary
Anti-Capitalist Homepage website. An English translation of the Program of
the KAPD is available at the website of the International Communist Current (www.internationalism.org).
Rühle’s famous text has been posted in English translation on
several websites and is readily available.
26. Conseils ouvriers en Allemagne 1917-21,
Vroutsch, Serie La Marge, No. 9-11, 1973, which contains: Le mouvement des conseils en Allemagne, (ICO, No. 101); Anton Pannekoek, by Mattick (Lénine philosophe, Spartacus,
1970); Karl Korsch, by Mattick
(Cahiers de l’ISEA, No. 140); Otto
Rühle, by Mattick (Cahiers du
communisme des conseils, No. 2); as well as Landauer et Mühsam, essais de biographies, Notes sur la
République des conseils de Bavière, Les conseils ouvriers en
Alsace. In English, see: “Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960)”, by Paul
Mattick (in Pannekoek’s Lenin as
Philosopher, Merlin Press,
27. Marx: Oeuvres, Gallimard, Vol. II, 1968, p. 81.
28. For
the period as a whole, we recommend the bibliographies of The German Left… and those of the excellent book by H.
Gruber, International Communism in the
Era of Lenin,
Capitalism and the Proletariat
In 1914,
The ratio of constant to
variable capital was higher in
|
|
|
|
Year |
% |
% |
% |
1910 |
8 |
14 |
6 |
1920 |
42 |
43 |
12 |
1930 |
24 |
22 |
7 |
Only the survival of these organizations,
which had become autonomous in relation to the proletariat, gave any real force
to the persistence of what has been called the “reformist spirit”
which still held sway over the majority of the German proletariat after 1918.
Between 1871 and 1913, real per capita income doubled in
It was the relatively most
modern characteristics of German capitalism which provided the conditions most
conducive to the success of the proletarian revolution, and which made
Another consequence of
Prior to the war, this mass
of unskilled workers did not form part of the German trade unions, which had
between two and three million members. There were two parallel trade union
organizations. The socialist Zentrale,
by far the larger of the two, brought together various “free trade
unions” in a federation known in 1918-1919 as the ADGB (General
Federation of German Trade Unions). The other federation, the
anarchosyndicalist or revolutionary syndicalist Zentrale, the FVDG (Federation of Free German Trade Unions), became
the FAUD at the end of 1919 with the entry of numerous recently-created factory
organizations (see Chapter 9). Before 1914, the sector which provided the basis
for both Zentrales was composed of
workers in the skilled trades: the FVDG was largely based among the
construction workers.
The OS, on the other hand, together with the “revolutionary shop
stewards” who were still members of the trade unions (see Chapter 4),
created the “factory organizations” during the war, and later
formed the autonomous “left” radical organizations of the
proletariat: the AAUs (General Workers Unions). The trade unions could no
longer ignore this majority of the proletariat, even though only the most
radical minority of the OS joined the
AAU. The skilled workers, previously reticent about admitting unskilled workers
into the trade unions, welcomed them after 1919. The trade unions, which in
fact adopted an organizational structure based on factory and industry, soon
had nine million members. This development was also encouraged by pressure from
capitalists who refused to enter into contracts with workers who were not
members of the trade unions (see the KAPD Program).
The enormous growth of the
trade unions proves that, despite the strength of its radical currents, the
German proletariat was still, taken as a whole, reformist. One cannot speak of
a labor aristocracy except in the case of a few sectors (generally the skilled,
and some others as a result of their particular situations) which defended
certain privileges against the other more numerous sectors (today such a
division exists on an international scale). But even the most privileged
sectors of the proletariat can become seeds of revolution if capital is
compelled to submit their privileges to examination; just as, conversely, the
other non-privileged sectors are not permanently compelled to be revolutionary,
and it cannot be said that when they act in a reformist manner they do so
because they are manipulated by corrupt or bribed elements. One cannot be
manipulated for decades unless one is effectively manipulable. In his pamphlet
on imperialism, Gorter treated all proletarians, without distinction, as
“lackeys”. These sectors benefited from the super-profits obtained
by capital thanks to its favorable or dominant position in the world market.
One cannot speak of a “minority” within the German proletariat
except to designate the minority of revolutionaries
confronting the workers as a whole.
Understood as a minority
which lives at the expense of the workers movement (“bureaucrats”
of the party, the trade unions, the cooperatives, etc.), the labor aristocracy
is a definite sociological reality. But its activities do not explain
everything.8 Although materially favored, certain sectors can behave
in the most radical fashion, since economic determination is not only a
question of wages. During the war, a large number of metal workers were
supporters of peace. One cannot refer to the “economy”, or the
“spirit”, but only to the totality of real relations. As long as
the war seemed inevitable, the mobilized worker supported it and actively
participated in it, since the solidarity of the trenches was the only tangible
reality remaining to him. The worker who was still at his workbench, often due
to his skilled status, and, consequently, because he belonged to a privileged
category, was subjected to more difficult working conditions and rebelled
against the war, which for him was not so much an experienced reality as a
threat: he might be mobilized.
The organization of workers
into unions (unionen, in German; not to be confused with the
“unions” of the English-speaking world, whose counterparts in this
text shall be referred to on all occasions as “trade
unions”—tr. note) or
councils, formed especially during the extensive mass strike movement,
corresponds to the transition from the “tool-machine phase” to the
“specialized machinery phase”9: an epoch during which
the trade unions passed from reformism (although not yet integrated into the
State), to systematic collaboration, and capital passed from surrounding life,
to totally penetrating life. At this juncture the proletariat made the
workplace the site of its attempt to achieve unity because the workplace was
not yet totally conquered by capital.10 Many workers still worked on
tool-machines. They were trained within the old trade union framework, and
demonstrated the results of this training in the factories where they worked,
where they preserved a relative autonomy and carried out many tasks. This stage
of large-scale mechanized industry
progressively yielded—later, with the war and then during the twenties,
at an accelerated pace—to the stage of the OS and of the scientific organization of labor. There is no rupture
between these two mutually interconnected periods; the struggles which
developed immediately after the war, however, comprised the meeting point of
the two phases.11 In the United States and Canada, within a more
modern capitalism, the most intense proletarian movement arose among the OS (who were often recent immigrants)
who tried to unite in the IWW (see Chapter 9). The councils constituted an
attempt on the part of the proletarians to form autonomous groups: they were forced
to do so; there was no other way to carry out any kind of struggle, even a
simple reformist struggle. In their collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the
trade unions went so far as to give their approval to the prohibition of
strikes, and even prohibited them themselves; the councils were therefore above
all compelled to undertake the tasks which the trade unions no longer
fulfilled. Their form (organization by factory, uniting organized and
unorganized workers) was better-adapted for an effective reformist struggle
against modern capitalism. But the control of the entire productive apparatus
by workers councils is in no way revolutionary if the workers limit themselves
to administering what has fallen into their hands in the same way as before, or
even better, with greater efficiency than before. Capitalist society, although
managed by the workers themselves, would still be capitalist.
The
The
The recent character of
The Inconclusive Bourgeois Revolution
The German bourgeoisie had a
seminal weak point whose causes were summarized by Marx.20 The
bourgeoisie received the framework for its later development (the Reich) from
the hands of the Prussian military-bureaucratic apparatus, upon which it was
utterly dependent for its survival. Hence the contradictory coexistence of a
capitalism which was highly-developed for its epoch and a bourgeoisie which was
economically powerful but acted within the confines of a political form
inherited from the end of the Middle Ages: an absolute bureaucratic monarchy,
alongside a powerless parliament.
Similarly, the German
bourgeoisie would receive democracy not from the hands of its own class but
from those of another. It was the proletariat which would carry the democratic
revolution of 1918 to victory. Until June 1920, the first governments of the
new democratic and parliamentary
The struggle for democracy
was one of the principle components of the SPD. The need for a democratic transformation
of the
1. Bry: Wages in
2. Ibid., Chapter 6, pp. 266-322.
3. Ibid., pp. 74-75.
4. Marks:
Journal of Modern History, September
1939, “The Sources of Reformism in the Social-Democratic Party of
5. Reference
is made to Capital, which we cannot
summarize here.
6. Fixed
capital: capital which does not circulate in the sense of the
“circulation” of capital. A fleet is fixed capital. See Vol. II.
7. Marx:
Fondements de la critique de
l’économie politique, Anthropos, 1968, Vol. II, p. 215.
Dauvé: Communisme et
“question russe”, SET-Tête de Feuilles, 1972, pp. 162-71;
and Le mouvement communiste, Champ
Libre, 1972.
8. For
a critique of the thesis of the “labor aristocracy”, see T. Cliff: Les racines économiques du
réformisme, photocopy,
9. Lefranc:
Histoire du travail et des travailleurs,
Flammarion, 1957, pp. 474-76.
10. Invariance, No. 6.
11. Lutte de classes, September-October
1974, “Les rapports sociaux communistes”.
12. In
his Imperialism… Lenin referred
to the considerable number of immigrants employed in all the industrial
countries of the epoch.
13. Engels:
La guerre des paysans; N. Cohn: Les fanatiques de l’apocalypse,
July 1962 (in English: The Pursuit of the
Millenium, revised and expanded edition, Oxford University Press, New York,
1970); see, also, Debord’s critique of the latter in La société du spectacle, Champ Libre, 1971, pp. 93-94
(Thesis 38). In English, The Society of
the Spectacle, Zone Books,
14. For
a critique of Marx’s positions in 1848, see Korsch: Marxisme et contre-révolution, Seuil, 1975.
15. The
Länder are the various states
which comprise
16. R.
Comfort: Revolutionary
17. PC, No. 58, p. 120.
18. Sternberg: Le conflit du siècle, Seuil,
1958, p. 186.
19. Comfort,
Chapter III.
20. Textes 1842-47, Spartacus, 1970.
21. See
Le Roi de Prusse et la réforme
sociale, in Textes 1842-47, and Invariance, No. 10. In English, see
“Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social
Reform. By a Prussian’”, in Karl
Marx: Early Writings, tr. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin
Books,
Pannekoek was Dutch, and his
native country’s small size helped him to view things from an
international perspective. In Germany, on the other hand, the SPD totally
dominated the entire political horizon of the various tendencies which claimed
to be Marxist, including, among others, the most radical elements around Rosa
Luxemburg.5 Overawed by the power of the “party”, the
left—which represented approximately 15% of the SPD—having
originated in a critique of the reformist practice of the leadership of the party in all fields, and never abandoning the
labor of Sisyphus of trying to unseat that leadership, did not take the
decisive step toward schism. The left in its entirety would wait until it would
be excluded from the party, after 1914, to forge its own organizations. In
addition, there were also, prior to 1914, “revisionist” (Bernstein)
and “orthodox” (Kautsky) tendencies: the latter was apparently the
majority faction. But it soon became clear, after
It is necessary to closely
examine the positions and activities of Rosa Luxemburg during the revolutionary
period as well as the previous years. Because she was heavily criticized by the
Leninists, and because she criticized Lenin and the Bolsheviks both long before
as well as during the 1917 revolution, proletarian revolutionaries often tend
to make her the spokesperson and to consider her as the theoretician (and as a model of practice while she was alive)
of the authentically revolutionary current. This opinion was nourished by the
left factions themselves, which soon overlooked the fact that they had opposed
her at the KPD’s founding congress. The clarification of the history of
the communist left in
Luxemburg’s critique of
Lenin’s organizational fetishism (see Organizational
Questions of Russian Social Democracy) was one aspect of her critique of
workers organizations. The basis of her critique was still more clearly
expounded in The Mass Strike, Party and
Trade Unions: the organizations, and particularly their leaderships,
necessarily followed in the wake of the spontaneous movements of the
proletariat, and usually even tried to restrain these movements. This was in
absolute conformity with what can normally be verified with respect to the
relation between the established organizations of the working class and the
movements of the working class (whether or not they lead to revolutions).
Luxemburg correctly saw this as inevitable, but did not for that reason cease
to view the parties, trade unions, etc., which were formed in the non-revolutionary
period and which embraced large sectors of the proletariat, as organizations
which are perhaps bad, but ultimately are still class organizations, which the
proletariat must rejuvenate during the revolution. This is why she opposed the
Dutch Left, which split from the reformist Dutch party (see Chapter 3), as well
as the German “left radicals”, instead calling upon the masses to
“reconquer” their organization (the SPD). According to her, one
must not separate oneself from the masses even when they follow the
“worst” workers party.
Her position was based on two
theses which had proven to be increasingly false: first, that the
“workers” organizations only possess a relative autonomy in respect
to the workers movement; and second, “the masses” are, at bottom,
revolutionary (or at least never counterrevolutionary).
The German Revolution has
clearly proven what various “lefts” had intuited: the workers
parties had acquired so much autonomy (in respect to the revolutionary
movement, but not to capital) that they were the most skilled architects of the
counterrevolution; in this manner, the revolutionary proletariat was defeated
by the counterrevolutionary proletariat.
Luxemburg wanted to establish
a compromise between these two elements. The Bolsheviks branded her position as
centrist at the Zimmerwald Conference on the war and social democracy (see
Chapter 4); and her position was in fact basically centrist. It corresponded
perfectly with that sector of the workers movement in Germany, organized by the
“shop stewards” during the war, which attempted to achieve positive
results in the reformist struggle, with “real” material benefits
and policies (in opposition to the manifest sabotage of all actions by the
trade unions and the social democrats). They wanted to return to social
democracy’s origins without advancing towards communism. They did not
want revolution.
The Luxemburgian critique of
organizational fetishism was carried out in the name of the fetishism of the
masses; her critique of “isolation” (in the case of the Dutch Left
prior to 1914) was carried out in the name of the fetishism of action. This
explains why she remained, until her death, on the side of the masses in the
insurrection of January 1919, whose failure she had nonetheless predicted. Her
attitude recalls the fetishism of the people among the great bourgeois
revolutionaries, but in the era of the proletariat.
August 1914 was the
consequence of a long evolution. The anarchist movement has never ceased to
refer to it, and has all too hastily viewed it as the failure of
“Marxism”, since there were many “government
anarchists” (following Malatesta’s formulation) who defended the
sacred union on this or that side. We shall cite only the cases of Kropotkin and
J. Guillaume. Anarchism has in particular placed much more emphasis on the
organizational roots of the failure of the Second International than on its
real causes. Contrary to what Marx and Engels said, the revolutionary movement
underwent a “real” split after the Commune.6
“Anarchism” and “Marxism” cannot explain either of the
two, since the Marxist movement preserved and developed certain aspects which
proved useful in 1914 (revolutionary defeatism). This did not prevent both of
them, however, from retaining remnants of the communist perspective, but only
in the form of parts removed from a totality, which they could not grasp
intellectually because the proletariat no longer grasped it practically. The
notion of community had become weakened and the “socialists” began
to place all their hopes in the State: socialization was thus identified with
nationalization or municipal ownership. Certain “anarchists” still
persisted in upholding an old tradition involving the search for community, but
did not clarify the problem of class, oscillating between reformism and savage
revolts. In their activity they, too, made the revolution a question of organization, of the proper formula
which would allow emancipation. Some Marxists also preserved the perspective of
community, although in a contradictory way. In his description of the future
society, Bebel7 heralded the disappearance of value, but not of the
social regulation of the production of goods through necessary labor time, which is the very origin of value.8
Kautsky clearly foresaw the end of the law of value . . . but preserved wages
and prices. The transformation was presented as a series of governmental
measures instituted by the “
It would be useless to
denounce a “collapse”, as Lenin did, who confused the issue with his
talk of “opportunism”. As Engels defined it, the notion of
opportunism (rehabilitated by Lenin) turned reality on its head. Engels equated
opportunism with an emphasis on day-to-day activity and bread-and-butter
issues, and not with the real social fact of social democracy organizing labor
in opposition to and in partnership
with capital. This fits in with his superficial analysis of the workers
movement of his era, which would later be employed by Lenin and the CI in their
analyses of the socialist movement.
In reality, if one wants to
speak of opportunism, one would have to accuse the whole proletariat (and it is
evidently a matter for accusation, since opportunism is a moral notion) of
being opportunist throughout the entire epoch. The workers fought for immediate
advantages because the flourishing condition of capitalism allowed them to do
so. This reformist foundation was transformed, in certain situations, into its
opposite: revolutionary action, whether because the proletariat’s
situation became unendurable, or because society’s rulers themselves
descended into crisis, or, as in the 19th century, due to the
impetus of bourgeois revolutions; there is no hard and fast line between
revolution and reformism; there is an irremediable opposition between the
petrified forms of reformism (which are often even unsuitable for an
“honest reformism”) and revolutionary forms of organization; there
is a bloody struggle between the proletariat which remains reformist and the
proletariat which becomes revolutionary, but to oppose the proletariat (which
“is revolutionary or does not exist”) on one side, to the working
class, “mere variable capital”, on the other, pertains to the realm
of metaphysics.
In their early days, social
democracy and the German trade unions comprised the organization of this
spontaneous reformist struggle of the German proletariat, which demonstrated
its lack of subversive spirit by the very fact of separating its political and
economic struggles in distinct organizations. Soon, however, a line was drawn
between the workers organizations and the workers movement per se: this became clear when the workers movement developed
various forms of action which opposed the traditional organizations during the
wildcat strikes of the first years of the 20th century; this
development would become yet more pronounced with the creation of the
“shop stewards” networks during the war. Henceforth, the
traditional workers organizations, the SPD and the trade unions, had their own
logic and their own function in the existing society: this is what must be
understood (as the Dutch did so well, splitting from the SDAP before 1910); the
grave reproach of “opportunism” is nothing but an empty phrase: its
employment reveals the bad conscience of the organization that feeds on the
energy of the proletariat, which is what social democracy had become.
It is, then, impossible for
revolutionaries to be in workers organizations (like Engels) or to try to deal
with them (like Lenin), so as to guide their transformation (Engels) or to
unmask them (Lenin). These organizations cannot be transformed because they
have their own nature, nor can they be unmasked, because, while they may be
susceptible to the reproach of being somewhat lax in the reformist struggle,
they cannot be held accountable for their lack of revolutionary spirit, since
the workers are reformist anyway. In which case, the only way to conquer what
one may call the workers movement—organizations which have become
autonomous of the workers—is, wherever possible, to decisively attack it,
even if this attack is carried out by a minority.
All talk of
“opportunism” assumed that the social democratic party was really
founded upon principles which it betrayed in its political activities. In
reality, these principles had never been more than a smokescreen. Twenty years
of denunciations of the always-renewed opportunism of a party which was not
actually what it had initially proposed itself to be at its first congresses
and which had revealed a nature which had nothing to do with the organization
of revolutionary proletarians, were of no significance at all. The party had
become an established body within the society which it had theoretically
claimed had to be completely transformed. It preferred the status quo, its
preservation, against the revolution (or even against the simple autonomous
actions of the workers in their attempts to obtain reforms) which could, in
case it failed, threaten the integrity of the organization and the extremely
privileged social situation of its functionaries. It is in relation to this
real function and these real principles behind its activity that the acts of
social democracy must be judged in advance.
Finally, one cannot accuse a
party of being opportunist unless one assumes that it is actually a
revolutionary party which has ceased to be revolutionary as a result of its
resort to certain easy measures to attain its goal, measures which in fact will
by no means allow the goal to be reached. Such a reproach can only be valid for
a short time. The party either rapidly moves towards a form of activity which
is in conformity with its goal and its principles (thus showing that it had
only undergone a momentary and non-essential deviation, connected, for example,
to its temporary domination by leaders who are effectively strangers to the
revolutionary movement)—this case is very rare; it has probably never
happened and only presents the obverse of a false symmetry—or else its
first deviations are confirmed by others, which verifies that the party was in
no way revolutionary, that its nature and its goal are power for itself, for
its leaders, and that in any event, what is most important for it is its own
preservation and consequently that of the existing order. In this case the
reproach of opportunism must be abandoned, since it still implies a certain
community with those against whom it is directed. This is why Gorter’s
resort to this term in applying it to the Dutch Communist Party in 1919 is
fully justified. The party had been undergoing a critical period of development
for several years, and Gorter thought that it still had a healthy nucleus; as
he said: “We hope that these leaders might adopt a better tactic.”
In regard to social democracy this judgment of a politics which was even more
rightist was disseminated for decades. Social democracy had assumed the role of
the long-term defense of the interests of capital. One of the merits of the
German Left would be that of showing that the Second International had
fulfilled its role, that it had not “failed”, and in this respect
the German Left was more advanced than the Italian Left. Without going so far,
numerous Anglo-Saxon historians emphasize the continuity of social democracy,
whereas leftist historians highlight the “rupture” of 1914. In
The Era of 1848
The Brockhaus Encyclopedia of
1846 notes that the term proletariat
“has recently been applied to the lowest social layers with the least
property.”11 Hegel had already used it in 1821 to designate
those who were not capable of supporting themselves and who had fallen into
dependence upon others. The most active categories of the working class during
this period were the master craftsmen, skilled workers and apprentices (who
together comprised 10% of the population), although the decline in craft-based
trades brought with it a reduction in the number of master craftsmen. Skilled
workers still comprised a minority in the factories. The formation of the
working class is a process of social disintegration. Torn from an ancient mode
of existence, the worker clung to that existence and found there part of the
energy needed to rebel against his new conditions.12 The image of
the golden, pre-“bureaucratic” age of the workers movement, where
the worker launched wildcat strikes free from any noxious constraints, is as
unreal as that of a brutalized and inert proletariat. Modern proletarian
movements were born during this transitional period, and modern theoretical
communism is their most inclusive and universal expression. Social democracy,
and particularly the German Social Democracy, would be born of the failure and
demise of this early movement, from which it would derive its theory as an
ideology without making it the theory of its effective practice.13 The proletariat is not and never was pure
negativity. Otherwise, one could never understand how, even in that epoch,
conservative forces could prevent its rebellion and integrate it, nor could one
form a comprehensive vision of the whole era which could explain why there was
no revolution in 1918-1921.
German workers, at that time
a small minority of the population, found it very difficult to link their
actions to those of the agricultural population, who were divided into two
large distinct sectors in the middle of the 19th century: the
farmers of the north and the southwest, where land ownership was relatively
dispersed, and the farm laborers of the east (1.5 million, of whom one-third
were Poles), where serfdom was abolished, but who were still dependents of the
landowners. At the end of the 18th century,
The prohibition of workers
associations between 1731 and 1840 only partially destroyed the old solidarity
of the medieval guilds. For the
workers, German backwardness was not just a negative factor; it also allowed
for the survival of collective forms of action. Mutual aid funds for the
unemployed and invalids among the skilled workers were becoming more tolerated:
among, for example, the printers concentrated in
At the beginning of the 19th
century, a Rhinelander, L. Gall, attributed the source of wealth to labor:
“everything which ennobles and perpetuates life exists as a result of labor, but it is nonetheless precisely
the class of laborers which suffers
from the scarcity of what it has itself created.”16 The
Silesian riots of June 1844, which were discussed by the whole revolutionary
movement of the epoch, occasioned the celebrated debate between A. Ruge and
Marx.17 Silesian industry had benefited from the Continental
blockade, but the weavers were being decimated by the development of
productivity. After the mistreatment of a weaver, some of the houses of the
merchants were destroyed and the riot was brought to an end by means of a
compromise imposed upon the weavers by military intervention, which caused
several fatalities. The region’s workers suffered from a rise in the
price of necessities between 1846 and 1847, which led to the deaths of up to
20% of the population in certain localities. This riot was the
Marx and Engels frequently
insisted on the fact that theory (the “German ideology”, but also
revolutionary theory) had developed so easily in
The liberal bourgeoisie often
supported the workers associations, about which the Jewish typographer S. Born
said: “We want a club so we can be men.” It was not rare for the
municipality to pay the clubs’ lecturers. When these associations too
plainly declared themselves against the established order, the bourgeoisie
withdrew their assistance; sometimes they were prohibited. This development
coincided, around 1844-1845, with growing interest in the “social
question”, as is verified by numerous texts from that time. Engels
recalled that interest in communism was as common among the bourgeoisie as it
was among the proletarians, and related that numerous members of the liberal
professions and even of the bourgeoisie attended lectures on communism.
Understanding that the creation of wealth through labor engendered the creation
of misery among the workers, the bourgeoisie tried to prevent the resolution of
this contradiction from assuming an explosive form, and studied the subversive
movement and its theoretical expressions in order to take action in regard to
social conditions. The Essence of Money
by M. Hess criticized the existence of labor power as a commodity, which had been accepted by Kant and Hegel: “If men
could not be sold, they would not be worth even one penny, since they have no
value unless they sell themselves or put themselves out to hire.”22
The critique of the world of commodities would be pursued by Marx. It is
possible that no more than five or ten thousand people effectively participated
in these “debates” and this “organization”, but their
role would be important in the following years. In 1848-1849, The New Rhineland Gazette had a print
run of 6,000, a considerable number for that era.
However, even though the
barricades of March 1848 forced the Prussian army to evacuate
“This is how the only
occasion offered by the history of the working class of the 19th
century for an action in common between skilled artisans and a much greater
number of more radical and more dispossessed men, with the goal of jointly
confronting the authority of the state, was not taken advantage of.”23
This historian even went so
far as to compare the arrest of Schlöffel (a radical student associated
with unskilled workers) to the assassination of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in
January 1919. Born’s group, representing the “highest layer of the
working class”, was the precursor of the SPD: the defeat of the more
proletarianized elements, in the sense in which Marx employed the term24,
coincided with the beginnings of the organization of the more privileged and
consequently more moderate elements, who appealed especially to the State, thus
presaging Lassalle (see below). It is clear that the journals published later,
in 1849, which were associated with Born, publicized the theme of production
associations supported by public funds.
After the defeat of April
1848, this movement was incapable of promoting the “dual”
revolution (bourgeois and proletarian) advocated by the communists.25
The armed confrontations in which the workers formed a large part of the
democratic camp had little chance of victory after the bourgeoisie of western
In
The effects of this defeat on
the German and European communist movements have been underestimated. The
“lessons” of the counterrevolution were taken into account by the
moderates as well as by the revolutionaries. While the years 1840-1850
coincided with a critique of private property, the defeat of 1848-1849
accentuated the tendency to seek improvements within capitalism. The old
traditions inherited from the guilds had transmitted the experience of
collective struggle to modern proletarians: the succeeding phase would see the
initiation of efforts to achieve a community of wage labor within existing
society with its own defense mechanisms and values recognized by the State.
In 1848-1850, the Brotherhood
(Verbrüderung) led by Born
counted almost 40,000 members and dedicated its efforts to promoting a
collectivist system. As Born stated in a letter to Marx in 1848, it was
necessary to avoid “futile insurrections”; the majority of workers
must be won over and the class must be unified within capital.29 This reformism was obviously condemned
to failure. It was unrealistic to want to organize a reformism parallel to
capitalism in rival units of production (cooperatives). This perspective was
the craftsman’s dream of adapting to technological progress without
destroying capital, thereby preventing artisans from becoming either
proletarians or small capitalist businessmen. The SPD, with the assistance of
the trade unions, would on the other hand construct a modern reformism, consonant with industrial development, not
outside of but within large industry. Lassalle appeared to be the point of
intersection between the two phases, combining labor organization and
cooperation.
In effect, the reaction which
followed 1848-1849 was political: on the economic plane, it could only survive
by adopting the program of its adversary (the bourgeoisie). In order to
consolidate its hegemony, the supposedly feudal
“Marxism” and Lassallism
For anyone who invokes
“Marxism”, especially in
Lassalle made an incomplete
attempt, sealed by an explicit pact (see his letters), to accomplish what
social democracy would later realize by concluding an implicit agreement with
capital. Lassalle was a precursor; for the workers, against the bourgeoisie,
and with the assistance of the State. In this sense, he was also a
prefiguration of 1918-1919 and national socialism. Lassallism could not succeed
because it remained tied to the utopia of the cooperatives which were to have
constituted a counterweight—but always with the help of the
State—to the industrial power of capital, which was impossible. The SPD
would strip Lassallism of these absurdities in order to preserve its essential
nucleus: Lassalle had helped German society to frame the question of what place
the workers should assume within it.
Although it was reformist,
the ADAV, founded in 1863, faced the hostility of the factory owners and the
police in (local) social conflicts, despite the pact sealed by the
Lassalle-Bismarck summit. Since he believed in the possibility of establishing
production cooperatives, Lassalle could all the more easily
“discover” the theory of the iron law of wages, which holds that
wages must always decline to a minimum due to the play of economic mechanisms,
no matter what the organized workers do. This theory allowed him to justify his
indifference, not to say hostility, to the trade unions. That such a doctrine
suited his politics is the least that one could say. His successor as leader of
the ADAV, Schweitzer, followed the same path, but was compelled to recant after
1868 under pressure from ADAV members and the reform movements. He then
organized a conference said to represent 140,000 workers, but this number
rapidly declined and was reduced to 10,000 in 1870.34
Alongside the party linked to
Marx and Engels, the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP), which was founded
in 1869, there was the offshoot of an organization created in 1863, the League
of German Workers Clubs (VDA), which from its inception had opposed Lassallism
in regard to the question of German unification.35 The ADAV
supported unification under Prussian leadership, and could be said to have sold
its support to the most powerful German state in exchange for a special law
concerning labor and some advantages within the unified Germany of the future.
The SDAP, however, proclaimed its support for a democratic unification without
Prussian hegemony. The social composition of the ADAV was, at least initially,
more working class than that of the SDAP, which happily directed its message
towards the anti-Prussian democrats as well as militant workers. The
declarations of Bebel and Liebknecht seem to grant a place of honor to the
resistance against Prussian dominance, even more than to the problems of
socialism. It cannot be said that the SDAP represented the class struggle and
Marxism against the class collaboration of the ADAV. The SDAP was quite
ambiguous, so much so that, until about 1880, support for the socialist and
workers movement was provided above all by artisans threatened by
industrialization. The VDA was “a rather weak federation of local
clubs”, while the ADAV was, from its very inception, highly centralized.
Two political organizations were linked to the VDA: the German Party (1865), a
very weak democratic group, and the
Saxon Peoples Party (1866), primarily composed of workers. This dualism would
persist in the SPD. Marx was much more aware of the Lassallian danger than of
the distance separating the SDAP from communism. He was convinced that the SDAP
would evolve in a revolutionary direction; as for the ADAV, its large
membership led him to provisionally take it into consideration before attacking
it in earnest. On
Similarly, when the SDAP
convened its 1869 Congress in Eisenach, claiming to embrace 14,000 workers, its
program, when subjected to careful examination, was by no means
“Marxist”.39 The Lassallian vestiges with which it was
still impregnated (“Free Peoples State”, “the entire product
of labor”, “public credit for production cooperatives”) were
the same ones which Marx would criticize six years later when the Party would
fuse with the Lassallians at Gotha. It is impossible to oppose
“Lassallism” to “Marxism”, even while recognizing that the
latter had provisionally capitulated to the former in 1875. Its alleged
affiliation later betrayed by the SPD never existed. The Eisenach Program is,
furthermore, fully within the democratic tradition: demands for
“political freedom” and a “democratic state”. The
influence of the Peoples Party was such that one of its leaders, Sonnemann, a
left liberal, persuaded Bebel to adopt the name “Socialist Democratic
Party”, thus leaving the word “worker” out of the
party’s title. When Bebel proposed that the word “worker” be
included in the name of the party he was defeated by the former followers of
Lassalle.40 In this sense, the Lassallians were the purest
representatives of a specifically, yet limited (see below) working class
reformism, in contrast to the “Marxists” who obtained all their inspiration
and their power from the democratic movement and from the fear of the liberal
bourgeoisie in the non-Prussian states of being dominated by Prussia. The SPD
would later combine Statism and democracy, but this dualism would again be
manifested in the conflict between an extreme right in favor of State power and
a liberal right (Bernstein).
Parliamentary activity soon
occupied a preponderant place within the new party. Liebknecht, of course,
vehemently declared in 1870: “The Reichstag does not make history and is
content with performing a comedy; its members say and do what the director
tells them. Should we, therefore, make the Reichstag the center of our
activities. . . ? If revolutionaries were not so inept and if the government
did not control the elections, it would be possible.”41 But he
did not reject the principle of parliamentarism and only regretted that it
played its democratic role so poorly.
The SDAP was a section of the
IWA, but, as Engels wrote to Cuno on
On
Bebel and Liebknecht did not
have an international point of view, and in this respect they were like
everyone else. Their attitude, even when it coincided with Marx’s
viewpoint, derived not from international but from national considerations. For
them, it was a matter of making alliances with certain parties and social
groups in
The SPD would speak of a victory
over Lassallism: but which elements of Marxism emerged victorious? Above all,
the idea of the ultimate victory of socialism, and of the need for an
independent political workers organization. But Lassalle was not opposed to
these things. Believing in a final victory is not in itself revolutionary: if
the tasks of the communist revolution are not clarified, the
“transition” to socialism could appear to be a gradual evolution. Lassallism was integrated into the workers
movement. In their pure form, the specific contributions of Bebel, Liebknecht
and Lassalle each represented a stereotyped tendency from the beginnings of the
movement, and fuse when capital distracts the working class. Many signs testify
to the persistence of Lassallism until the beginning of the 20th
century. One can even speak of an official Lassalle cult. Liebknecht, in
publishing an article by Engels in 1868, deleted the passages critical of
Lassalle. In his famous pamphlet Our
Goals (1870), Bebel makes few allusions to the IWA, but often quotes
Lassalle and employs his arguments. Marx often complained that the Lassallians
simultaneously plagiarized and distorted his theories. Marx’s thought was
never understood for what it really was. It was always disseminated through a
filter, that of Lassalle, in an epoch when Marx’s writings were not
widely circulated, and later through the official Social Democratic screen.
Militants’ correspondence testifies, at least until the end of the
century, to a lack of awareness of the Communist
Manifesto. In 1872, the cover of a Party publication reproduced two
photographs, of Marx and Lassalle, flanking that of Liebknecht. The History of Social Democracy, a
semi-official work written by Mehring, a theoretician of the left, is
nonetheless as favorable to Lassalle as to Marx.46 The attack
against Lassalle during the 1870s derived primarily from the (self-avowed)
anti-Marxist Dühring. Lassalle’s real popularity would persist (even
outside the Party) until the War: other idols would then replace him. It is pure
illusion to believe that the polemics of the epoch revolved around Marx and
were settled in his favor. The progressive penetration of theoretical communism
is a legend. Upon Liebknecht’s death (1900), it was Bebel who would lead
the Party until 1913. His polemics were of little importance: above all, he
wanted to preserve the organization, that is, the one which would prepare the
future (ultimately a capitalist future) of Social Democracy.47
Theory became simply an allusive reference, useful or annoying, depending on
the circumstances. The Marx-Engels correspondence, published in 1913, was
carefully abridged by V. Adler, Bernstein and Bebel, with particular attention
to those passages dealing with Lassalle and Liebknecht, whom Marx abused on
several occasions.48 The movement needed heroes. Mehring denounced
this maneuver, and published some of the expurgated passages before the
book’s release, although he claimed in 1915 that the book had presented
the essentials of Marx and Engels’ correspondence. Riazanov would later
guarantee this falsification, but would then regret having done so.
The SDAP combined with the
ADAV in 1875 at the Gotha Congress to form the Socialist Workers Party, making
many concessions to Lassallism, which were severely criticized by Marx. The
legend would have it that this deviation was to be corrected by the creation,
in 1890, of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), whose Marxist Erfurt
Program, written by Kautsky, would be the proof of revolutionary victory. Of
course, Marx expressed vigorous reservations concerning the name itself:
“What a name: Sozialdemokrat.
Why not frankly call it the Proletarian?”,
Engels wrote to Marx on
After
Engels harbored vast
illusions when he wrote to Lafargue on
Engels mistakenly assimilated
universal suffrage with the “index which allows one to measure the
maturity of the working class. It can only be that, and will never be anything
but that in today’s State”.54 The representative system
is much more than that and as capital blocks any other kind of community not
derived from the capital relation it becomes correspondingly more important.
Elections and political life become one of the privileged sites in which one
rediscovers a sense of community. Parliamentarism is not merely a “barometer
of class struggle”: it does not limit itself to measuring, it deforms
what it measures, and itself intervenes with all of its weight in the
“class struggle” in order to bring the latter to an end. It is not
enough to say that parliamentarism was not revolutionary after 191455: one must also see its nefarious role even
before 1914, and admit that Marx, Engels and after them almost the entire left
wing of the Second International did not take this into account.
Engels’ tactic also
rests upon the idea that universal suffrage would not be easily granted in
Reformism and the Radical Response prior to 1914
It would be an excessive
distortion of the facts to consider the SPD’s evolution until the end of
the 19th century from the perspective of the
“revisionist” dispute which began around 1890 involving Bernstein,
the only honest reformist, or Vollmar, the Bavarian socialist. The latter, a
militant in a largely agricultural, only slightly industrialized region,
advocated doctrinal softening and flexibility in electoral tactics in order not
to alienate the peasants and middle classes. This was not the more important
sort of revisionism from the capitalist point of view. In reality, the most
dangerous reformism (for the revolution) came from the workers (trade union)
leaders in the large industrial regions. These leaders applied the second
(reformist) part of the Erfurt Program, abandoning the measures enumerated in
the first part which can be summarized as follows: capitalist socialization of
wealth and production. This Program did not say that the privileged agent of
this evolution would be the State, but neither was anything clearly stated on
this topic, so the road was still open. Lassallian Statism again comes to the
fore, not to develop cooperatives, but to assure society’s
democratization. Since the years when
At first, from about 1869 to
1890, the trade unions were a means of recruitment for the Party, which was
illegal from 1872 to 1890. After 1890, the political and trade union
organizations enjoyed a situation of independent coexistence. In 1906, the
trade unions imposed their right to veto any important decision of the SPD.57
But their mutual evolution did not proceed without problems. Radical elements
often dominated local trade union coordinating bodies and local sections. The
latter, comparable to the departmental unions of the French CGT, frequently
opposed the emergence of a layer of permanent salaried officials, which took
place wherever trade unions existed. The radicals denounced tendencies towards
conciliation, and opposed collective bargaining. In 1896, a local section of
the
The growth of the trade
unions, which combined, in 1892, in the General Trade Union Commission, and
later in the ADGB in 1900, was accompanied by a growing rivalry with the SPD.
Like the Bavarians, the trade unions found the revolutionary ideology of the Party to be an obstacle
to their growth. The Party, on the other hand, needed this ideology to win over
those elements which more or less aspired to social change, as well as to
preserve its left wing. The trade unions supported the
“revisionists” (who loudly proclaimed what the Party was actually
doing), and the “orthodox” leaders forged a revolutionary image at
little expense, appearing to be defenders of the revolutionary tradition. There
was a struggle between these two organizations, whose interests were not
convergent: this disagreement would reappear in the
The bureaucratization of the
Party was also accompanied by a certain amount of resistance and only really
got underway after 1900.60 The most numerous permanent officials
were not in the Party, but in its satellite organizations: in 1914, there were
4,100 permanent officials in the SPD and the ADGB, but in 1912 there were 7,100
in workers cooperatives. The organization had to be organized: to sustain
workers activities, certain commercial enterprises were necessary. Auer had
said, in 1890: “the Party cannot live on dues; we need to make profits
from our Press.”61 A Saxon delegate to the 1894 Congress
denounced the capitalist nature of the Party: “There are enterprises
which employ between 50 and 100 workers. When these workers wanted to take the
First of May off from work, the social democratic management, among whom were
various orators who spoke at the rallies on the First of May, docked their
pay.”62 The Party had to be profitable.
One of the reasons adduced by
the German Left in favor of a purely working class organization was the
enormous weight acquired within the SPD by certain rural groups or small cities
which played a role in the Party which was totally disproportionate to their
real importance.63 The middle classes of medium-sized and even some
small cities were over-represented within the Party’s organizational
apparatus and its leadership. In 1912, at the Party’s Congress in the
State of
“National
Socialism” was progressively confirmed as the dominant characteristic of
the SPD. Concerning
The socialist leaders
severely condemned the anti-militarism of some SPD members, thereby revealing
their patriotism. W. Liebknecht, in a debate with D. Nieuwenhuis in Zurich in
1893 (see Chapter 3), denied that one could “fight against the Moloch of
militarism by convincing isolated individuals, provoking puerile uprisings in
the barracks . . . which is false, but tirelessly advocated. We must establish
our doctrine in the army. When the masses become socialists, then the time of
militarism will have come to an end (prolonged applause)”.66
To the false “anarchist” radicalism then advocated by G.
Hervé, he opposed a gradualism which retained nothing of
“Marxism” but what he found useful, along with, among other things,
a partial critique of anarchism. An in-depth critique would have presupposed
the self-critique of
“Marxism” and the recognition of its crisis. At the 1906 Mannheim Congress, Bebel addressed the issue of
Belgian anti-militarism: “An insignificant country, whose army cannot
compare with Prussian military organization. The same thing is happening in
The socialist youth movement
was one of the focal points of opposition. It was not a creation of the Party.
Groups of young people formed around 1904-1906, sometimes with the assistance
of Party members.
From their inception, it was
perceived that the great mass movements of 1905 in
After the Hamburg Congress
(1908), the Left supported the youth movement and in turn received important
assistance from the youth movement. The position of the youth in the Party
became a touchstone of the conflict between revisionists and radicals. In
almost every place where a youth group existed, the Party section took its side
against the central Party apparatus. As in the question of war, everything
ended in compromise. The authority over the youth groups conceded to the local
sections allowed the youth groups to pursue their radicalism wherever the
sections favored them, even when the Party machine led by Ebert undertook to
control them. After 1911 the movement ebbed due to the actions of the State,
only to be reborn later during the war.
Behind the surface appearance
of adhering to principles, the right—rather than the leadership of the
Party—controlled the Party. The SPD added some pseudo-radical
declarations of principle to the programs of action proposed or imposed by the
trade unions. The “Party” structure was not the sole cause of the
SPD’s degeneration, which was promoted by the trade unions. The center
backed the right and made use of the left for doctrinal support (without any
impact on the policies it pursued), even referring to the left in its
anti-revisionist struggle. The existence of revolutionary tendencies within an
utterly reformist organization is not in itself a positive sign. These
tendencies served to provide the organization with a dynamic and credibility
for radical working class groups and in those situations where revolutionary ideology was necessary. As long as they
did not break with the organization, and as long as they did not understand
that they did not have to conquer or submit to the organization, but to destroy
it, these revolutionary tendencies strengthened the organization. Korsch would
later write that Luxemburg (and, elsewhere in the Second International, Lenin)
only attacked the theory but not the
practice of social democracy, thus strengthening it contrary to her own
intentions.69
In 1908 the Party’s
school, created in 1905 to train functionaries for the SPD and the ADGB, became
the target of revisionist attacks (by Eisner, among others), but continued to
be dominated by the Left (Luxemburg, Mehring). Its function was ambiguous. On
the one hand, it preserved a tradition of revolutionary theory and thus
prepared for the future. On the other hand, it preserved the idea of a party
which was still concerned with revolutionary theory. As for the trade unions,
they settled the matter by sending no more students to the Party’s
school.
In a letter to Kautsky dated
This situation was reversed
by the rise of German capitalism: “the golden chain to which the
capitalist has bound wage labor and which it never ceases to forge, has now
grown long enough to allow for a relaxation of some of its tension.”70
The theme of the integration
of the workers movement into established society was debated for the first time
during this epoch: after 1918, people would speak of
“bourgeoisification” and “ossification”. Max Weber
attributed this trend to “the growing number of people who have an
interest in this kind of social promotion and its material advantages.”
“One could ask who has more to lose by it: bourgeois society or social
democracy? In my opinion, I believe that social democracy has more to lose, and
more particularly those among its adherents who are the bearers of revolutionary
ideology.” He viewed social
democracy as “a State within a State”.71 In 1918, M.
Weber would render homage to the qualities of order and discipline which the
German people, drilled by social democracy, could exhibit, as his own
experience with a local workers and soldiers council demonstrated. R. Michels,
who abandoned social democracy for revolutionary syndicalism, denounced the
SPD’s bureaucratization: 72 for some workers the labor
bureaucracy constituted the social promotion which the church at one time
offered certain peasants. Weber lamented that the bourgeoisie preserved the
revolutionary forces within the workers movement due to its refusal to concede
full freedom of activity (particularly by way of universal suffrage) to social
democracy: one would then see, he said, how it is not social democracy which
will conquer the State, but that it will be the State which will conquer social
democracy.
The bureaucratic
centralization of the SPD gave rise at times to a vigorous reaction, above all
in the urban centers where tendencies developed in opposition to the
leadership. In opposition to reformism it was anti-Statist; in opposition to
the suffocation of internal democracy it wanted a completely democratic party
structure. Kautsky condemned “the rebel’s impatience” which,
according to him, inspired the excessive radicalism of 1907.73 The
left gradually exposed the center, attacking its opportunism, for example, at
the Chemnitz Congress of 1912. But the Party’s evolution was quite
coherent. It was the Left which could be accused of opportunism for struggling
each day against reformism without attacking it in its continuity and its
profound logic. One of the reasons why the Left failed to clarify this point
was an insufficient understanding of the crisis-revolution relation. Convinced
that a war was imminent, it expected the war would bring about a mass uprising.
At the end of the war, the Left would expect, this time as a result of the
political and social crisis engendered by the war, a revolution which it would
still improvidently conceive of as an automatic development. Luxemburg had
often set out her concept of organization as an irresistible flood: in a letter
dated February 17, 1904 to H. Roland-Holst she stated that opportunism thrives
in “stagnant waters” and dies “all by itself” in a
current.74 The idea of the crisis of capitalism facilitated the
avoidance of a serious investigation of questions concerning the critical
situation of the working class in modern capitalism, particularly in relation
to the function of the organized workers movement. Instead of relying on the
shock of a serious disturbance (war, crisis), it was necessary to begin by
breaking with their own organization. Levi was right, in 1930, when he said
that after 1903 there was no radical presence, outside of “a tiny
sect”, which could maintain theoretical coherence and assist in the
reconstruction of a communist organization.75 Judging that the
imperialist phase ruled out the satisfaction of reforms which had previously
been possible, the Left also tended to ignore the considerable role played by
reforms conceded to one part of the working class.
In 1913, a strike of shipyard
workers in
The trade unions occasionally
had to yield in order to maintain their rule over their organizations. This was
an era of trade union splits and a kind of nostalgic longing for the epoch when
the movement had not yet been centralized. In the textile, metal working and
painting trades, local trade unions arose which deliberately emphasized workers
autonomy.77 The
“shop stewards” who made their appearance during the war, were a
new form of this workers autonomy (see Chapter 4). The SPD excluded those of
its members who participated in these trade unions. The “Jungen”, whom the Party had
striven to keep apolitical by means of recreational activities, also clashed
with their Party guardians. A kind of nostalgia was born among the leading
circles of the Party. The Party found itself between two phases, after the
construction and before the management of the State. The Jena Congress (1913)
prefigured the “Community of Labor” created in 1916 by the centrist
opposition in the Party’s leadership (see Chapter 4).
The image of the workers
movement on the eve of the war was a study in contrasts. In
1. Traité de sociologie du travail, Colin, Vol. I, 1961, pp.
220-21.
2. Marx and Engels: Textes sur l’organisation,
Spartacus, 1970, pp. 120 et seq.
3. See
the famous (and much misunderstood: see below) Critique du programme de Gotha by Marx, as well as the other
documents collected in the Ed. Sociales edition of 1971. In English, see
“Critique of the Gotha Program”, in Karl Marx: The First International and After. Political Writings:
Volume 3, ed. David Fernbach, Penguin Books,
4. Théorie marxiste et tactique
révolutionnaire (1913), quoted in Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, as well as his 1915 text,
summarized in Chapter 4 below. For an English translation of the entire text of
Pannekoek’s Marxist Theory and
Revolutionary Tactics, see Pannekoek
and Gorter’s Marxism, ed. D.A. Smart, Pluto Press,
5. Luxemburg,
Mehring, Vandervelde: Grèves
sauvages et spontanéité des masses, Spartacus, 1970, with an
introduction by P. Guillaume.
6. Les
prétendues scissons dans l’Internationale, in Textes sur l’organisation. In
English, see “The Alleged Splits in the International”, in Karl Marx: The First International and
After. Political Writings: Volume 3, ed. David Fernbach, Penguin Books,
7. Woman under Socialism: this text
inspired some passages in Bordiga’s works of the 1950s (see Construction et révolution).
English translation: Woman Under
Socialism, tr. Daniel De
8. P.
Louis: 150 ans de pensée
socialiste, new series, Rivière, 1953, p. 72.
9. La révolution sociale,
Rivière, 1912, pp. 157 and 160. In English: The Social Revolution, tr. A.M. and May Wood Simons, Charles H.
Kerr &
10. Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, p.
77. In English: Pannekoek and the Workers
Councils, Telos Press,
11. R.
Reichard: Crippled from Birth: German
Social Democracy 1844-70,
12. Thompson:
The Formation of the English Working
Class.
13. Korsch:
La crise du marxisme (1931), in Anti-Kautsky, Champ Libre, 1973. In
English, see: Karl Korsch: Revolutionary
Theory, ed. Douglas Kellner,
14. Engels:
La question paysanne en
15. Reichard,
pp. 220-221.
16. Ibid., p. 22.
17. Grandjonc:
Marx et les communistes allemands
à
18. La Ligue des Communistes, Aubier, 1972.
19. Marx:
Herr Vogt, Costes, Vol. I, 1927, pp.
103 et seq.
20. Le militantisme, stade suprême de
l’aliénation, OJTR,
21. Cf.
the Correspondence de Marx et Engels,
(Ed. Sociales), and their biographies written by A. Cornu (PUF, 4 Vols.); and Oeuvres, II, pp. 98-99.
22. Quoted
by E. de Fontenay: Les figures juives de
Marx, Galilée, 1973.
23. Reichard:
p. 65.
24. Cf.
Blanqui’s response to his judges in 1832, in which he claims the name of
“proletarian” (Bruhat, Histoire
du movement ouvrier français, Ed. Sociales, Vol. I, 1952, p. 240).
25. For
the lack of another term we use this formulation, but without granting it all
the implications which it possesses in Bordiga (Cf., for example, Les révolutions multiples).
26. Reichard:
p. 94.
27. Ibid., pp. 95-97.
28. Ibid., p. 98.
29. Ibid., p. 100.
30. Ibid., pp. 171-172.
31. Ibid., p. 143.
32. Hunt:
German Social Democracy 1918-33,
33. For
the SPD as a “counter-society”, cf. Hunt, p. 53, and Reichard, p. 285,
note 7 of Chapter II. See also:
34. Reichard,
pp. 218-19.
35. R.
Morgan: The German Social Democrats and
the First International 1864-72,
36. Ibid., p. 49.
37. Ibid., p. 103.
38. Ibid., p. 132-33.
39. Ibid., pp. 172-173.
40. Ibid., p. 173.
41. A.
Berlau: The German Social Democratic
Party 1914-21,
42. Cahiers de l’ISEA, Vol. III, No.
7, July 1969.
43. Morgan:
p. 208.
44. Ibid., p. 211.
45. Ibid., p. 216.
46. Ibid., pp. 234, et seq.
47. Cole:
The Second International 1889-1914,
Vol. I, MacMillan,
48. Especially
the portions concerning Hegel: E. Weil, Hegel
et l’Etat, Vrin, 1950. The Costes edition of the Marx-Engels
correspondence is based on the German edition.
49. Correspondance Marx-Engels, Costes, Vol.
VIII, 1934, pp. 106 and 107-108.
50. Engels:
Progès de la réforme
sociale sur le continent (1843), in Écrits
militaires, l’Herne, 1970.
51. Correspondance Engels-P. et L. Lafargue,
Ed. Sociales, Vol. II (1887-1890), 1957. On this issue, cf. the collection of
texts of Marx and Engels, UGE (10/18).
52. Correspondance Engels-Marx et divers,
edited by Sorge, Costes, Vol. II, 1950, pp. 210-211.
53. Ibid., p. 260.
54. L’origine de la famille…,
Ed. Sociales, 1954, pp. 158-59. In English: The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Foreign Languages Press,
55. As
the Italian Left does, for example, in its 1945
Theses, published in Invariance,
No. 9.
56. Écrits militaires, p. 483.
57. Hunt:
p. 150.
58. Comfort:
Chapter V.
59. Hunt:
pp. 187-190.
60. Marks.
61. Ibid., p. 349.
62. Ibid., pp. 351-352.
63. C.
Schorske: German Social Democracy,
1905-17,
64. Schorske:
p. 144.
65. Dauvé:
Pour une critique de l’ideologie
anti-militariste, Ed. de l’Oubli,
66. W.
Walling: The Socialists and the War,
67. Ibid., p. 76.
68. Ibid., p. 77.
69. International Council Correspondence, in
La contre-révolution
bureaucratique, UGE, 1973, pp. 243-45.
70. Marx:
Oeuvres, Gallimard, Vol. I, 1963, pp.
127-128.
71. E.
Waldmann: The Spartacist Uprising of 1919,
Marquette University Press, 1958, p. 108, note no. 81.
72. In
his book, Political Parties. See his
earlier article quoted by Schorske, Chapter V.
73. Schorske:
p. 185.
74. Ibid., pp. 32-33.
75. Quoted
in the R. Luxemburg issue of Partisans,
December-January 1968-1969, p. 8.
76. Schorske:
pp. 260-261.
77. Ibid., p. 261.
78. Comfort:
Chapter V.
79. Angress:
pp. 105, et seq.
The Dutch Left
Not surprisingly, the
theoretical (and, to some degree, the organizational) sources of the German
Left originated not outside of the classical workers movement, or in its
heartland, but in its periphery. They are of German-Dutch origin.
In the
Their organ was the journal De Nieuwe Tijd, to which De Tribune was added later (see below). This
current attempted to go beyond traditional debates. In relation to the colonial
question, for example, it did not restrict itself to endorsing the contemporary
theory which held that capitalism was an “inevitable stage for the
colonies in their march towards socialism . . . if socialism were to triumph in
the old world, it would be possible to avoid the miseries of capitalism on the
other continents by sharing capitalism’s technological advantages with
them. Gorter and Pijnappel agreed with Mendels, and said that his analysis
agreed with Marx’s writings.”2 Their analysis, in
effect, returned to the view entertained by Marx, especially in regard to
Russia.3 Gorter broached the theme of the proletariat’s
isolation, which he would again address in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin: “Attacking the Party’s
illusions concerning the petite bourgeoisie and the peasants, Gorter stated in
passing that a large part of this petite bourgeoisie had an interest in the
products of the colonies . . . annually making hundreds of millions from the
Indies . . . .” The International’s Stuttgart Congress (1907),
interpreted by Lenin as a healthy reaction against the Right, “opened the
eyes of the Dutch Left.”4 This development was not uniform,
however: Roland-Holst, despite understanding the connection between German
imperialism and the positions supported by the German socialists, concluded
that the Congress had ended to the revolutionaries’ advantage.
In its essentials, the
German-Dutch Left (including Radek) held a position close to that of its Polish
and Russian adversaries on the question of the right of nations or of
“peoples” to self-determination. For Wiedijk: “the colonial
question is essentially situated, not in the colonies themselves, but in the colonizing
countries, where the most important interests are at stake. . . . Colonial
reform cannot come before class struggle.”5 Lenin was quite
isolated on this issue. The other Bolsheviks did not accept the defense of the
absolute right to self-determination before the revolution. Always on the
lookout for anything which could undermine the power of the leading capitalist
countries and lend support to the proletarian struggle, Lenin tried to find
substitutes for proletarian action. He saw the centrifugal role which nationalist
forces could play to weaken the
“The Marxist solution
to the democracy question consists in the utilization,
on the part of the proletariat conducting its class struggle, of all democratic
institutions and aspirations against
the bourgeoisie. . . . As for the Marxists, they know that democracy does not
eliminate class oppression, but only makes the class struggle clearer, more
extensive, more open; it is what we need. . . . The more democratic the regime,
the more obvious, for the workers, is the origin of the evil which is
capitalism. . . .”6
The creation of a democratic
national state thus constitutes progress, since such a state would then become
a framework within which the proletariat could organize and educate itself. The
proletariat needs democratic States
because it needs democracy. For Pannekoek, however, the national solution is
utopian under the regime of capital, because every nation is at war with the
others and oppresses its own minorities. In 1912, his critique of the projects
for cultural autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was also an indirect
critique of Lenin: “It is not our
advocacy of national autonomy, whose realization does not depend on us, but
only the strengthening of class consciousness which will really smash the
terrible power of nationalism to pieces. It would be false to want to
concentrate all our efforts on a ‘positive national policy’ and to
stake everything on . . . the realization of our program for national
self-determination as a precondition for class struggle.”7
In the same year J. Strasser,
an Austrian left-socialist,8 published a similar text, in which he
simultaneously attacked the federalism of Austrian social democracy (which
sought the means to preserve the unity of the empire in concessions to the
other nationalities), the nationalism of Czech social democracy and the
supporters of pan-German unification. The socialist party, Strasser wrote, must
be centralized, and all national solutions are illusory: “it is not true
that nations can in any circumstance live side by side without becoming rivals.
In bourgeois society, each nation accuses the others of expansionist
tendencies, and even aggression, whenever they get in each others’ way.
Every national struggle makes a mockery of revisionist internationalism. What,
then, will the proletariat do when the struggle between nationalities breaks out?”9
During the war, Pannekoek did
not participate in the debate on the national question. Lenin stated with
satisfaction that while Gorter was against the principle of self-determination,
he nonetheless allowed for it in the case of colonialism; for the Dutch East
Indies, for example.10 Like the German Left he was not directly
confronted by the reality of the national question, unlike the Russians, the
Poles and the Austrians, nor was it a crucial theme in his experience or
activity. Each time he systematically investigated the question, however, he
did so in the sense of this observation of Bukharin’s: if the
“right of nations” is not an empty, meaningless term, it must
include the compulsory defense of the national State, and end in the demand for
patriotism or, which is the same thing, in the absurd position of the
revolutionaries’ denial of internationalism.11 The only
meaning which the slogan of self-determination can have is opposed to the
revolution. Bukharin was more aware than Lenin of the integral connection which
existed between organized capitalism and any
State, large or small.12
Within the SDAP, the
conflicts between the left and the center became increasingly acute. In 1901
they revolved around the agrarian question: the left refused to oppose the expropriation
of small farmers for the purpose of the development of modern capitalist
agriculture. It was not the Party’s job to incite the small-scale
peasants to unite in defense of the small family farm, but to fight for
socialism. This debate would be taken up again in the Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. On the education question (1902), the
Left rejected any concessions to religious schools, which were desired by the
Party’s leadership for reasons having to do with electoral deals. In 1903
the Left turned against the trade unions which sabotaged a railroad strike.
Finally, in 1905, in the debate over the parliamentary question, it violently
denounced the alliance with the radical bourgeois parties in the run-off
elections, which granted a majority to the radicals against the Right. As these
trade union and parliamentary trends were to continue to unfold (the same kind
of alliance was made in the German elections of 1912), the Left would become
abstentionist and critical of the trade unions.
In 1907 the Left established
its own newspaper: De Tribune (whence
the name “Tribunists”), which was particularly vehement in its
attacks on the Party’s leadership. An extraordinary Congress of the Party
in 1909 demanded that it cease publication. With the exception of a small
circle around Roland-Holst, which would not join the others until some time
later, the whole left wing left the Party and founded the Social Democratic
Party (SDP). It was a “groupuscule”: it had no more than 700
members in contrast to the 25,000 members of the SDAP in 1913. It was not
accepted as a member by the International, despite the support of the
Bolsheviks, another schismatic party. Its application having been presented to
the Bureau of the Socialist International in 1909, the latter was confronted by
two motions. The motion of the SDP and the German SPD, which was supported by
Lenin, was in favor of the new party’s petition for affiliation: but the
opposition motion, presented by the Austrian V. Adler, obtained a majority.
Luxemburg condemned the split in the name of Party unity.13 The SDP
did, however, engage in parliamentary activity. In 1918 it would become the
Communist Party of the Netherlands (KPN), with two seats in Parliament. In 1919
Gorter denounced the opportunism of the Dutch
communist party. His attack included, among other themes, the notion of a
“pure” and “clear” “nucleus” which would be
further developed in 1920-1921.
For her part, Roland-Holst
occupied an intermediate position, somewhat like that of Trotsky in
The significance of the Dutch
Left is above all theoretical and international. The Dutch would provide a
meeting place for the socialist opposition during the war; the
There are now some important
historical works dealing with Pannekoek: we shall only focus on what
distinguished him, even before the war, from the Luxemburgist Left. Almost from
the start of his political activity, in 1904, he worked for the most part in
Pannekoek and Radek attacked
Kautsky in the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung,
particularly in regard to international issues and imperialism, and posed the
problem of the possible relation between war and revolution: “The
struggle against imperialism does not have the purpose of hindering its
development, but of mobilizing the masses against it. . . .”15
This position, expressed by Pannekoek in 1910, would be taken up by Lenin in
1914. Of Polish origin, Radek was excluded from Polish Social Democracy in 1912
for embezzlement. He had previously been a supporter of the Warsaw Group which
was at that time close to the Bolsheviks and opposed to the (Luxemburgist)
Party leadership. He was excluded from the Party the following year, despite
Pannekoek’s protests. A Russo-Polish court of honor ruled in his favor in
1915.16 He went to
In 1912, Pannekoek was among the
first to connect the class struggle in Europe to the independence movement in
the colonies: only by joining with the proletariat in the highly-developed
countries could the struggles in the backward countries acquire a socialist
character.18 This position was quite unlike both Lenin’s view
as well as that of the other members of the Dutch left wing, which is outlined
below, and which could at times border on indifference
concerning underdeveloped regions.
The left-wing current which
would coalesce in the KPD was born long before 1918-19, and by virtue of its
actions had already demarcated itself from the first (Luxemburgist) leadership
of the Party.19 The communist left which appeared after 1917 was
not, therefore, without roots in the previous epoch. What is called the
“communist left” became the communist left prior to 1914 through
contact with other left currents (particularly those of Lenin and Luxemburg),
and these currents mutually influenced one another. The revolutionary currents
which would confront one another after 1917 had to a great extent already known
and opposed one another before 1917, in relation to the national question,
among other issues. Pannekoek made extensive contributions to the polemics on
this question. By criticizing “infantile leftism”, Lenin was
continuing a debate which started a dozen years earlier.
Pannekoek distinguished
himself from the Luxemburgist Left on two important points. He thought that
radical elements should abandon social democracy and regroup outside it. Luxemburg,
however, condemned the SDP’s schism: one must persevere wherever the
masses are found: “one cannot remain outside the organization, one must
not lose contact with the masses. . . . The worst workers party is better than
no party at all.”20 This presaged the rupture between the
Spartacus League and the ISD, and later that between the KPD and the KAPD.
An important polemic also set
Pannekoek against Luxemburg, concerning the theory of the “final
crisis” of capital, as expounded in The
Accumulation of Capital.21 Pannekoek criticized it on two
levels. On the “mathematical” level, Luxemburg took as her starting
point one of Marx’s “errors” in his accumulation schemas in
Sections 2 and 3 of Volume II of Capital.
Defending Marx, Pannekoek showed that it was impossible to prove that
capital’s movement must of necessity come to a halt should it be deprived
of possibilities for expansion outside of the “capitalist zone”.
Without, however, making the proletarian movement the motive force of history,
he criticized the idea that one could speak of the crisis of capital in purely
economic terms, as well as the content which Luxemburg conferred upon
necessity. According to Luxemburg, the necessity which drives capitalism
towards collapse is mechanistic: the proletariat is not included as one of its
factors. Her catastrophic vision overlooks this factor although it is an
element even at the “purely economic” level. Pannekoek would return
to this theme much later, explaining this concept of mechanistic necessity as a
resurgence, on the theoretical plane, of a typically social democratic trait
which Luxemburg criticized on the political plane: Kautskyist fatalism, the
negation of the revolutionary character of the proletariat.22
Nonetheless, after the war, and unlike the case of the first divergence
summarized above, the German Left (although opposed to Luxemburg’s
tactics), would again take up the Luxemburgist thesis, simplifying it instead
of developing it, under the rubric of the “death crisis” of capitalism.23
Paradoxically, a historian
(Schurer) has viewed Pannekoek as one of the precursors and founders of
“Leninism”.24 Bricianer was right to reject this hasty
assimilation, but did not go far enough in his examination of the genesis of
the Left prior to 1914.25 Schurer relies upon real analogies, which
do not, however, justify his comparison of Lenin and Pannekoek, even before
1914. It is true that each was opposed to the Luxemburgist theory of
imperialism; and that Pannekoek was undoubtedly the first to grant importance
to the notion of a “labor aristocracy”, and in particular was the
first as well to once again resuscitate Marx’s thesis on the need to
destroy the State. But he approached these questions in a way dissimilar to
that of Lenin.
Tactical Differences in the Workers Movement (1909) effectively examined the root of the reformist
tendency, which Pannekoek attributed to the weight of the middle classes, and
of the employees and officials of the workers movement; on the other side, the
workers in large industry constituted the revolutionary nucleus. Lenin,
however, in Marxism and Revisionism
(1908), insisted upon the role of the petite bourgeoisie. Even more than
“small-scale production”, which Lenin would never cease to discuss
(even in Infantile Disorder), Pannekoek
showed that it is the very mode of existence of the workers in a
non-revolutionary period which defines the nature of the “labor
aristocracy”. Merely by virtue of their numbers, the workers must join
together into a bloc (in fact, into numerous rival blocs) which requires representatives to deal with
capitalists and the State, from whom concessions must be wrested. The workers
bureaucracy was more than a kind of activity or a leader-masses relationship;
it was above all sociologically a relation in which a privileged, entrenched
minority was formed. In the higher ranks, the leaders even hoped to enter the
bourgeoisie, even if this hope was based on nothing but the inevitable
financial and commercial activities of the workers movement, through the funds
which it absorbed: social welfare, sick benefits, cultural centers, publishing,
etc. In the lower ranks, the cadres possessed socio-cultural means for the
advancement of their offspring. It is in this sense that one can speak of a
social layer which reproduces itself as privileged, and not simply of
categories which enjoy more advantages than others.
The notion of a “labor
aristocracy” was frequently employed in England during the 1880s to
designate a quite numerous minority of “artisans (skilled workers and
craftsmen) and above all those who were members of the trade unions and other
labor organizations”.26 The privileged social layer(s) varied
from country to country depending on the background of the working class and
its organizations, and in 1890 Engels invoked the “aristocratic
minority” of unionized workers.27 In the United States, this
issue was inseparable from that of racial and ethnic minorities: in England
Marx also emphasized the antagonism between the English and the Irish.28
What was new about Engels’ 1892 Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England was his connecting
this phenomenon to British industrial monopoly: a thesis appropriated by Lenin.
In that same year, Wilhelm Liebknecht declared at the Socialist Congress:
“The majority of you are certainly, for the most part, aristocrats of
labor, insofar as income is concerned.”29 The German Left went
beyond a sociological view in understanding that a certain kind of workers
struggle, in a calm period, gives rise to structures which immediately turn
against the revolution. Lenin, on the other hand, saw in this phenomenon
nothing but the corruption of one part of the workers who held the leadership
of the movement: he might have asked himself how this minority could have led
the movement against the wishes of the majority. In regard to which Lenin
logically deduced that one must re-conquer these organizations, while the Left
perceived them as the products of a non-revolutionary phase and, consequently,
as structures which must be destroyed. Luxemburg, although she emphasized the
trade unions’ regressive role, did not address this problem (see Reform and Revolution). But her
opposition to the trade unions had its origin in her distrust of purely
economic action, since she saw this as jeopardizing socialist education. The respect (in her case one
cannot speak of fetishism30) which Luxemburg had for the existing
workers organizations, and which was well-evidenced by her refusal to create
new schismatic organizations, was an aspect of her fetishism of education which
she shared with the immense majority of the revolutionaries of her time.
Between 1910 and 1912,
Pannekoek made a theoretical “breakthrough” by evoking the
proletariat’s need to create new organs of power, which meant that the proletariat
could not use parliament as a political form. Pannekoek defined the
proletariat’s need to exercise Machtmittel,
instruments of force or of power, which Bricianer translated as “elements
of force”.31 Such an idea illustrates the complexity of Pannekoek’s
thought and the twists and turns of subversive theory. Much later, Bordiga
would define the communist movement as a question of “force” rather
than one of “form”.32 Lenin rendered homage to Pannekoek
in 1917, in State and Revolution, but
also accused him of not having drawn all the conclusions which follow from this
idea. The critique was probably justified, but Lenin continued to nourish
illusions about the pre-1914 socialist movement. Pannekoek, furthermore,
implicitly criticized Kautsky’s (and also Lenin’s) view of class
consciousness. His great merit was having discerned communism in the nature of
the class, and not just as a program.
But rather than in its deepest being he discerned it in its organization. His
preoccupation with “spontaneity” was not focused on the
self-destruction of the proletariat as such: that is, as commodified human
activity reappropriating the means of life and with these its humanity. He
discerned the rise of the proletariat in its forms rather than its content,
because its content was hardly discernable in that era.
In September, 1918, Radek
recognized Pannekoek’s contribution, saying that the existing political
forms, even the most democratic, must not be used, although he did not say what
new institutions would replace them. But these two questions—the State
and the labor aristocracy—highlighted the differences between Lenin and
Pannekoek. Lenin was animated by the will to seize power, which involved
advocating the destruction of the old State (and not its conquest as he had
long thought, thus imitating almost all the world’s social democrats).
But he did not understand the “how”, he did not see what was
potentially contradictory in the proletariat’s being which would rise to
the fore in a revolutionary period: this explains his exaggeration of the
“Party”.33 Quite unlike his usual views on the matter,
the short shrift given to the idea of the Party in State and Revolution is neither a trick to flatter the workers nor
something positive about which one should be pleased. State and Revolution simply testifies to one facet of Lenin’s
contradiction, sometimes inclining towards an exaggeration of the role of the
Party (What is to be Done?), and at
other times allowing for democratic self-management (State and Revolution, which does not prevent this book from being
an excellent revolutionary text). The way he dealt with the example of the
Commune is significant; he once again took up Marx’s position, which is,
however, susceptible to criticism, in The
Civil War in France.34 Pannekoek, however, did not explicitly
refer to 1871, concerning which he had a more lucid and quite well-justified
judgment.35 It is also true that his ideas about the labor
aristocracy had influenced Lenin and Zinoviev, 36 but Pannekoek
viewed the issue from a different angle. Later experience would show that Lenin
and Pannekoek would deduce the opposite conclusions from their analyses of the
labor aristocracy. What is essential is not denouncing a privileged minority,
but understanding the (inevitable) expansion of reformist activity among all
the workers organized in trade unions, parties, etc., and seeing that the
revolution must be made outside of these institutions. Between 1910 and 1912,
Pannekoek began to be aware of this, denying that the trade unions and parties
could be used as structures of proletarian power: the proletariat must
therefore create new organs for this purpose. He would later understand that
the revolution must be made not outside
of the classical organizations, but against
them. Lenin, on the other hand, fought and would continue to fight for the
impossible conquest of these organizations, upon certain class bases, and
through the creation of “new” trade-union-type organizations, which
involved the same kind of activity conducted by the old reformist trade unions,
which is to say reformist activity.
Lenin did not understand the
proletarian experience of his time in its most profound aspects. He was only
able to theorize a few of its most essential orientations: his best efforts
(his defeatist position in 1914) were negative.
From the moment that the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries
engaged in revolutionary action, Lenin was superseded. Then, at that precise
moment, although he was not situated at the most advanced stage attained by the
movement, he imposed his will. Lenin’s success at the head of the Russian
Party and the CI is the theoretical and organizational expression of the
historical compromise: the proletariat attacked
society without destroying it. This
is why Lenin became the highest expression of a combative but not a communist
movement. The experiences acquired during this assault would survive, but they
would be deformed and truncated by capital: this is Leninism, a tendency which
was nonetheless revolutionary in its origins, despite its weak points. The
communist left, however, the expression of the most radical but also one of the
least popular aspects of the movement, would be crushed.
1. Le socialisme en danger, published by
Payot in 1975, with an introduction and notes by J. Y. Bériou.
2. La IIe Internationale et
l’Orient, a collection edited by G. Haupt and M.
Rébérioux, Cujas, 1967, p. 236.
3. Invariance, No. 4.
4. La IIe Internationale et
l’Orient, p. 239.
5. A
summary of his position by F. Tichelman, Ibid.,
pp. 243-46.
6. Oeuvres, Vol. 23, Ed. Sociales, 1959,
pages 20, 23, 24, 57, 67-68, and 79-80.
7. Lutte de classes et nation, reproduced
in the collection Les marxistes et la
question nationale (1848-1914), Maspero, 1974, p. 305.
8. Cf.
his biography in the Dictionnaire
biographique du mouvement ouvrier international. L’Autriche, Ed.
Ouvrières, 1971, pp. 301-302. Strasser was a member of the Austrian CP
and adopted an “anti-putschist” position close to that of Levi; he
would later be excluded for “Trotskyism”.
9. Les marxistes et la question nationale,
p.288.
10. Oeuvres, Vol. 22, Ed. Sociales, 1960,
pages 164, 181 and 375.
11. Ibid., p. 261.
12. L’économie mondiale et
l’impérialisme, Anthropos, 1967, Chapter XIII.
13. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
14. He
was the author of Révolution
mondiale (1918), L’organisation
de la lutte de classe du prolétariat (1921), La nécessité de la réunification du KAPD
(1923), a large number of articles in the KAPD and AAUD press, as well as
pamphlets from which we provide some extracts below. See Herman Gorter, The Organisation of the Proletariat’s
Class Struggle, in Pannekoek and
Gorter’s Marxism, ed. D.A. Smart, Pluto Press,
15. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
16. Concerning
the relations between German and Polish socialists, see, as well as the work of
Nettl, H. Schurer: “Radek and German Revolution”, Survey, October 1964; and especially the
upcoming book by C. Weil, to be published by Champ Libre.
17. On
18. Cf.
his article “Révolution mondiale” in Le Socialiste of
19. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
20. Cf.
his letter to Roland-Holst, dated August 1908, quoted by Nettl (English
edition, Vol. II, p. 657).
21. An
essay on this theme can be found in L. Laurat: L’accumulation du capital, Rivière, 1930, and in
various articles in Révolution
Internationale (1968-1972). For a critical judgment, cf. Lutte de classes, February 1975,
“Profit et marché”; and Mattick: Marx et Keynes, Gallimard, 1972 (in English, Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy, Porter Sargent
Publisher,
22. In
this context we can only provide a basic outline of the positions taken in relation to this problem: for more extensive elaborations which treat the issue in
depth, cf. Pannekoek’s essay “The Theory of the Collapse of
Capitalism”, translated by Adam Buick, published in Capital and Class, Spring 1977, and currently available online at
the marxists.org website.
23. On
the problem of a mechanistic interpretation of the crisis, cf. C. Brendel, Pannekoek, Theoretikus van het Socialisme,
Nimegen, 1970, Chapter XII.
24. “A.
Pannekoek and the Origins of Leninism”, The Slavonic and East European Review, June, 1963.
25. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
26. E.
Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries. Contemporary
Essays, Weidenfeld-Nicolson, 1973, p. 121.
27. Marx
and Engels: Le Syndicalisme, Maspero,
Vol. I, 1972, p. 195.
28. Cf.
the texts collected in J.-P. Carasso: La
rumeur irlandaise, Champ Libre, 1969.
29. Marks:
p. 354.
30. Cf.
Questions d’organisation de la
sociale-démocratie russe, Spartacus, 1946. English translation:
“Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy”, in Selected Political Writings of Rosa
Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard, Monthly Review Press,
31. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
32. Eléments d’orientation
(1946), reproduced in Invariance, No.
7 and as a pamphlet, Ed. Programme Communiste, 1972.
33. Authier:
Les débuts du mouvement ouvrier
russe, in Trotsky: Rapport de la
délégation sibérienne, Spartacus, 1970, and the
postscripts by P. Guillaume and G. Dauvé in Kautsky’s Les trois sources du marxisme,
Spartacus, 1969.
34. It
is true that this view can be contrasted with other texts of a private and
confidential character: cf. La Commune de
1871, UGE, 1971. In 1905, Lenin warned against imitating the Commune:
“it was a movement which our movement must not copy” (quoted by
Haupt in Le mouvement social,
April-June 1972, p. 213).
35. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
36. Zinoviev:
The War and the Crisis of Socialism,
written in 1915-16, published in 1917 (influenced by Michels).
1914 and Democracy
On
The 1907 Stuttgart Congress
of the Socialist International had ended in a compromise which raised the hopes
of the Left. The Lenin-Martov-Luxemburg amendment, which proclaimed that, in
case of war, the “economic and political crisis created by the war should
be used . . . to precipitate the destruction of capitalist rule,” had no
practical force since the International was quite careful not to authorize the
means to implement such a policy.1 It was a respectable institution,
recognized by the international bourgeoisie, which even as late as 1913 had
expectations of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: had the war not taken
place, it would quite likely have been awarded the prize in 1914.
Some groups and individuals
then proclaimed the “collapse” of the Second International: the
Bolsheviks, Bordiga and the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party, Pannekoek
and Gorter, the Serbian Socialist Party, etc. The French, German and English
parties accepted the war. The other two important parties (their importance was
not merely numerical), the Russian and the Italian parties, had quite distinct
positions. The two factions of the Russian Party, which in reality constituted
two distinct parties, did not abandon the struggle against their own
government. Italy did not enter the war at first: while an important minority
took a revolutionary position on the war which was similar to that of the
Zimmerwald Left, the majority of the PSI adopted a completely pacifist
position, and was quite content not to have to take up a position between the
two lines of fire. When
The different positions
adopted by the Socialist Parties cannot be understood if one inters oneself in
the logic of the parties themselves. The parties represented the general
tendency of the proletariat in each country: almost total support on the part
of the French and English proletariat for the war, a more subdued adherence on
the part of the German proletariat, which would be transformed into rebellion
against the war, and Russian proletarian defeatism.
In
The positions of the various
proletariats and workers parties revolved around the defense or conquest of
democracy. On a world scale there was just one proletariat. Generally, it
sought improvements within the framework of the existing mode of production.
The reformism of the West and the democratic revolutionism of the East were two
aspects of the same reality. One could say that the proletariat participated in
these two aspects. Even in
Developments within the SPD
As of
On August 4, the left wing of
the SPD parliamentary delegation, K. Liebknecht and Otto Rühle, yielded to
Party discipline (Luxemburg was not a deputy). Taken as a whole, however, the
social democratic edifice, including the trade unions, was already beginning to
crumble. The rate and methods by which the various tendencies would regroup in
different organizations can be examined on three levels: parliament, party and
the workers movement, with each influencing the others, especially from the
bottom up, as the development of the workers movement was the foundation of the
development of the left radical and centrist groups.
It was on the parliamentary
level that the splits appeared and crystallized most quickly. The parliamentary
apparatus, and, consequently, the reactionary tendency, possessed a monopoly of
information due to the very nature of such an organization. Liebknecht had to
go to
The tide of events would push
Rühle, and then some twenty other deputies, towards the opposition. In
February of 1915, Luxemburg was imprisoned for the first time during the war,
and would not be released until February 1916. While in prison she wrote The Crisis of Social Democracy, also
known as the Junius Pamphlet after
her pseudonym (see below). An international women’s peace conference
convened in
In early 1916, all these
oppositionists were excluded from the parliamentary delegation. The centrists
formed the social democratic Community of Labor (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), the nucleus of the future USPD. It was
opposed to the SPD leadership’s war policy but refused to break with the
Party until it was excluded in early 1917.
After the February Revolution
in
The de-aggregation of the
Party’s left was paralleled by a reaction on the part of the leadership.
For the first time, the old radical current of social democracy was dispersed
into numerous groups (prior to 1914, Luxemburg and Kautsky were both known as
“radicals”). Later, a process of regroupment culminated in the
founding of the USPD, the Spartacus League and the ISD.
The first opposition groups
formed primarily in Hamburg, around Wolffheim and Laufenberg, and in Bremen,
where the group included the majority of the socialist organization and could
express its views in the Bremer
Bürger-Zeitung, which from the very start of the war took a firm
stand: “everything which we have said until now would amount to nothing
but empty words unless we uphold our positions during and after the
war.”3 Groups also formed in
The loyal branches of the
Party diminished in number: after
The leadership’s policy
was to fire the editors of its papers who did not support its directives, and
to replace them with more docile editorial teams. In
The ISD
The ISD was formed in
September 1915. It was the smallest of the radical currents, but it was the
precursor of the postwar German Left. Its theoretical spokesperson before the
war was Pannekoek. After
Upon definitively breaking
with the SPD, these groups explained the supposed betrayal of 1914 as being due
to the social democratic form of organization itself. They wanted a new form of
organization in which complete democracy would prevail: the delegates must be
revocable at any moment, under the constant vigilance of the rank and file,
etc. In this manner the formation of a layer of bureaucrats living on the
members’ dues, the “bonzes” who become conservatives (in
politics as well) in order to preserve their positions, would be prevented. One
of the principle refrains of the German Revolution began to be heard:
denunciation of the leaders, praise for the masses.
Lichstrahlen
was founded in 1913 by Julian Borchardt. The very title of the magazine clearly
indicated its enlightenment goal: to clarify the consciousness of the masses so
they could take measures to free themselves from the influence of leaders.4
(Knowledge of the currents involved in the origins of the German Left is
important in order to form an accurate idea of the latter.) Pannekoek, who was
in close contact with the
Besides the fact that it did
not join the ISD, the
In September of 1915, various
groups and individuals (among others, the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks)
held a conference in Zimmerwald attended by all the currents of international
social democracy which were opposed to the Second International’s policy
since the onset of the war, in order to build a new worldwide revolutionary
organization. The internationalists, few in number, could be counted on the
fingers of two hands.
From Germany, the following
were represented at Zimmerwald: the International
group (the future Spartacus League: see below); the Bremen and Brunswick groups
(represented by Radek); the Berlin group (Borchardt); as well as the centrists
Ledebour and Hoffmann who took as their basis the proclamation of Kautsky,
Haase and Bernstein demanding a peace treaty, without attacking the leadership
of the SPD.
On the fundamental question
of what attitude to adopt concerning social democracy, a split developed
between the left and the center. The Mensheviks (Martov) and the future
Spartacists joined the centrists. They rejected an immediate split and spoke of
re-conquering social democracy. The left (the Bolsheviks, Roland-Holst8
representing the Dutch SDP Left, and the delegates from
“Social-patriotism and
social-imperialism, defended in Germany by both the majority—which is
openly patriotic—of the old social democrats, as well as by the so-called
centrists grouped around Kautsky . . . is an even more dangerous enemy of the
proletariat than the bourgeois advocacy of imperialism, because
social-imperialism, outrageously claiming to be the standard-bearer of
socialism, can lead unenlightened workers into error” (un-aufgeklärte, always Aufklärung, the clarification of
consciousness).
The resolution saw only a
spiritual problem of consciousness where it was above all a matter of the
relation of forces. But even at the level of the relation of forces its
analyses seemed to be correct because, after the war, social democracy was the
only effective counterrevolutionary force. Gorter’s Imperialism, the World War and Social Democracy (1915) developed
the major theses of the Zimmerwald Left: transforming the war into a civil war
and creating a new international. It also contains an implicit critique of the
thesis concerning the labor bureaucracy: it was the whole proletariat (and not
just its highest layers) which had been “corrupted”, that is, it
had seen its material situation improve through its struggles, thanks to the
rise in the rate of profit in the preceding period.
Gorter and Pannekoek, who
could not attend the Zimmerwald Conference, supported the left. Pannekoek and
Roland-Holst sent money (the SDP did not want to become involved in this kind
of activity). They were entrusted with editing and publishing a German-language
international organ, Vorbote (the
Precursor), whose other collaborators were Lenin, Radek, Zinoviev and Gorter.
Only two issues appeared as a result of disputes within the small group, due in
part to the Bolsheviks’ sensitivities. One such dispute, for example,
involved Roland-Holst and Trotsky.10
This collaboration within the
framework of the Zimmerwald Left is one of the elements which help to explain
the German Left’s misunderstandings concerning the Bolshevik seizure of
power and the Third International at the time of its founding. When Lenin and
the leadership of the Third International began to attack the
“leftists”, the latter would long believe that this was a result of
a lack of information.
The Bolsheviks, and the
German, Dutch, Bulgarian and Italian Lefts, were unique in their espousal
during the war of the revolutionary position against social democracy and their
advocacy of the realistic and revolutionary watchword: no to peace, transform
the war between nations into a civil war to seize power.
It was upon this set of
positions that the
The two touchstones of the
left at the founding Congress of the German CP would, in effect, be electoral
abstentionism and sabotage of the trade unions. These two positions were
arrived at by the ISD in the course of its theoretical development, greatly
influenced by the workers movement during the war. It was in Arbeiterpolitik that, for the first
time, the watchword of the German Revolution appeared: Heraus den Gewerkschaften! (Out of the Trade Unions!), at first to
be subjected to criticism, and later to be adopted. Much the same thing took
place regarding the concept of the unitary
organization which was expressed for the first time in 1917 in the same
journal. This idea would be re-appropriated and further elaborated by Wolffheim
and Laufenberg, providing the first theoretical foundations of the AAU. But the
German Left went beyond the IWW: instead of basing itself on economic
organizations which rejected politics, it wanted to positively overcome the
rupture between political and economic organizations. Finally, the critique of
social democracy and its methods led the ISD to the rejection of
parliamentarism as a tactic which fatally led to the domination of the
parliamentary delegation over the rest of the Party which would thus become the
instrument for purely electoral ends. The later theoretical elaborations of
this current are clearly of great interest today: World Revolution and Communist Tactics, by Pannekoek, as well as
three texts by Rühle: The Revolution
is Not a Party Matter!, Fundamental
Questions of Organization, and From
the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution.
The USPD
As the Left maintained, the
USPD was a “party of leaders”, created by “leaders” to
lead the “masses”. At the beginning of 1917, after a national
conference of oppositionists, which was attended by the social democratic
Community of Labor, the Spartacus League and Lichstrahlen (these groups contributing 111, 34 and 7 delegates,
respectively) and which voted to remain in the SPD, the Community of Labor and
the Spartacists were excluded from the SPD. In April, the centrists created the
USPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party, which the Spartacus League
joined as an autonomous group. It was an important party which would receive
2.5 million votes in the 1919 elections. Drawn from the SPD Left, which
comprised many of its sections, it had its own trade union organization in the
“revolutionary shop stewards” (see below), an oppositionist trade
union organization born during the war.
The Independents denounced
the existing German State as “the State of the Middle Classes” and
wanted a State of the working class.12 This position differs from
both Bernstein’s stance at the turn of the century which was in favor of
an SPD-Liberal alliance, as well as from that of the defenders of imperialism,
who were supporters of a working class-big capital alliance against the liberal
bourgeoisie and the middle classes, a program which would be more or less
realized by the Nazis. The USPD extended traditional liberalism by mixing it
with a laborism of workers ideology. The numerous workers who supported it were
against the revolution as well as the authoritarianism and bureaucratism of the
SPD and the ADGB. Historically, this Party expressed the ambiguous character of
a (numerous) fraction of workers whose confusion would be augmented by defeat.
In conformity with its
dualism, it was the Party where all compromises found a place. Whenever its
left wing launched or reactivated an action, it began negotiating from the very
moment that the action appeared to become dangerous to the established order.
It had a left wing which took to the streets (the Spartacists, at the
beginning, and leaders like Ledebour who had connections with the shop
stewards), and a right wing which undertook parliamentary maneuvers. After the
sailors had established contact with the USPD during the summer of 1917 (see
the next Chapter), it abandoned them the moment they were repressed and denied
any responsibility for their actions. A leader of the USPD declared: “We
have tried to channel the justified indignation of the masses into legal
political action.”13 These “pure” social democrats
wanted social democracy without its natural consequence: social
democracy’s counterrevolutionary future. Their critique, like
Luxemburg’s, was directed at the “official authorities”, the
“current leaders” of the SPD, but never at the SPD as such.
The USPD was the German
expression of the international phenomenon Lenin designated as
“centrism”: the center of the Italian SP under Serrati, the
Independent Labour Party in
The Spartacist League
The Spartacist League
included both the future rightist leaders of the KPD (Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches,
Levi, Pieck--the future president of the GDR--Zetkin), as well as future
KAPists (Rühle, Bergmann, Meyer). Others, like Liebknecht, occupied an
intermediate position in the revolution.
The Spartacist League
suffered from a problem which would be reproduced on a larger scale during the
KPD’s first few months: a left majority and a right-wing leadership, with
the left not daring to make a clean break to join the ISD. In 1915, the
Spartacist League was known as the International group, which was the name of
the single issue of a journal which it published. In 1916 it became the
Spartacist Group or League: starting in January 1916, Luxemburg published a
series of political letters under the signature of “Spartacus”, and
the “Spartacus” journal appeared in September. Its two
theoreticians were Liebknecht and Luxemburg. For his valiant and spectacular
opposition to the war, Liebknecht was the most popular of the “social
democratic leaders” in
If Luxemburg was the author
of the formula, “After
“However laudable and
understandable the impatience and bitterness which today lead the best elements
to leave the Party (we should recall that 4/5 of the Party has thus abandoned
it), flight is still flight. For us, this means a betrayal of the masses who are
struggling and suffocating, caught in the snares of the Scheidemanns and the
Legiens (socialist leader and the leader of the ADGB, respectively), who enjoy
the favor of the bourgeoisie. One can ‘leave’ small sects and
little cults when they no longer please, in order to found new sects and new
cults. To attempt, by means of a simple “departure”, to free the
proletarian masses from the horribly heavy and disastrous yoke of the
bourgeoisie and to thus set a good example for them, is purely imaginary. To
entertain the illusion of freeing the masses by tearing up the militants’
membership cards is nothing but the inverted expression of the fetishism of the
Party membership card as an illusory power. Both these attitudes are merely
different poles of institutional cretinism, an illness inherent to the old
social democracy.”14
The Spartacus Letter of March 30, 1916, concerning the founding of the
Community of Labor, concluded in this fashion: “The watchword is neither
schism, nor unity, nor new party, nor old party, but the re-conquest of the Party from the bottom up by means of the
rebellion of the masses who must take their organizations and instruments into
their own hands, not with a rebellion of words, but of deeds.”
This tactic was similar to
the centrist position of the Spartacists at Zimmerwald: refusing to publicly
denounce the Kautskyist center and to accept Lenin’s and Gorter’s, et al., slogans against the war,
Luxemburg and Liebknecht underwent the following evolution. At first, they
propagandized in favor of a “just” peace without annexations,
defined as a “socialist peace”. At the meeting of the SPD shop
stewards held in Charlottenburg on December 30, 1914, Liebknecht proposed a
vote on a “Resolution on the nature of the war and the tasks of the
working class” in which he said: “The goal of the socialists is to
obtain through struggle a peace without annexations, without humiliating any
country, and to do everything possible to reinforce the movement for such a
socialist peace in all countries concerned.” Later, the conclusion of the
Junius Pamphlet (“Theses on the
Tasks of International Social Democracy”) launched the slogan “War
against War”, which was susceptible of many different interpretations.
Luxemburg would long remain bound to the socialist conception of the war.
Jaurés’s phrase is well-known: “Capitalism brings war the
way clouds bring a storm.” The Zimmerwald Left went so far as to add a
third term: war leads to revolution. The slogan, “War against War”
remains in the social democratic camp.
Liebknecht developed an
original position on organization. He had seen that, except for those made by
Pannekoek, the “leftist” critiques of the social democratic form of
organization were quite superficial and effectively revealed a degree of
organizational fetishism. He attempted to oppose to an organizational form
which favored the leaders and the counterrevolution, another form which would
favor the “self-activity of the masses”. This leftist point of view
was expounded by Liebknecht in his prison writings and was shared by the
majority of the Spartacist League:
“To eliminate the paid
bureaucracy, or to exclude it from all decision-making processes; to limit it
to technical labor; to prohibit the re-election of all officials, after a
maximum time served . . . , to reduce the power of high-level positions; decentralization; vote by the rank and
file on all important questions (veto power). . . . To teach the masses and
individuals intellectual and moral independence, to question authority, to take
the initiative and personal responsibility, so that each person would be
prepared for and capable of free action: all these things comprise the only
sure foundation for the development of a workers movement which would be equal
to its historic tasks, in general, and this is also the precondition and
essential basis for the extirpation of the bureaucratic danger.”15
Luxemburg did not want to
become involved in this kind of critique. She broke with social democracy, but
only reluctantly, and helped retard the construction of a new, entirely
autonomous radical organization. Her 1904 polemic with Lenin, however, showed
that she was by no means a devotee of organizational fetishism.16 It
is impossible to agree with Laufenberg when, in 1920, he wrote in Communism versus Spartacism:
“Luxemburg never freed herself from the social democratic form of organization.” Laufenberg’s
critique issued from the mystified point of view expressed by Liebknecht above.
All the debates within the German Left are generally very confused.
There was, then, an important
Left, which was even in the majority within the Spartacist League; but it did
not distinguish itself in relation to its centrist leadership, represented by
Luxemburg. The Spartacist League itself remained an autonomous group within the
USPD, which, for its part, never lost hope of reunification with the SPD.
Labor Agitation and the “Shop Stewards”
All strikes were prohibited
by the trade unions as a “betrayal of our brothers at the front”.
As a result, everything was very clear from the beginning on the labor front,
as far as organizations were concerned: in every strike, a new organization was
born in each factory, led by the “revolutionary shop stewards”.
These men were generally regularly-elected trade union delegates who did not
follow the official line of the ADGB’s Central Committee. The new
structures were based on the factory,
and these factory organizations (BO,
Betriebsorganisation) were organized by industrial
regions (for example, the workers council of Greater Berlin), in accordance
with the technical structure of capital during that era. This form of
organization would be adopted and theorized by the German Left (KAPD, AAU), and
was also the embryo of the future workers councils. The shop stewards held
effective leadership over all strikes, and called them off without any
negotiations when they felt that the strike movement was in no position to make
the State back down. Starting and stopping strikes almost at will, the shop
stewards were the most authentic expression of the labor rank and file at that
time: they comprised its executive organ. Constantly spreading, the strikes
were supposed to have terminated in the insurrectionary general strike. The
shop stewards would elaborate a plan for November 1918 along such lines which,
as it turned out, could not be executed: once again, it became obvious that the
revolution would begin spontaneously before the D-Day foreseen by all the
leaders. Later, when this revolution directly posed problems at the level of
the State, once the struggle became directly political, the shop stewards in
fact proved incapable of leading it: they generally rallied to the USPD as
their political party. Incapable of transcending the limitations of the
factory, they left it only in order to fall prey to the limitations of
political democracy. Opposed to mass action, which they considered to be
“revolutionary gymnastics”, the Revolutionäre
Obleute (RO) proved that the mere
fact of their working class and factory background did not confer upon them any
more immunity against opportunism and immediatism than was the case with social
groups “outside” the factories. The most radical sectors of the
proletariat (the “left”) would not clearly emerge until the
revolution.
The first disturbances were
hunger riots accompanied by looting of stores, in October 1915 in
The movements in the
provinces were followed by a large strike in
The strikes of January 1918 were
an extension of the strikes in
The strike spread in
1. Haupt: Le congrès manqué,
Maspero, 1965, pp. 25-27.
2. Badia: Histoire de l’Allemagne comtemporaine,
Ed. Sociales, Vol. I, p. 62.
3. Walling,
p. 268. Cf. Humbert Droz, L’origine
de la IC, La Baconnière, 1968; and Gankin and Fisher, The Bolscheviks and the World War,
Stanford University Press and Oxford University Press, 1940.
4. H.
M. Bock: Syndikalismus und
Linkskommunismus, Marburger Abhandlungen für Politischen Wissenschaft,
Vol. 13, 1969, p. 72.
5. “L’imperialisme
et les tâches du proletariat”, Vorbote,
No. 1, 1916.
6. Guerin:
Le mouvement ouvrier aux
7. Bock:
p. 79.
8. Roland-Holst:
she left the small “Internationalist Group” to join the SDP in
1916.
9. Bock:
p. 69.
10. F.
Kool: Die Linke gegen die
Parteiherrschaft, Walter-Verlag, Olten et
11. According
to Waldman, most members of the Lichstrahlen
would later join the Linksradikalen
of northern
12. L.
O’Boyle: American Historical Review,
July, 1951, “The German Independent Socialists during the
13. Badia:
p. 81.
14. Quoted
by Bock, p. 69.
15. Ibid., p. 65.
16. “Organizational
Questions of Russian Social Democracy”, op. cit.
17. Badia:
pp. 87-88.
Prior to November 9
The revolution began among
the sailors of the German fleet at
Their attitude and program
were quite pacifist: peace, democracy and recognition of the workers. This was
the program of all the councils which were born in that first phase. They took
the form of the Russian workers and soldiers soviets. They were based on
cities, neighborhoods or the various military units. Their form was unlike that
of the enterprise or factory councils.
The
This tactic of the SPD proved
to be more suitable under the circumstances than the one advocated by the
government minister from the Catholic Zentrum
Party, Erzberger, who proposed that
The revolution rapidly spread
throughout the whole country, taking
Unlike the precedence of
Approximately 10,000 councils
were established, electing leaders who were in their great majority members of
the SPD. Both the leaders of the SPD as well as the Army encouraged this
process and helped to form councils: “All power to the Councils”.
The council was the form chosen to liquidate the subversive movement, from the
very moment of its appearance. The “council-form” is no less a
failure than the “party-form”. Yet, even today, in imitation of the
Leninists, councilists speak of the council as if it must always be a revolutionary
council, while the latter constituted an exception within the German
Revolution. The Leninists speak the same way about the “revolutionary
party”, as if it were a magical talisman, despite the fact that it has
never existed. These disputes concerning party or council are of no account
because they have always lacked and will continue to lack any real historical
substance.
The November Revolution took
place in a totally unexpected manner for all the parties and groups which
attempted to assume its leadership, including, among others, those who were
closest to the rank and file, the RO,
whose plan for an insurrection was rendered superfluous by the wave which
spread from
The strategies and functions of the
various organizations
As far as the bourgeoisie was
concerned, the State was momentarily neutralized. Nowhere did the bureaucracy
offer any resistance to the formation of councils which, although concentrating
all power in their hands wherever they were established, left the old State
intact, and demanded that the latter “recognize” them. The Army
dissolved, although its officers managed its return to
The SPD which had taken power
had undergone a large reduction in its membership, which was in its eyes a sign
of proletarian radicalization, although the masses allowed it to remain in
power. Once it occupied the highest offices of the State, its membership as
well as its audience rapidly expanded: it obtained 35% of the vote in the
January 1919 elections. It was the “backbone of the new bourgeois
State” (Wolffheim).
Although it had been formed
by those who had been excluded from the SPD, the USPD never lost the hope of
reunification. Since its leaders were primarily concerned with the exercise of
power, they did not consider the possibility of assembling a council as the
Spartacist left had desired. Having taken account of the obvious current of
radicalization, Spartacus had to show that it had at least become a significant
minority within the USPD. We must point out that “public opinion”,
the press, etc., had at that time seized upon the term “Spartacist”
as being more suitable than “left radicals”, “international
socialists”, etc., for causing a sensation, and that the term was applied
to the whole revolutionary movement, within which Spartacus was just one group
among others, and which would constitute neither the majority nor the most
radical current within the KPD. The term “left radical” was also
used in an imprecise manner, designating not only the USPD left (without
distinction) but also everything to the left of the USPD.7
On
Freed by the government at
the end of October, Liebknecht met with the
Like Spartacus, the ISD also
grew and multiplied the number of its publications: some of them would become
the organs of the left wing which would be excluded from the KPD. On November
23, meeting in
On a national scale, the
revolutionary shop stewards seemed to constitute the trade union left. As such,
they corresponded exactly to the USPD (following the old economic-political
dichotomy which the revolution would try to overcome). The RO was ultimately the trade union organization of the USPD. It
fully confirmed this tendency by providing itself with a trade unionist leadership:
Ledebour, Däumig (both from the USPD) and Müller (of the
On
Meanwhile, the
anarchosyndicalists, although outlawed and reduced to inactivity during the
war, had preserved their cadres. The Free Federation of German Trade Unions
(FVDG) rapidly rebuilt its organization. During December 26-27 it held a
conference and, most importantly, decided to invite its members to collaborate
with the communist organizations (IKD) and the Spartacists, in support of the
councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat.9
The “November
Revolution” was not even a bourgeois revolution: ultimately, it was the
political conclusion, carried out by the proletariat, of a bourgeois revolution
which started in the 19th century. This “revolution” was
not a revolution: it did not fight the essence of the State, which was only
modified in a secondary manner. Eichhorn, a USPD member, who was appointed
“chief of police” of
1. Comfort: Chapter
III.
2. See The Revolution in
3. Summarized by
Waldman: p. 107, note 78.
4. Compare
with the Italian bourgeoisie of the same era: R. Paris, Histoire du fascisme, Maspero, Vol. I, 1962; and Communisme et fascisme, Ed. Programme
Communiste.
5. Quoted
in A. Grosser, Hitler, la presse et la
naissance d’une dictature, Colin, 1972, p. 19.
6. Reichenbach:
“Zur Geschichte der KAPD”, Archiv
für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1928,
Vol. XIII.
7. Comfort,
p. 43.
8. On
the relations between the RO and the
Spartacus League, cf. Prudhommeaux.
9. Bock:
p. 105, and Document III.
The Bourgeoisie and the “Workers
Party”
The economic crisis at the
end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 was primarily due to economic
disorganization caused by the war and the need for peacetime reconversion: at
this level alone, it was not a crisis
in the sense of a cyclical crisis. Its features (a considerable decrease in
production, a large trade deficit, a million unemployed at the beginning of
1919—with 250,000 unemployed in Berlin alone—a 2/3 decline in the
exchange value of the mark) were conjunctural effects of the war and
reconversion.
The way capitalism managed to
survive and to crush subversion was basically new. All the institutions which one
would have thought would have served the counterrevolution had collapsed. First
of all, the State and the Army; the bourgeoisie remained in the background, its
parties having relinquished political power (see the previous Chapter). The
bourgeoisie yielded to the socialists, whose leader, Ebert, reassured them:
“We are the only ones who can maintain order.” Among the
pre-revolutionary hierarchies, the SPD and the ADGB were the only institutions
which were still effective on a national scale in
Nowhere did the proletariat
undertake decisive measures of the kind advocated by Lenin in his Message to the Soviet Republic of Bavaria
of
In Bavaria, the
transformations in the army were purely formal: certain rights were conceded to
the soldiers in exchange for their general obedience to their officers.4
Even worse, the only effect of this reform was to exacerbate the
officers’ hatred for all social change, without having granted, in
exchange, the means for the soldiers to organize themselves against the officer
corps. J. Knief considered “the practice of many of the soldiers councils
to be counterrevolutionary”.5 It was within the proletariat
itself that the issue would be decided. The majority of the workers, organized in
trade unions and led by the SPD, would be the agent for capital’s
survival. Capital only exists because the
proletariat creates it, and the proletariat reproduces capital until the
general breakdown of the relations integral to capital, together with the
experience of numerous failed revolutions, compels the proletariat to struggle
and gives it the ability to fight for its survival by rejecting its own
condition as proletariat, rather than in order to survive, by way of political
reforms and activities, as workers who sell their labor power.
After taking power, the SPD
declared the revolution was over, at least in its phase of violence and mass
action. The party of the working class being in power, and the working class
thus having taken political power in its hands, the revolutionary
transformation of social relations (what was called socialization) was only a
question of time: it was a matter of a progressive and peaceful process. The
development of capital still had to continue, since only a capital which had
arrived at the ultimate stage of its development could be
“socialized”. For this reason, order must reign, and the
“Spartacists” must be crushed, “Spartacists” being
another way of saying “reactionary lumpenproletariat”.
The workers movement came to
consider the revolutionary proletarians as marginal in respect to the
“working class”. This was also the source of the rise of racism:
anti-Semitism wreaked havoc in the workers movement, 6 especially
the variety directed against the eastern Jews who had come from
“The Jews of the east
are, for the most part, a proletarian group mired in filth, poverty, and the
lowest moral level of commerce. Unable to adapt to industry, their physical
constitution, furthermore, generally renders them ill-suited for industrial or
agricultural labor.”
Considering fact that these
lines were extracted from the SPD’s leading journal, Neue Zeit, one can imagine what forms anti-Semitism assumed in
everyday agitation and propaganda. Becker, an SPD deputy in the national
assembly, declared in that forum, in 1919: “The Warschovskys, the
Auerbachs and the Sickmanns of Lodz, the Stachovskys and the Alexandrovitchs of
Warsaw are doing business everywhere in
Having a better appreciation
than anyone else for the revolutionary potential of the radical sector, the
driving force of the movement which had just been unleashed, the SPD took
measures to confront it, while it diverted the “masses” with grand
speeches about the advent of socialization. One can see the ideology of
socialization in P. Lensch, who moved from the left to the socialist right wing
and who announced on the eve of the peace that capital would emerge from the
conflict as “a captive of socialism”.7 Economic
socialization was inevitable: “capitalism must be organized”.
Prefiguring the Nazis, which is to say the language of National Socialism so dear to the SPD, he presented the alternative
between “social” organization” and “plutocratic”
organization. The State “has undergone a process of socialization”
and social democracy has experienced a process of
“nationalization”: “For the first time in history, we are
establishing harmony between the State and the people.” Nazism would
receive its “totalitarian language” from social democracy.
In an article on Socialization, 8 Pannekoek
criticized the term itself, which alone designates nothing but organized
capitalism or “State socialism”. But he did not discuss the notion
of a community without exchange. Nor would Gorter: 9
“The proletariat must
take State and legislative power into its hands. It must guarantee a minimum of
the means of subsistence to all the workers and to all those who must become
workers. It must take over the management of all production, of trade and
transportation, and of the distribution of production. It must decree
compulsory labor for all. It must repudiate the State’s debts; confiscate
war profits; it must only tax capital and income and thereby arrive at a
confiscation of capital. It must expropriate the Banks and large industry. It
must socialize the land.”
The SPD also availed itself
of violent measures. After November 10, Ebert was in contact with the
Army’s leaders and assured them of his assistance: the distrust, and even
more than distrust, on the part of the General Staff with respect to social
democracy was a habit which would not disappear simply because the latter held
government power. It was at this moment that Ebert uttered his famous phrase:
“we are the only party which can maintain order.”10 On
the 11th, Ebert’s government made haste to sign the armistice
so as to be able to dedicate itself to a more essential war. Since the Army had
to be dismantled according to the terms of the armistice, its leaders undertook
the construction of Freikorps: even
so, the military means at the disposal of the counterrevolution were still
scarce, which was a powerful reason for choosing which tactic to follow. The
SPD faced a unique situation, unlike, for example, that faced by its Austrian
counterparts.11 Founded in 1889 by an accord between radical and
moderate socialists, Austrian social democracy did not have to vote for war
credits, since the government had suspended parliament in March of 1914. It
did, however, support the State (above all K. Renner and V. Adler, against the
opposition of F. Adler). Austrian social democracy did not have as much blood
on its hands as its German neighbor, and preserved, for the most part, a leftist
ideology and semblance. “Socialization” and democracy had
relatively greater importance in
The Function of Democracy
Democracy served all
purposes. Trade union leaders and employers, who had long served on the same
commissions, quickly signed the accord known under the name of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft: literally, the
“community of labor”. The businessman, who was aware that the
period rendered a great number of measures impractical, surrendered
“everything” to preserve what was essential.
For the trade unions and the
SPD this reaction was excellent propaganda for guaranteeing a good beginning
for socialization and for preventing strikes. Significant reforms, for that era,
were adopted, such as the principle
of the eight hour day. In particular, the trade unions were recognized as valid
interlocutors and components within the enterprise. Joint committees were made
obligatory, composed of trade union and employer representatives in enterprises
with more than 20 employees: this measure would be implemented in January 1920
under the rubric of the “law on enterprise councils”. Instead of
going on strike and conducting propaganda campaigns, it was better to discuss
matters with the joint committee: this is what the anti-trade union left would
call “economic democracy”.
Council democracy revived
parliamentary democracy, the trade unions being unable to overcome the
simulacrum of parliamentary democracy within their own ranks. In December, the
elections for the provincial assemblies were organized: the SPD won a majority,
except in
In order to prevent the
revolutionary wave from sweeping everything away, the counterrevolution
consolidated the only really existing means to stop it: the reformist majority
of the working class, which in addition had its own concrete
goals--negotiations with the employers, councils, elections. Everything was
connected together by democratic ideology, and defended by the Freikorps. It was on this last level
that the shoe pinched: the military apparatus of the counterrevolution was
short on soldiers, while the workers were armed. The first direct attack on the
radicals (the Volksmarinedivision)
would fail (see the next Chapter). This would give way to the tactic of
progressively crushing the partial uprisings in the various regions of
This tactic could not have
succeeded unless the revolution, despite its scale, was unable to act
simultaneously and with one will. Each council power had specific problems of
all kinds which it hoped to solve locally. There is no example of a movement
which was victorious in one State and devoted itself to agitation in a
neighboring State. Among the leftists, it seems that Wolffheim and Laufenberg
were the only ones to concern themselves with establishing communication
between the rebellious zones in northern and central
Once it had consolidated the
counterweight to halt the revolution, social democracy had to take immediate
action in order to prevent the constitution of the proletarians into a class, a
process begun at the end of the war, whose first confused manifestation was the
generalization of councils-soviets, but which would acquire an increasingly
more precise expression in the factory councils and the increasing strength of
the Spartacists and the IKD, particularly with the fusion of these two groups
into the KPD.
To speak of
“strategy”, of “tactics”, of “provocation”,
etc., by no means implies that the motive force of this whole revolutionary
movement was established by “consciousness”. Under the pressure of
the social and political crisis which followed the war, social and political
groups were obliged to take action in order to survive; the survival of one
could only be achieved to the detriment of the other, and each group adopted,
more or less consciously, the tactic which the pre-existing conditions imposed.
The SPD was forced to take action against the Volksmarinedivision, and after its defeat it was compelled to
sacrifice a pawn against the revolution (the expulsion of Eichhorn). In both
cases, these moves provoked a reaction in the reactionary camp for whom it
became obvious that the proletarians, having reached the limit of their
potential, could not bring about the fall of the social democratic State. The
reaction could then make its move without fearing any response.13
Except for the
The Founding of the KPD
The prelude to the founding
of the KPD was the national conference of the IKD held on December 24 in
After having desired to
remain in the USPD, the Spartacus League placed itself “outside the
organization” by taking the initiative to hold a national conference in
October (see the preceding Chapter). Excluded de facto, it accepted the IKD’s position and left the USPD. A
small minority (Luxemburg, Levi, and L. Jogisches) was very hesitant, since it
judged that the situation was not “mature” enough for the creation
of the revolutionary party. But they followed the majority. The Congress set
the date when Spartacus would convoke its second national conference: December
30.
Except for certain
specialized histories, 16 whenever the matter of the radical
movement of 1918-19 is discussed, it is the Spartacists who get the most
attention. The left groups of
At the founding Congress of
the KPD it became evident that the overwhelming majority of the delegates,
although not all of them members of the IKD, adhered to the theses of the IKD.
The party would have 90,000 members in March 1919. According to F. Kool, it was
formed of mostly young workers “without political experience”.
According to Bock, the sociological profile of its recruits was much more
varied and included workers from all layers of the proletariat. Subsequently, a
consensus concerning the “lack of maturity” of the delegates to the
founding Congress would become established.17 Historians and
political organizations cannot admit that proletarians could
“spontaneously” adopt such radical positions.
After having unanimously
adopted the program which had been written by Luxemburg and had already been
published on December 14 as the “Program of the Spartacus League”
under the title of What Does Spartacus
Want?, along with the slogans of the “Communist Party of Germany
(Spartacus League)” or KPD(S), the leftist tendency crystallized around
two questions, that of participation in the elections (for the constituent
assembly) and that of working in the trade unions.
The Congress held a debate on
the question of organization, but for the most part opposed centralism. Workers
autonomy, if not workerism, occupied a preferential place in the Congress.
Eberlein declared: 18 “The organizations of the old SPD,
except for periodic elections, were inert and empty. . . . We must construct
our organization on totally different foundations. We demand that the workers
and soldiers councils exercise all political power. The factory councils are
the basis of power. Our organization must be adapted to this situation. It
would then be best, probably, to create communist groups in the factories. It
cannot be tolerated that orders should be imposed from above. The industrial
organizations must enjoy complete autonomy. The task of the central organ is
above all that of synthesizing the movements which develop outside of it and
assuring political and ideological leadership.” Each organization must
have full autonomy of action; the central office has a minimal political role:
information clearing house, preparation of congresses and managing day-to-day
business. Above all it was not to be a revolutionary general staff for all of
Participation in the
elections was rejected by 62 votes against 23; among the latter, Liebknecht
declared that he had only reluctantly voted “in favor”.20
Knief, on the other hand, of the Bremen IKD, was a supporter of revolutionary
parliamentarism. The 62 votes represented the IKD and the party’s
“rank and file”.
Luxemburg reproached the
abstentionists for “transforming radicalism (which in German is
synonymous with ‘leftism’) into something quite comfortable”.
A more “useful” tactic was needed, Levi explained in his report, which
would consist in participating in the elections in order to destroy
parliamentarism. Rühle presented the opposition’s report. The
majority of those “lacking in political experience” did not want to
hear any nonsense about classical politics, and their hostile shouts often
interrupted the speeches of Luxemburg and Levi.
It was crucial for its
current and future activities that the KPD Congress should affirm that the
party should work for the destruction of the trade unions and call upon all of
its members to leave them: such was the opinion of the abstentionist majority.
On behalf of the left, Frölich (
The radicalism displayed by
the Congress was one reason why the RO
refused to join the KPD. Under Däumig’s leadership, they formed a “Community
of Labor” and in 1922 returned to the rump USPD (that is, what was left
of it after the departure, in 1920, of its left wing for the KPD; cf. Chapter
13), which soon rejoined the SPD. A minority chose to remain outside of the SPD
and the KPD and preserved the name USPD, which later split in its turn into two
groups in 1923, which would join the SAP (another centrist party) in 1931. The
ex-USPD members who returned to the SPD in 1922 preserved certain
characteristically “leftist” positions: hostile to national
coalitions of the socialist party with the bourgeois parties, in 1923 they
initiated the abortive experience of the “workers government” in
Saxony.22
Luxemburg’s maneuver
regarding the trade union question and the fact that the party minority was
elected to the party’s leadership positions demonstrated a certain
inexperience or incompetence in political affairs on the part of the KPD
majority: this would be further confirmed when, in October 1919, the minority
managed to exclude the majority. The German Left would be constituted and would
distinguish itself in opposition to Spartacism, in the course of which it would
experience more difficulties than in other aspects of its break with its social
democratic past.23 But if there is a clear difference between
“Spartacism” and the “German Left”, neither the one nor
the other had become petrified in 1919. Had proletarian action followed an
ascending course, which did not happen, profound analyses would have been
possible. It is just as impossible to draw a hard and fast line between the two
currents, as the golden legend of Spartacism is false. The KPD Congress was
divided over “the question of the ‘unitary’ organization
defended by ISD elements . . . and the ‘leader-masses’ problem,
which in addition to garnering the support of the above mentioned
‘radicals’ also had sympathizers among the Spartacists, who had
defended these positions—although in a somewhat vague manner—when
they had constituted the ‘International’ fraction of the
USPD”.24 It would be the left, however, which would be
consolidated during the course of the struggles of 1919, and its divergences
with the KPD’s right wing would become so profound that they would lead
to a split.
The Spartacist leaders proved
to be incapable of breaking with social democracy and its methods. One of the
errors of the left was that of not criticizing the party program itself.
According to What Does Spartacus Want?,
a revolution had taken place: its first phase (up to December 24) had been
“exclusively political”; from that point forward, it had to be
oriented towards what was essential: towards the field of the economy.25
“The conquest of power
cannot be accomplished at one blow, but must be incremental: we shall introduce
ourselves into the bourgeois State until we occupy all of its posts and defend
them against all external attacks. . . .
It is a step-by-step, hand-to-hand struggle, in each State, in each
city, in each village, in order to put all the instruments of power into the
hands of the workers and soldiers councils, instruments which must slowly be
torn from the grasp of the bourgeoisie. While achieving this goal we must,
first of all, educate our comrades. . . .”
It serves no purpose to
insist on those aspects which separate Marx (concerning which Pannekoek and,
later, Lenin, would write at length) from this “incremental”
conquest of the capitalist State by a proletariat which “introduces
itself” into that State. It is the same kind of absence of a rupture as
is found in the Kautskyism of The Road to
Power. Luxemburg’s contradiction, like that of so many others, was
that of effectively being a revolutionary, and not only in words, but without
acquiring the means to really be a revolutionary. Her originality resides in
the method chosen for her purpose: it is always a question of teaching and
educating, but by means of action and not classical pedagogy. The fear of a
failed putsch caused Luxemburg to renounce proposing a centralized struggle:
“It is among the rank and file, where each factory owner confronts his
wage slaves, where we must uproot the instruments of power, little by little,
from the rulers.”
Luxemburg did not understand
that even though the class struggle is especially fluid and mobile, it also
crystallizes into organizations, both revolutionary and reactionary.26
Hence her refusal to create an independent organization. Her reasoning in
relation to the State born in November 1918 was like her reasoning concerning
the SPD and the USPD. Conceiving of social life primarily as movement, she
neglected the moments of rupture. She rejected a frontal assault on the
1. La question syndicale et la gauche allemande…., p. 6.
2. Conseils ouvriers en Allemagne 1917-21, pp. 158-166.
3. Comfort,
Chapter III; cf. also P. von Oertzen, Die
Betriebsräte in der November Revolution, Düsseldorf, 1963.
4. A.
Mitchell: Revolution in
5. La question syndicale…., p. 58,
note no. 6.
6. Berlau:
pp. 345-346.
7. Three Years of World Revolution,
Constable,
8. Le Phare, March 1920.
9. Bulletin communiste, June 3 1920,
“La révolution universelle”, cf. also Rühle, From the Bourgeois to the Communist
Revolution, Socialist Reproduction, London, 1974, with a good introduction;
and L. Valiani, Histoire du socialisme au
XXe siècle, Nagel, 1948, pp. 115-116.
10. Statement
attributed to Scheidemann, quoted in Badia.
11. K.
Shell: The Transformation of Austrian
Socialism,
12. PC, No. 61, p. 37 et seq., and No. 64, p. 77 et
seq.
13. Concerning
“historical coercion”—which is not synonymous with
automatism—cf. La Sainte Famille,
Ed. Sociales, 1969, pp.47-48. In English, The
Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, Progress Publishers,
14. Waldman:
p. 150, No. 92.
15. R.
Lowenthal, The Bolshevisation of the
Spartakus League, in St.
Anthony’s Papers, No. 9, Chatto-Windus, London, 1960, p. 26.
16. Bock
and Kool, in particular.
17. Among
others, Badia, in Le spartakisme,
conclusion; Waldman, p. 152, note no. 96; and Lowenthal, p. 27.
18. Waldman:
pp. 155-156.
19. Cf.
La gauche allemande. Textes.
20. Bock:
p. 95.
21. Cf.
Lange’s report: Waldman, pp. 153-154.
22. Hunt:
pp. 206-207 and 210, et seq.
23. PC, No. 58, pp. 91-115, concerning
Spartacism and pp. 100-101 for the IKD.
24. La question syndicale…., p. 5.
25. Luxemburg:
Oeuvres, Maspero, Vol. II, 1969, pp.
126-128.
26. R.
Paris: Introduction to La
révolution russe, Maspero, 1964.
The Councils Commit Suicide
On November 10, the delegates
of the councils in the Berlin region met and proclaimed the “Socialist
Republic”, and elected a provisional executive committee (Vollzugsrat), composed of six SPD
members, six USPD members, and twelve soldiers, all of the latter being SPD
supporters. Although it considered itself to be the repository of all power, it
delegated all of its power to the council of peoples’ commissars, in whom
it declared that it placed all its confidence. This explains why, on the 13th,
it opposed the creation of a proletarian red guard.
In some regions the councils
would go further. In
It is clear that, throughout
this entire period, the example of the soviet-Russian revolution led to a
fetishism of the soviet form. For the German movement, not having reached the
point of its most extreme radicalization, “making” soviets became a
substitute for revolutionary action. During the Congress, the Spartacists, who
had been excluded from its deliberations, led a demonstration calling for
another round of elections for the councils.
The Conflict in
With this SPD victory and the
SPD’s success in the local elections for the Brunswick assembly, Ebert
thought that the moment had arrived to make his first move by attacking the Volksmarinedivision which, composed of
3,000 sailors from Kiel, had installed itself in Berlin “to defend the
conquests of the revolution” against the attacks of the reaction. For the
government, it was the principle military manifestation of the revolution: it
was best neutralized as soon as possible.
Immediately after the Council
Congress, an attempt was made to provoke the sailors by withholding their pay.
On December 24, the sailors responded by occupying the Chancellery. Ebert, who
could not yet act openly, contacted General Lequis, who assembled the security
forces and surrounded the sailors. The latter took refuge in the royal palace,
which they used as a base camp. The battle began with a volley of artillery
fire, killing and wounding 60 sailors, who resisted until the moment when a
radical demonstration began. Lequis’ troops, having themselves been
surrounded, were forced to withdraw: their officers only escaped being lynched
thanks to a speech by Ebert. At that time, demonstrators also occupied the Vorwärts offices for the first
time: the
After the failure of this
State offensive, the USPD peoples’ commissars resigned from the
government, just as the RO had been
urging them to do since the 21st. It was against this background
that the founding Congress of the KPD was held. In assessing the strength of
the revolutionary camp, one must keep in mind the fact that the radicals
convened a congress instead of immediately taking advantage of the
revolutionary victory, which had just struck an important blow against the
government. On the 25th, this episode having come to an end, Ebert
could do no more and would go to bed saying that he did not know who would be
in power when he awoke.
“When Ebert
awoke”, with the resignation of the USPD members, three members of the
SPD were co-opted onto the council of peoples commissars. Among them, Noske was
put in charge of military affairs and reasserted his authority over the
vacillating remnants of the Army in
On the 5th, a huge
demonstration (700,000 people) took place demanding Eichhorn’s
reinstatement. This was the initial purpose of the demonstration, but the ensuing
series of events proved that there were other, more radical currents within it.
Great strikes and revolutions often begin with such absurd slogans. For the
second time, demonstrators occupied the Vorwärts
offices: members of the Berlin IKD group took control of the building.
Directly implicated, since
Eichhorn was one of its members, the USPD, after having abandoned what they
thought was a sinking ship on the 29th of December, saw that, an
insurrection having taken place, it should control it through the RO, a good instrument for taking power:
it practiced “leftism”. On the 5th of January, it formed
an “insurrection committee” which was joined by the Spartacists
Liebknecht and Pieck, who were opposed by a minority (Luxemburg) of KPD
leaders. It is false to speak of a “Spartacist insurrection” as if
it was inspired by the KPD, when the insurrection was the result of the
conjunction of two forces: the USPD, which aspired to power, and the KPD left,
which only sought the social revolution. In general terms, the insurrection was
in reality above all directed against the State. The KPD, the RO and the USPD published a leaflet
calling for a demonstration and the abolition of the despotism exercised by the
government. Of course, only the dictatorship of the proletariat can overthrow
the government: but the leaflet did not mention this. It invited the workers to
mobilize and to struggle but did not provide a clear objective. Although a
member of the USPD, Eichhorn was part of the State apparatus: most of the Sicherheitswehr, created on his
initiative with socialist workers and soldiers, would furthermore take the
government’s side. The extreme left mobilized not to destroy the State in
leftist guise (which was as dangerous as its rightist guise), but to purge this
Statist left of its reactionary elements (the SPD); it intended, therefore, to
purify the State. The technically premature aspect of the insurrection has
often been emphasized without, however, emphasizing its meaning. The
adversaries of this undertaking (Luxemburg, Jogisches, the central committee,
along with Radek) were only worried about squandering the small revolutionary
forces. It was not understood that this insurrection was the logical outcome of
an attitude informed by opposition to the State but which did not seek its
destruction. The leaders of the KPD followed the RO. For its part, the communist left, which had not even wanted to
take the party’s leadership into its hands, was even less capable of
putting itself at the head of the street actions. What was tragic about this
was not the fact that some revolutionaries tried to carry out an action which
would be judged a posteriori to be
hopeless, but that once they went into action they would only go halfway.
On the night of the 5th,
the insurrection committee elaborated a plan for the next day’s
insurrection. Noske, meanwhile, marshaled the city’s security forces,
positioned them on the outskirts of
Central and Northern
On the 19th, the
elections for the Constituent Assembly, from which the KPD abstained, delivered
an overwhelming victory to the SPD: 37.5% of the votes against the USPD’s
7.8%. The new socialist government presided over by Scheidemann, with Noske as
its Minister of War, included ministers from the Zentrum. Established in its trademark image, radicalized since the
month of November, the USPD, upon being consulted, refused to participate in
the government.
In
The
At the end of January,
With the occupation of
The second blow struck by the
reaction extended from
The Freikorps departed in order to destroy the new proletarian powers
reconstructed during the street fighting and those which had survived their
first assaults: Magdeburg (April 10), Brunswick (April 14), and then Saxony:
Leipzig (May 11), and then the other cities or regions where local power
“was not proportionate” to the distribution of seats in the
National Assembly.3 In Saxony, for example, the USPD was still in
power: it was deposed. A new and important factor was the new resurgence of the
petite bourgeoisie, which formed Einwohnerwehren
(local self-defense groups) under the protection of the Freikorps. At this time, as well, “voluntary strikes”
by shopkeepers and white collar employees took place. This phenomenon helps us
to appreciate Gorter’s thesis concerning the “isolation” of
the proletariat which had to fight alone in
Between the crushing of
Magdeburg-Brunswick and the reduction of
The union launched a strike whose defeat allowed the government to
dismantle the new organization in a massive police raid. The
The Reich of 1918 was too large for one State to control all of its
territory at the same time during a revolutionary crisis. This was an important
reason for
1. November 1918-February 1919
On
The Bavarian USPD (and this
was also true, to a lesser degree, of the USPD in general) was a party of
enlightened democrats. Either there is a proletarian dictatorship, in which
case, instead of organizing a referendum, the proletariat proceeds to the destruction
of capital (abolition of the commodity: that is, immediate free access to all
abundant products, a vast reduction in the compulsory working day due to the
suppression of all jobs dedicated to the metamorphoses of the commodity, to
buying and selling, and the dedication of these employees to other more useful
functions, etc.) if the country is a highly-developed one. (This was not the
case with Russia: the problem of the Russian proletariat, so small in number,
was that of resisting, of holding on to political power and military supremacy
by means of a policy of alliances with the petty-bourgeois and peasant layers,
until the world revolution: hence the organization of non-democratic elections
with a plurality of votes for the workers). Or, a party having just arrived in
power, in the wake of an insurrectionary, but hardly radical movement, as
happened in Bavaria, does not want to go beyond the limits of the bourgeois
exercise of power and wants to hold elections, in which it only gets 2.5% of
the vote after two months in power. This enlightened and criminal attitude on
the part of the Bavarian USPD would culminate in the proclamation “by
decree” of the council republic.
2. February-March
The USPD having received 2.5%
of the vote, a conflict necessarily erupted between the recently-elected
general assembly and the USPD central power which, paying close attention to
the appearances of the electoral game, appeared to be an ultra-minority. This
conflict seemed to be easy to resolve since Eisner, at the end of February,
decided to faithfully submit his letter of resignation to the
“peoples’ representatives”. As he was entering the assembly,
however, he was assassinated.
The central committee of the
Bavarian councils proclaimed a general strike. The assembly spontaneously
dispersed. The real balance of forces, which could be summarized as at least a
toss-up between the council power and the parliamentary democracy, was not
reflected in the electoral results. Eisner’s funeral was the occasion for
a massive demonstration. The councils implemented more dictatorial measures:
they arrested 50 reactionary hostages, shut down the bourgeois press, and tried
to arm the proletariat. Except for these measures, it did not take advantage of
the situation and thereby deprived itself of the full value of the measures it
did take: these measures appeared to be a substitute for revolutionary action,
whose model was the Commune or
In other regions, the Freikorps intervened to restore the
powers seized by the councils from the local assemblies, but in
3. First and
It was G. Landauer who
proposed, on April 6-7, the creation of a “
Hoffmann, president of the
old government, formed a new one in
With the beginning of the
civil war, the communists joined the government. The anarchists resigned, since
Mühsam and Landauer were theoreticians of non-violence. As in many
movements in which the masses had pushed ahead, they had remained, despite
their opinions, for a while. At the hour of repression, however, Landauer would
be assassinated, Mühsam would be taken prisoner, and another anarchist,
Toller, would become one of the leaders of the Red Army. Their tragic fates
were not in contradiction to their suicidal positions, for themselves as for
the others. By conceiving of the revolution as a gigantic act of bringing
pressure to bear on behalf of the oppressed, without securing the necessary
organizational and military means, they participated in the movement only to
separate themselves from it at the moment of confrontation and, despite
everything, perished in it.
This second government gave
itself the title of the “
The Positions and Evolution of the
Various Organizations
“It is now impossible
to accurately depict the activity of the various organized forces and their
relations with unorganized forces within the strike movements and insurrections
from November 1918 to May 1919.”7 The relative radicalization
of the USPD was due above all to the real radicalization of the movement itself
and of the communist organizations: the social current which corresponded to
the positions of the ex-IKD, with the practical aim of completely transforming
the State, became a political factor. In order not to lose its autonomous
existence in relation to the SPD, the USPD had to force itself to play the role
of a parliamentary extreme left and had to play the game on two boards.
Although numerous leaders of the SPD had joined the USPD, many were in favor of
reunification, since the principle cause of the schism—the war—had
disappeared after 1918. The only reproach they had for their old party was that
it went too far in its support for the bourgeoisie. Thus, the USPD, after the
start of the social democratic repression in
The united front of the
anarchosyndicalists and the communists (November 1918 to May 1919)
corresponded, within the FVDG, to the ideological hegemony of Roche:
non-rejection of violence, dictatorship of the proletariat, defense of the
council-form. These were positions close to the form assumed by the
revolutionary movement, not advice about what had to be done to prevent a
“return to capitalism”. This observation could be applied to the
left as a whole. Its merit was its boycott of elections of all kinds, de facto destruction of the trade
unions, and theorizing these attitudes as affirmations of an authentically proletarian
movement. But if it is true that antiparliamentarism and anti-trade unionism
constitute the movement’s best points, they are not enough. These points
would be assumed by the only capitalist party which would rise to the occasion
of the German revolution and would also be capable of repressing it, Nazism.
Roche provided a definition of the councils which indicated their limitations:
“the councils are the parliaments of the working class.” After all
the struggles of the month of May, the syndicalist camp returned to a more
classical anarchosyndicalism: remaining in the minority, Roche would become a
theoretician of the AAU.
Along with the trade union
and parliamentary questions, another important disagreement divided the KPD and
to some extent was the foundation of the first two, since it determined the
assessment of the historical situation. Those who based their perspective on What Does Spartacus Want? felt that
Spartacus, and subsequently the KPD, must not “take power unless it is
the clear, unequivocal will of the great majority of the proletarian masses of
the entire country”. Luxemburg would again declare at the KPD’s
founding congress that the revolution would be a long, drawn-out affair and
that the situation was not mature: the masses “do not consciously accept
the views, the goals and the methods of the Spartacus League”.8
The Luxemburgist minority, and after her death the Central Committee,
considered any attempt to take power in the advanced centers as
“putschist” or at least “adventurous”. However, once
the struggle had begun, Luxemburg participated in it until she was killed: one
cannot say as much about her Levist epigones.
The majority fraction of the
KPD, supported by many Spartacists (cf. Liebknecht, at the time of the
At this point we must mention
the Wolffheim/Laufenberg tendency (later known as “National
Bolshevism”), 9 as it played such an important role in
It is still one of the
favorite arguments against the left, despite all evidence to the contrary, that
it had incubated a current of this kind. The question, of course, was far from
being so obvious at first. Lenin called Laufenberg’s text, Between the First and Second Revolutions,
an “excellent pamphlet”. This pamphlet did, however, invoke a
“national group identity”. The author concluded his text as
follows: “According to this communist conception, all intellectual and
manual workers belong to this active nation. . . . Lassalle’s national
tactics are enjoying a resurgence and comprise a whole in conjunction with
international tactics. . . .”12 One of the manifestations of
the crisis of the movement was the fact that, for some, in the process of
transcending the point of view of the individual enterprise (which had been
amply theorized), they had fallen into a national and non-class-based
viewpoint. The German revolutionary proletariat did not know how to provide
itself with a “national form” without falling back into the bad
habit of nationalism; it did not know how to be “national” (how to
constitute itself as a class at the level of the nation, of its capital)
without becoming “nationalist”. As Pannekoek said: “the
revolutionary proletariat of all countries constitutes just one mass, one army,
and if, while taking an active part in the struggle, it does not remember this,
it can be annihilated ‘again and again’”.13
Unity is not a question of
organization, but of communistic measures as well as efforts to unify the
movement. It will not be unified if it is not a movement which acts to change
the relations of production: the latter can only be changed if the movement is
unified. Prudhommeaux would later write14 that the military struggle
and social transformation are not possible unless they are carried out
simultaneously.15
1. Comfort: Chapter II.
2. Ibid., Chapter 4.
3. Badia: Histoire de l’Allemagne contemporaine,
Vol. I, p. 143.
4. According to Bock.
5. Mitchell: p. 320.
6. Badia: p. 149.
7. Bock: p. 110.
8. Ibid., pp. 112-113.
9. In
this city, the USPD split at the beginning of 1919. Comfort doubts that the
(Levist) KPD had any real existence in
10. Bock:
p. 274. Cf. the thesis of L. Dupeux, Stratégie
communiste et dynamique conservatrice. Essai sur les différents sens de
l’expression “national-bolchevisme”,
11. Oeuvres, Vol. 30,
12. Zwischen der ersten und der zweiten
Revolution, Hoym, n.d. For a bibliography of national bolshevism, cf.
Angress, p. 327, note 34.
13. Bulletin communiste,
14. La tragédie de Spartacus, in Spartacus et la Commune de
15. See
the testimonies of G. Regler, La glaive
et le fourreau, Plon, 1960, Chapter III (
If Trotsky was correct when
he wrote, in 1922, that “in 1919, the European bourgeoisie was completely
discon-certed”, 1 before recovering its strength in 1920 and
1921, it is equally true that 1919 was the decisive year when a combination of
violence and democracy allowed it to resist a proletariat which was restive
yet, despite appearances, had not taken the offensive.
The period between May 1919 and March 1920 was not characterized by great
battles in
A state of siege reigned
everywhere and imposed clandestine conditions upon the revolutionary groups. It
was during these few months that important splits took place and that the new
“leftist” organizations were formed.
On the international plane,
There were not two socialist
parties in
The least that could be said
about them was that the Hungarian revolutionaries, inspired by the Communist
International, persevered in their illusions. In the first issue of the Communist International (May 1919), L.
Rudas wrote that “the entire socialist party” had recognized
“the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And now, the
proletariat stands as one man behind the new socialist party.” The social
democracy had previously participated in the government after
Lenin admitted that he had
forgotten about the depth of the Hungarian revolutionary movement: but a
telephone conversation reassured him; in this socialist-communist unity, he
said, only the left socialists3 participated. On May 27 he wrote
that “in the matter of organization, the Hungarian proletariat seems to
have outdone us”. He thought that its organization would allow it to
avoid the massive use of violence which was necessary in
The Communist International
misunderstood the Hungarian experience. It saw, above all, the power of the
socialists, first in order to combat them (1919), but then (after 1920) in
order to conclude with the need to attract them to communism: hence the schisms
which were proposed in the leaderships of the old socialist parties, the united
front and the conquest of the trade unions. On this last point, however, after
the bourgeois defeat, more praise was bestowed upon the opposition. Roudniansky
stated8 that in
In January of 1921, two
Hungarians, Kabatchiev and Rakosi (future leader of Stalinist Hungary prior to
1956), CI delegates to the Livorno Congress, where the Italian Communist Party
was founded, explained that the error of the Hungarian communists must not be
repeated.10 They explicitly compared the two cases, deducing from
the first that one must break with the socialist center as well as with the
right (in Italy, with Serrati). “The reasons which impelled them (the
Hungarian communists) towards unity are the same ones which are today used on
behalf of the reformists and centrists in
The Treaty of
In June of 1919, the
The treaty signified an
enormous transfer of surplus value from
The communist parties jointly
launched a specific struggle against
the treaty, whose abrogation they demanded: abrogation was one of the principle
slogans of the 1920s. Gorter, and along with him the German Left, analyzed the
treaty as a terrible blow dealt to the proletariat, and not just the German
proletariat. But it was not a question, for either Gorter or the left, of
making the treaty’s abolition into a “partial demand”: since
it found itself facing an agreement between capitalist states, the proletariat,
in any event, had nothing to say, unless it accepted the terms of debate and
sought the lesser evil within the framework of the system of capitalist States
(in the same way that antifascism would seek the least unfavorable capitalist
formula for the proletariat, within the system of bourgeois political powers).
It is a kind of false realism to believe that the proletariat could have some
impact on facts whose very existence implies that the proletariat has not
played a historical role. The revolutionaries had no more reason to zealously
demand the abolition of the treaty than to demand the disarming of the police.
The fact that these slogans were launched proved the invisibility of the
proletariat as a class power, and its effort to find a substitute for that
power by indirect means. The proletarians had not been invited to have an
influence on the relations between States: should such a thing occur, they
would be integrated into one or another State. This is what would happen on
several occasions during the time of the
The Establishment of the
On
An article in the
constitution promised the integration of the councils. On October 9, the law
was presented before the Assembly.14 In the view of the USPD and
numerous councils—particularly the clandestine executive council (Vollzugsrat) of
1. La nouvelle étape, Librairie de l’Humanité,
1922, p. 13.
2. Comfort, Chapter IV.
3. Oeuvres, Vol. 29, 1962, pp. 244-245.
4. Ibid., pp. 392 and 396.
5. Survey, October 1964, “Paul Levi and the Comintern”.
6. Lowenthal, p. 34.
7. D.
Cattell, Journal of Central European
Affairs, January-April 1951, “The Hungarian
Revolution of 1919 and the Reorganization of the Comintern in 1920”.
8. L’Internationale Communiste, No.
5.
9. Ibid., No. 10.
10. Gruber,
pp. 297-298.
Marx’s analysis of
trade unions in the Manifesto and Wages, Price and Profit, 1
dating from the second half of the 19th century, is no longer
applicable. Workers struggles, with their victories or defeats, no longer have the
sole objective of consolidating labor unity, but are also intended to
strengthen the trade union as a reactionary organization. The German Left would
be compelled to understand this, while other revolutionaries (among others,
Bordiga, despite his visionary traits) would want to reconstruct the old movement. Others would later be tempted by the
idea of forming broad-based, democratic workers organizations, which would be
based on rank and file workers organizations.2 At the end of his
life, Pannekoek’s achievement would reside in the fact that he
understood, despite his councilist and educationalist illusions, that
revolutionaries would never be able to recreate the old movement: 3
like Bordiga, Pannekoek is also profoundly contradictory. It is not the reformist
organizations which oppose the
revolution: it is reformism itself
which drives the proletarians away from the revolution.
Revolutionary Syndicalism
The rupture (in the USA and
other countries) between the official socialist movement and a more leftist
movement with a Marxist orientation, as was the case in the split between the
reformist Socialist Party of America
and DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party,
was characteristic of a period when the proletariat was incapable of unity. The
alternative was between obtaining reforms and “preparing” for the
revolution: in the first case, there was integration into capital; in the
second, a break with the real practice of the workers. This explains why the syndicalist perspective was the only one
which thrived: it established the unity of immediate struggles and revolution.
For the syndicalist perspective there is continuity between: 1) the immediate
struggle, with trade union organization (by trade or, like the IWW, by
industry); 2) the revolution, with the industrial organizations taking power;
3) socialism, with a social organization on this basis. Such an illusion has
the merit of being coherent. The groups (DeLeon) which tried to unite with
these syndicalists in order to penetrate the working class failed, because, by
definition, this form of action rejected any kind of structure which was not
formed “by the workers themselves” at the point of production.
The
“syndicalists” were divided into two major currents. The first was
a survival from the 19th century workers movement and of the
“workers separatism”4 which rejected both the communist
movement and capitalism for the same reason, preferring instead to deal with
the labor question in its own way, in terms of its exclusively worker-based
organization. It was connected to the Proudhonist tradition, which was not so
much an ideological tendency as it was a theorization of workers aspirations;
its contemporary analogue is the politics of self-management.5 This
current, which was predominant in the early days of the CGT, entered into
crisis after 1906 (when the general strike for the eight-hour day failed) due
to the expanding industrialization which liquidated its base in trade- and
skill-based organizations. French revolutionary syndicalism never underwent a factional
struggle between moderates and radicals: the revolutionary tendency, by virtue
of its own development, was transformed in a reformist direction. In 1914,
there was no surprise: “For several years, Griffuelhes, Pouget and
Merrheim had discouraged antipatriotic action.”6
The second current was much
more modern and was inseparable from large industry. The IWW was the
organization of the unskilled, Taylorized labor and the unemployed. This
organization did not decay like the CGT, but was destroyed as an active
movement. The trade unions of the CIO would come to occupy the positions which
the IWW could not, because, as a hybrid movement, the IWW simultaneously wanted
revolutionary action and an organization of all wage workers on an economic
basis. The shop stewards, 7 on the other hand, were the
organizations of workers delegates, often skilled, whose trade unions had not
defended their privileges during the war. They often used original means in
organizing to obtain the satisfaction of their demands, but their struggle was
not revolutionary. Rather than preventing an autonomous organization of the
workers against capital, they filled a vacuum abandoned by the trade unions.8
Germany combined the first and second currents of revolutionary syndicalism in
an original synthesis, which would be adapted to events under pressure from the
workers, and this development would be accentuated as the positions of the SPD
and the ADGB drove the workers towards more leftist organizations.
The drift towards the more
radical groups (USPD, KPD, syndicalists) would create a new conception of
organization: unionism. At the beginning of 1919, the metal workers union,
which, with 1,240,000 members and comprising 1/5 of all organized workers, was
the leading German trade union, elected new leaders sympathetic to the USPD.
During the war, its minority had already voted for a proposal, which was
defeated by 77 votes to 44, to withhold its dues from the ADGB, whose
patriotism it denounced.9 The Mannheim Accord of 1906 (cf. Chapter
2) had expired. But the ADGB responded by getting rid of its opponents: it
would reintegrate the RO opposition
and exclude the communists. In Halle, for example, where almost all the trade
unions were led by communists, the local trade union committee fused with the
council organization at the beginning of 1921; the ADGB immediately provoked a
trade union split.10 In 1919, however, the KPD’s lack of a
precise position on the trade union question at its founding congress led to an
absence of relations between communists and trade union organs during the first
half of the year, although the situation varied from region to region.
“In
As often happened, once the
revolution was over, the workers joined the most radical organizations which were,
or appeared to be, correct, or created new ones, which slowly became
counterrevolutionary if they survived into a prolonged period of
“calm”. The rupture took place between a pre-existing tendency from
before the revolution and the other, more recently produced tendency, which
could not survive after the revolutionary defeat. The same process would take
place in the communist party.
The FVDG broke the radical
front by opposing the renovation of the General Union of Miners, destroyed in
May 1919, and turned to the creation of an organization on the principles of
revolutionary syndicalism in the Rhineland-Westphalia region, where it was
strongest: the Freie Arbeiter Union
(Rhineland-Westphalia) (Free Workers Union) was founded at the
Düsseldorf Congress on September 15-16, 1919. The very name, FAU, was a
compromise between anarchism (Freie:
free) and unionism (
The FAUD was founded at the
XIIth Congress of the FVDG in December 1919. This new name reflected the
adherence of the various locals of the FAU, born since May, to the FVDG: the
FAU of Rhineland-Westphalia, discussed above, was by far the most important.
The organization had spread throughout
The FAUD(S) was led by a
central committee of old syndicalists, at whose head were R. Rocker and F.
Kater, who defended a pacifist and anti-revolutionary syndicalism. They had
been the first to proclaim the slogan of a united front, inviting the
Spartacists and independent socialists, already in 1918, to join a
“social-political” front. They would even continue to follow this
policy in 1921, issuing invitations to the USPD as well as to the KPD/VKPD. In
parallel with the Levi tendency, the German syndicalists adopted the same
“anti-putschist” positions during the course of the March-April
1920, and March 1921 events. Like the Levists, the central committee of the
FAUD(S) would characterize the attacks which the left communists (of the KPD
and KAPD) carried out against the trains carrying arms to Poland during the
summer of 1920 as “romanticism”.14 As a delegate from
the Ruhr declared, requesting that the term “syndicalist” be
abandoned: “the syndicalists are not revolutionary enough in the eyes of
the Ruhr miners.”15
In the next period, the FAUD
split into three principle tendencies. The leadership, now in the minority,
upheld anarchosyndicalism in its original purity. It tried to set up a trade
union international to rival the Communist International: the “IWA”.
The IWW, the shop stewards and the CNT, however, tried to join the Communist
International, through its affiliate the Red Trade Union International, founded
in July of 1921. But the CI’s policies repelled them, since it wanted the
traditional trade unions to join the RTUI, as well as to promote reformist
struggles using more aggressive slogans and methods. If the IWA, founded at the
end of 1922, would only have an ephemeral impact, by taking advantage of the
RTUI’s opportunism, it at least managed to detour numerous revolutionary
workers into a dead end. The primary activity of this new IWA would consist of
denouncing the “communists” who were trying to shift the workers
struggle away from its true terrain: the workers struggle. The behavior of the
Communist International, at both the national and international levels, helped
to push the revolutionaries—since at least some of these workers
organizations showed a tendency towards radical actions and
positions—into the arms of the reformists. It reinforced tendencies
towards confusion and conciliation, which were strong in some trade unions
(CNT), instead of extirpating or eliminating them.16
Equally insignificant, the
second tendency was grouped around the Düsseldorf journal Die Schöpfung (The Creation),
characterized above all by its activism and its “anti-dogmatism”.
Some of its adherents judged that they “had to vote despite their
principles”. Others, in September 1921, elaborated a program of action
which involved issuing an ultimatum to the government and the trade unions,
whose rejection would lead to the general strike. Its members also created
“communes” and anarchist schools, etc.
The most important tendency,
whose further development is most noteworthy, was the so-called “FAU of
Gelsenkirchen” (FAU(G)), whose nucleus was formed by former members of
the USPD and the General Union of Miners. It only superficially adopted the
syndicalist ideology, and became the economic organization of the VKPD, while
retaining a certain degree of autonomy (concerning the VKPD, cf. Chapter 13).
It left the FAUD in November 1920, and had 110,000 members at that time,
primarily in the FAU of the Rhineland-Westphalia region and the General Union
of Miners of Central Germany and
The phenomenon of the unionen reflected a situation in which
the proletarians were neither capable of nor wanted to attack capital, but
refused to carry out purely economistic actions in the usual corporativist
manner: this explains their anti-trade union reaction and their efforts to unify themselves in the unionen. Of course, since the assault
was not undertaken with a firm resolve, reformism, no matter how strong it may
have been, was condemned to failure. These new organizations would be eclipsed
or would fall into dependence on another form of syndicalism, with apolitical
aspirations but much more concerned with fighting against the Marxists than in
driving the workers actions forward, and which would sabotage local and
regional attempts at unification with unions inspired by left communists, who
were judged to be “authoritarian” and violent. This narrow-minded
spirit was a revelation of a competitive attitude typical of politics. Unionism
would develop as a reaction against classical “revolutionary”
syndicalism as much as against the ADGB.
The Origins of Unionism
(It should be emphasized that
the Unionen discussed in this book
were not (and in fact fought against) what are called “unions” in
the English language (Gewerkschaften
in German)) (Author’s note to the American edition).
Unionism, as a concept of
proletarian revolutionary organization, was conceived by elements which had
arrived during the war, at the time of the revolution in
The IWW was considered to be
a sympathetic but confused movement, or as one of those rare cases of a workers
organization which was “not manipulated” from outside by a
“party”. It played a role in the formation of the German Left. When
the KAPist worker P. Mattick immigrated to the
Unionism held that the
workers should be organized by factories and then by economic regions (and not by industries). This difference is
crucial (within the context of the period under consideration, and obviously
not as an abstract, ahistorical opposition): the point of view of industrial unionism,
in its debates, and its power position, was framed in relation to the cartels
and industrial trusts—it was a form of organization designed to return to
the roots of true trade unionism. Organization by economic regions, however,
united all the workers in the same region, transcending not only the trade or
profession (like all unionism) but also the industry and even the factory; this
kind of unionism which goes beyond the interests of trade, of factory, and of
industry is, in fact, a geographical-strategic grouping with a view to
revolutionary action and had a tendency to supersede the proletarian condition
itself. Furthermore, the one time when a union, with the assistance of the
AAUD, led a reformist struggle (in 1927), it was an industrial union: the Union
of North Sea Fishermen.
In 1919, the unions were
temporary associations which worked on the formation of councils: it was the
councils and not the unions which were called upon to manage production. For all
the currents of the period, socialism was a problem of management: the
different conceptions of socialism concerned the form of workers management of
production (by the party, by the council, the trade unions, the union, etc.).
The unions appeared spontaneously during the war and the revolution. When the
workers abandoned the trade unions they did so factory by factory and not by
the basic units of trade union organization (the trades).
The idea of unitary organization (neither party, nor
trade union, but something beyond both) appeared for the first time in an
anonymous article in the
At the KPD’s founding
congress, the left defended the concept of unitary organization. During the
ensuing period of struggles, the party’s majority implemented the slogan
“abandon the trade unions” and also helped to create the elements
of the future AAU. The unionist current was seeking its own identity at the
moment (May 1919) when the syndicalists broke with the revolutionary front. At
that time, revolutionary groups were once again forming in the
It was in
Organizations of the AAU type
(by factory and by region) expressed a primordial fact: the workers who formed
them carried out a revolutionary struggle by attacking the roots of the
economic relations and not their effects. To declare oneself in favor of the dictatorship
of the proletariat was also the sole criterion for membership in the AAU.
Viewed negatively, only those workers who rejected any idea of reformist or
partial struggle could organize in the AAU. When the revolutionary wave receded
and was submerged in the sea of reformist action, the trade union-type
organization, with its professional divisions, reigned unchallenged. The AAU
ceased to be an instrument of struggle, since the struggle which it served no
longer existed, and it would be relegated to the status of a subsidiary sect of
the KAPD.
The relation between
organization based on skills/trades and the reformist struggle would be
negatively confirmed in 1923. The spectacular inflation of that year caused a
day’s wage to lose one-third of its value after 24 hours.21
The wage struggle once again having become impossible, the trade union
organizations were dismantled and replaced by factory organizations: but this
time the latter did not undertake any revolutionary action worthy of the name.
The Formation of the “AAUD”
In August 1919, factory
organizations, acting upon the basis of the positions of the KPD, met in
The two leading tendencies at
the congress were composed of those who called for the immediate abolition of
the party organization (Roche, from Hamburg, and Rühle, from Dresden) and
those who thought that it was necessary to maintain the party for a certain
time (Schröder and the leadership of the future KAPD). The
During this period, Becker
thought that the unions should “be intermediate organs between the party
and the class”, a position which the other tendencies felt was too rigid.
The split which developed among the “centralists” helped to hand
over the leadership to the “federalists”, who were particularly
strong in
Dannenberg’s tendency
advocated “industrial unionism”: the unions should federate by
industry and not by region, and should link up with a political party (in this
case, the USPD). This tendency disappeared along with its leader in 1921, after
having been excluded in 1920, “attacked by all other tendencies for its
pro-USPD sympathies and its ‘economistic reformism’”.23
The debate at the congress
was very confused, and the delegates had just enough time to agree about what
the AAUD was not, before the police
arrested them. But the organization’s foundation responded to a real
movement. The formation of the unions coincided with a de facto break with and a rejection of trade union organization. To
conceive of the AAUD in purely organizational terms, as one more link in
“the life of groups”, is to have not understood it in its essence.
In August 1919, the
The second conference of the
AAUD, which took place on
Rühle’s current
separated from the AAUD (cf. Chapter 14). The destiny of the AAUD after its
third conference was indistinguishable from that of the KAPD. What is essential
is that, from the organizational point of view, the AAUD was not merely an
appendix of the KAPD which the latter had created.
Particularly strong in
First, the members of the
KAPD and the AAUD came from all layers of the proletariat. Furthermore, after
half a century of social democratic domestication, and in opposition to the
despotism of the factory, the rejection of the discipline of the various
parties was something completely positive, especially in
As long as the AAUD was a
living organization, its polemic against the anarchosyndicalism which was
attempting to return to organization by trade had a real basis. It was the
expression of the movement of radical proletarians which, by organizing to
achieve goals held in common by the whole proletariat, also entered into
conflict with the forms which were keeping them isolated in stagnant
compartments. As a distinct ideology, revolutionary syndicalism played a
reactionary role during this phase. But when, during the period of reaction,
some survivors of unionism devoted themselves to making a fetish of the forms
of organization of the radical current of the German Left (councils, factory
organizations, AAU, etc.), this propaganda underwent a change of function.
Encouraging the workers to create these organizations was in this case a
substitute for revolutionary action. And this was all the more dangerous
insofar as these forms, which had previously expressed a subversive content,
could become the vehicle for tendencies which were simply reformist, as a
result of the further development of capital and of the forms of its domination.
1. Oeuvres, Gallimard, Vol. I, 1963, pp. 530 and 532-533.
2. Munis
and Peret, Les syndicats contre la
révolution, Losfeld, 1968.
3. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
4. A.
Kriegel, Le pain et les roses, PUF,
1968, p. 37 et seq., and P. Ansart, Naissance de l’anarchisme, PUF,
1970.
5. For
example, the case of LIP in
6. Lefranc, Le syndicalisme en France sous la IIIe
République, Payot, 1967, p. 190 et
seq. Cf. also the article by Tilly and Shorter on the strikes in France, Annales, July-August 1973.
7. Cf.
the introduction to MacLean, The War
after the War, Socialist Reproduction,
8. Révolution Internationale, n.d.,
No. 8.
9. La question syndicale…, p. 7.
10. Ibid., pp. 48-49.
11. Ibid., p. 8.
12. Ibid., p. 9.
13. The
text adopted by the congress appears in Bock, Document VI.
14. La question syndicale…, p. 16.
15. Bock,
p. 57.
16. La question syndicale…, pp. 17-19.
17. Its
extensive statutes are reproduced in Bock, p. 367.
18. Our
position is anti-political, but not a-political:
cf. Le Mouvement Communiste, No. 5,
October 1973, “De la politique”.
19. Dubofsky,
We Shall Be All, Quadrangle Books,
Chicago; Journal of Social History,
Summer 1974, for the IWW between 1909 and 1922; and H. Bötcher, Zur revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsbewegung
in Amerika, Deutschland und England, Jena, 1922.
20. Bock,
Document V.
21. Badia,
p. 186.
22. La question syndicale…, p. 19.
23. Ibid., p. 20.
24. Ibid., p. 8.
25. La gauche allemande….
26. Ibid.
27. La question syndicale…, pp. 19-20.
Bock estimates a maximum of 100,000 in March 1921.
28 La question syndicale…, p.20.
29. Bock,
p. 1.
The Minority Right-wing Leadership goes
on the Offensive
The opposition between the
KPD’s tendencies would revolve around the basic problem which was not
resolved by the first congress: the position to be taken on the trade union
question—but the battle lines would not be firmly drawn until the struggles
were over. In effect, in early May of 1919 the Rote Fahne (organ of the
The left’s attitude did
not change. The focal point of the tendency at that time was in northern
Levi, a lawyer by profession,
had met Lenin in
The central committee did not
carry out its attack directly on the basis of crucial strategic issues (trade
unions, elections), but with the help of the false centralism/federalism
opposition, and did so obliquely. At the
The
The Heidelberg Congress met
secretly between October 20 and 24. The party’s representational
arrangements were distorted by the central committee. Each district had only
one vote, no matter how large or how small it was. Levi caused the resolution
approved at the
Availing itself of the method
employed by the SPD right wing and center against the left prior to the war,
the central committee lumped the members of the opposition together with the
syndicalists: it would prove, however, that it knew perfectly well how to
distinguish between them.2 The central committee wanted to transform
the debate into a struggle between Marxism and anarchosyndicalism. With this
purpose in mind it quoted articles which had appeared in the leftist press.
Since the left allowed all the currents of the real movement to express
themselves in its press, it was hardly difficult to find articles which
confused syndicalism with unionism in its columns: in the series entitled
“A Contribution to the Debate on the Trade Union Question”, for example,
which appeared in the
During the summer the left
factions of northern
Indeed, that portion of
Levi’s theses dedicated to electoral and trade union tactics was
ambiguous in the highest degree and could be used to justify rightist and
leftist methods at the same time, depending upon the situation. This will
contribute to a better understanding of
“The KPD cannot reject,
in principle, any political means which contribute to the preparation for these
great struggles. But these elections, considered merely as a preparatory means,
must be subordinated to the revolutionary struggle, and the application of such
means can be abandoned in utterly extraordinary political situations; when
revolutionary actions have begun and move towards the decisive phase, then the
application of parliamentary methods becomes obsolete or provisionally
superfluous.”
Ultimately, the KPD program
would not go beyond this expression of the problem. Among German communist
theoreticians, only Rühle would analyze the issue by maintaining that the
phase of the proletariat’s participation in parliamentary activity had
utterly come to an end, and justified abstentionism in both the revolutionary
period as well as the period of reaction.
The central committee’s
“Theses” defined the trade union question in the following manner:
“The task of the political party consists in assuring to the proletariat
the free utilization of economic means, even, should it be necessary, at the
cost of the destruction of the trade union form and the creation of new forms
of organization.” The text’s tone was decidedly revolutionary and
anti-unionist, and articulated an ideology of the “vanguard”.
“The idea that the
party should abandon its leadership role in revolutionary actions, in favor of
factory organizations [a meaningless sort of discussion, since the German
party, while it was revolutionary, never “led” anything—N.B.]
and that the party should limit itself to propaganda, is counterrevolutionary
because it seeks to replace the clear vision of the workers vanguard with the
chaotic power of the masses in a state of flux.”
The KAPD would also have a
vanguardist perspective. But in its case the vanguard was not the group of
people who were thought to have the most advanced consciousness, of those who
possessed the clearest “perspective” on the issues, but all of
those people who dedicated themselves to initiating, before anyone else did, the fight against society: they would thus
set an example for the rest of the working class.
The “Theses”
contained an idea which was seldom expressed during this era: “The
conception according to which one can create mass movements by means of a
particular form of organization, and consequently that the revolution is a
matter of the form of organization, is rejected as a relapse into bourgeois
utopia.”7
Only those who understood the
true social and political nature of the authors could reject this text: they
would consequently also know what the Levist leadership had done (and would yet
do) (return to parliamentarism, work in the trade unions, fusion with the USPD)
independently of what it first stated in accordance with the circumstances. It
was this fraction of the left which rejected the “Theses” with 18
votes against 31 votes. On the fourth day of the congress, 25 delegates (the 18
plus 7 others with consultative votes) were excluded. These delegates
represented the regions of
After this first purge, there
was still an internal opposition, since the abstentionist tendencies had
remained in the party, believing that
their position was justified by the theses they had just adopted. In regard
to the trade union question, the central committee was forced to reach an
accommodation with the representatives from Rhineland-Westphalia who did not
want to hear anything about a return to the trade unions. In November 1919, the
Many have argued that the
preparations for the First Congress of the KPD were rushed in order to deny its
“representative” character. In any case,
The KPD and KPD (Opposition)
Between October 1919 and
March 1920, the proletariat was still reeling from the effects of its defeat.
The left honed its perspective, as did the right, represented by Levi, and above
all by Radek. Radek had played an important role in
Criticism came from many
different leftist publications: Die
Aktion, the
In the meantime, they became
acquainted with the texts of Pannekoek, especially World Revolution and Communist Tactics, published in Der Kommunist of Bremen in December
1919.12 Another one of Pannekoek’s articles, published in the
same journal, was entitled The New
Blanquism.13 This is how Pannekoek characterized the
ultra-centralizing conceptions established as principles by the KPD central
committee, for whom a political minority “gathering together the
conscious proletarians” seizes and holds political power, identifying
this process with the conquest of power by the proletariat. This is what
happened in
“Such a doctrine (that
of Radek and Levi) implies that it is not the entire party but its central
committee which exercises its dictatorship, first within the party itself, from
which it excludes, on its own initiative, the militants, and rids itself of any
opposition by underhanded means.”14
“The arrogant
proclamations about the centralization of revolutionary forces into the hands
of a proven vanguard would be more impressive if it was not known that they are
being used to justify, on the one hand, an underhanded opportunist policy, and
on the other, a nostalgia for the parliamentary tribune.”15
Pannekoek soon reached the
conclusion that the German revolution had come to an end: unlike Gorter, he
remained on the margins of the various organizations of the left, even though
he was most sympathetic to the perspectives of the AAU-E and Rühle.16
Prior to the war, he had already made an essential distinction, in Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics,
17 between the existing organizations (he was speaking of the SPD) and
what he called “the spirit of organization” in the proletariat.
After 1919 Pannekoek undoubtedly soon adopted the idea that no organization,
however “leftist” it may be, unless it was the organization which
the proletariat created for itself during the revolution, could justify calling
itself the party of the proletariat.
The German Left is
undoubtedly more than just an oscillation between organizational fetishism and
an exaggeration of the importance of the party “nucleus” (cf.
Chapter 14). More precisely, these two “deviations” reflect the two
extremes of the desperate struggle of proletarians seeking, in an
organizational form, the solution which would allow them to overcome their
continually repeated defeats. Its critique of the rest of the left (cf. the
texts of the KAPD) is much less radical than that of Pannekoek; although it was
quite violent in the terms it employed. This would all remain on a formal level
(on this aspect of the German Left and on Pannekoek’s later development, cf.
Appendix I).
1. 1919, No. 83.
2. Bock, p. 142.
3. Cf., among other
issues, PC, No. 58.
4. Bock, Document VIII.
5. Frölich, La maladie syndicaliste dans le KPD,
quoted in PC, No. 58, pp. 176-177.
6. La question syndicale…, p. 19.
7. Expressed
by the PCI, in 1921, in its famous formula: “The revolution is not a
question of the form of organization” (Parti et classes, Ed. Programme Communiste, 1971, p. 25), cf. also Le principe démocratique (1922).
8. La question syndicale…., p. 19.
9. Lowenthal,
p. 31, et seq.
10. Cf.
his “Diary”, published in
11. Revue d’Allemagne, April-June
1974, “Carl Einstein: de l’arte pur à l’action
politique”. On the “revolutionary artists” of that era, cf. Action poétique, No. 51-52,
devoted especially to the artists associated with the KPD.
12. Reproduced
almost in its entirety in Invariance,
n.d., No. 7. Extensive extracts can be found in Pannekoek and the Workers Councils. Published in full in English
translation in Pannekoek and
Gorter’s Marxism, ed. D.A. Smart, Pluto Press,
13. Bock
offers numerous extracts.
14. This
formulation strikingly recalls Trotsky’s 1904 theses on Bolshevism: cf. Nos Tâches politiques, Belfond,
1970, and Rapport de la
délégation sibérienne.
15. Bock,
pp. 149-150.
16. Kool,
p. 128.
17. Extensive
extracts can be found in Pannekoek and
the Workers Councils. Published in full in English translation in Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism,
pp. 50-73.
The First Congress
The First Congress of the Communist International (March
1919) was originally intended to be merely a preparatory conference for the foundation
of the new International.2 The Congress was not representative of
the world movement: almost all the delegates came from Russia or the adjoining
countries controlled by the Russians, and the westerners present came from
small groups residing in Russia. The European delegates who attended the
Congress only did so because they happened to be in
Between 1918 and 1919, a large number of communist parties
and groups evolved towards leftist positions, especially in respect to the
parliamentary question, and thus underwent organizational and political crises,
which were exacerbated by the actions of the Communist International (cf.
Chapter 17). As in
The positions held by the Russians were little known at
that time, and sometimes were not even known at all. The subsequent
disillusionment derived from the fact that people generally trusted the reports
they received, focusing above all on the “soviet” aspect of the
revolution. Since they had carried out a violent revolution against the elected parliament, the
Bolsheviks were considered to be hostile to parliament, and it was thought that
they would declare themselves against the employment of traditional methods.
Didn’t the texts of the First Congress attack bourgeois democracy? While
they said that democracy is counterrevolutionary, and that the parliamentary
form is not suitable for the revolution, they did not explicitly state that one
should refuse to engage in parliamentary activity. The Bolsheviks knew that
parliamentary democracy is not the
adequate form for the revolution and for post-revolutionary society: only
the European communist left understood that parliamentary democracy constituted
a danger to the proletariat, a
treacherous terrain where it would become lost. The Russians had fought in a
society where democracy was opposed to the established regime. There, democracy
had at least represented a small part of the real social movement, its internal
conflicts and those which existed between the movement and the State found an
echo and real interest outside of parliament because democracy allowed the
revolutionaries to transform it into a tribunal precisely because democracy was
suppressed. Only in this situation was it possible to speak of
“revolutionary parliamentarism”. In
At the First Congress Lenin defended a confused position in
respect to the institutions which had arisen in the west during and after the
war, comparing them to the Russian soviets.3 In reality, the German
councils were reactionary, and the shop stewards’ committees and factory
councils did not sufficiently transcend the framework of the enterprise to be
considered potential organs of proletarian power: the Second Congress would
later adopt a clearer position, despite a certain formalism, by defining the
“preconditions for the creation of workers councils”. In 1919,
Eberlein wanted the Congress to admit the complexity of the trade union issue.
It was too simple, he said, to issue calls for “revolutionizing”
the trade unions whose structure was adapted to the old State system: the
“leadership of the economic movement” had passed to the councils,
the trade unions having become, in
The relations between western and Russian communists in
1919-1921 (and thus the Communist International as well) were characterized by
a certain mutual incomprehension which would not be dispelled until after 1921
(although some, such as Rühle, displayed more lucidity in this regard).
The non-Russian communists made an effort to organize centers for propaganda,
reflection and tactical elaboration: even though they were not at first aware
of the fact, these efforts clashed with the intentions of the Russians to
centralize the international activities of the movement under their leadership.
But the Bolsheviks could not be victorious without the help of two convergent
factors. First, the difficulties and setbacks of the revolution, which forced
the communists in the most active countries into clandestinity, did not
facilitate the installation of permanent centers. But this
“technical” reality, which the Russians so heavily emphasized, did
not explain everything. The failure or the stagnation of the movement in
One could devote an entire volume to the study of the
perfectly sincere and revolutionary communists who accepted the Bolshevik
positions without ever seeing the matter from the point of view of the left; in
France, The Communist Bulletin and
Rosmer provided a good example of what is said above concerning the
left’s misunderstandings. For them, Bolshevism was the entire strategy
and program; all that was needed was to know how to apply it to other
countries. They did not understand that bolshevism was, according to the most
generous hypothesis, the best product of the socialist movement as it had
existed prior to 1914, without ever going beyond those limits. Its perspective
transcended the Russian framework, since the socialist movement there could
not, from the beginning, triumph without the world revolution. But in order to
be capable of taking all the tactics of the world revolution into
consideration, a step was necessary which the Russians never took. The lack of
information (which was, however, often exaggerated) 6 was only a
secondary reason: the Russians made use of the European documents by only
reading into them what they had previously wanted to find. Lenin, who was often
more perspicacious than the westerners in his assessments, nonetheless
demonstrated a high degree of incomprehension regarding the specific problems
of the communist revolution in the
more advanced countries.7 The situation as it developed between 1920
and 1921, along with Russian isolation due to the European defeat, led to an ambiguous policy on the part of the
Bolsheviks, who were as concerned with protecting their state as with promoting
the world revolution. This contradiction was unsustainable and would only
really be resolved by Stalin. From this point of view, Trotskyism represents
neither the best revolutionary expression of, nor a layer which broke loose
from the Russian “bureaucracy”, nor an aberration, but a vain
effort to preserve a revolutionary perspective by taking the heroic period as a
basis, and ignoring the contradictions of that period.8 In the dead
end of Trotskyism, its confused opportunism mixed with the memory of a few
doctrinal points reproduced the caricatural and congenital ambiguity of the
“first four congresses of the Communist International”. Militants
like Rosmer did not see that, if it had spread, the revolution not only would
not have respected the line established by the Russian leadership of the
Communist International, but would have profoundly transformed the status and
the nature of the Russian party itself, which might have, perhaps, found other
leaders. The ebb of the movement in the West, however, caused its
revolutionaries to regress to the
Russian level.
The Failure of the
The Amsterdam Conference (January 1920) was held to define
the basis upon which the Auxiliary Bureau (or sub-Bureau) for
The Amsterdam Conference was attended by the leaders of the
KPN, S. Pankhurst, Willis and Hodgson (British Socialist Party, a centrist
party which would contribute the bulk of the membership of that country’s
Communist Party), Murphy (delegate of the Shop Stewards Movement), L. Fraina
(American communist) and Borodin.11 What particularly distinguished
the debate was the high proportion of Anglo-Saxons present. With some 20
participants, this conference was more representative of the international
revolutionary movement and specifically of the weight of the left in that
movement than was the First Congress of the Communist International. Zetkin,
who arrived just before the end of the conference, denied its representative
character. The discussion would end prematurely due to the intervention of the
police. One part of the delegation dispersed, while others, in a private
capacity, carried on the discussion elsewhere.
Pankhurst proposed the organization of an international
strike against intervention in
Fraina’s resolution on the trade unions combined
“industrial unions” (not organized by trade) with political action.
It implicitly rejected the theses defended by, for example, the Italian “ordinovistas” associated with
Gramsci: “The conception according to which the workers, under capitalist
rule, must acquire in their industrial unions the experience and the technical
skills to run the new society, and that they have to gradually acquire, through
their industrial unions, power over industry, is confused with the proposals of
parliamentary socialism which hold that the workers must gradually conquer
experience in the affairs of State by means of control over the bourgeois
State. Each of these conceptions rejects, in its own way, the fundamental
problem of the revolutionary conquest of State power. The conquest of State power:
that is the goal of the revolutionary proletariat.”12 The
institution for this conquest was the soviet. This resolution, however, was
still confused: it fought against “laborism” and the traditional
trade unions, but called for the conquest of the “industrial
unions”. The trade unions were weapons of capital, but the industrial
unions were potentially weapons of the proletariat. These industrial unions
would become the classical unions of the post-war era, particularly in the
United States (the CIO) but also in Europe: the evolution of the trade unions
at Renault illustrates this development quite well.13 This position
was all the more contradictory since the resolution admitted that “the
development of imperialism determines the definitive absorption of the trade
unions by capitalism”.
Concerning parliamentarism, the conference limited itself
to outlining the divergent positions, without pronouncing in favor of one or
the other. Almost all of the delegates were in favor of breaking with the
socialist parties. The resolution on communist unity, drafted by Fraina,
advocated breaking with the member organizations of the Second International,
and rejected the idea (which was supported by the Communist International and
accepted by the English centrists) of communists affiliating with the Labor
Party. It was also decided that “shop committees and other workers
organizations” should be admitted into the Communist International,
without making this a question of principle.
These measures, which were approved but never implemented,
due to a lack of means and time, testify that the Bureau considered itself to
be one of the centers of the movement in
The Second Congress of the Communist International
Some of the rather optimistic positions of the Second
Congress (July 1920) must again be set in context. After having been invaded by
Confusion persisted concerning the Russians’ position
advising the revolutionaries in other countries not to “imitate”
them. Many revolutionaries (Welti in
In reality, however, by saying “do not imitate
us”, the Russians actually intended to say: “Don’t think
anymore about revolution”, “don’t remain a small
minority”, “form large mass parties”; and “imitate
us” basically meant “make compromises” and “be
disciplined”; what was essential for the Russians was, at that time, to
stay in power, rather than worrying about the regression which their power was
undergoing.
In September 1919, Roland-Holst asserted that profound
differences existed between the Russian and Western masses.17 Others
wanted the most rigorous centralism in order to prevent deviations: this was
the position of the Italian Left, which was hardly more consistent than the
other left tendencies, since it would be the (Russian) leadership of the
Communist International which would be the great centralizing force for right
wing deviations. The Russians wanted tactics adapted to the circumstances, but only as they understood them. A
clear change of course on the part of the Russians took place in relation to
the tactics to be followed in the West, and consequently, in relation to the
Left as well. In 1919, the criteria for the membership in the communist
parties, established after long deliberation, were agreement with the
dictatorship of the proletariat, breaking with the socialists, and
internationalism. Even among those who would join the Communist Party, some
refused, in 1919-1920, to make parliamentary activity (which, however, they
supported) a criterion for membership: “the differences of opinion on
this issue will not interfere with the unification of the forces of the extreme
left in Great Britain.”18 On
“If we consider the problem in its general and
theoretical form, it is . . . the same program, that is, the struggle for
soviet power . . . which can and, today, must unify all honest and sincere
working class revolutionaries. . . . The question of parliamentarism is now a
partial and secondary question. . . . I would consider the immediate foundation
of Communist Parties, that is, of parties fighting for the transition from
bourgeois parliamentarism to soviet power, to be an authentic step towards
complete unity.”19
During the same period, Lenin advised Levi not to make
parliamentarism grounds for a split. Similarly, on the topic of the trade
unions, the Communist International evolved from a somewhat flexible position,
not transforming the conquest of the traditional trade unions into a principle,
to a tactic based on that very principle. During its first period, until the
winter of 1919-1920, the Communist International rejected the destruction of
the traditional trade union organizations wherever the revolutionary movement
was growing (
A little later, the tendency which sought parties capable
of exercising pressure on their respective parliaments incited the Communist
International to support the entrance of centrists into the Communist Parties
(VKPD) and to encourage splits which would preserve the center (PCF). The year
1919 witnessed the consolidation of the revolutionary regime in
There was no contradiction between the first two
congresses. Bolshevism had originally conceived of itself as the Russian method
to create in
Approved by the Second Congress, the 21 Conditions
manifested an anti-reformist organizational illusion, and were a means to make
the Russians’ positions accepted. Far from being the proof of the
communist character of the sections of the Communist International, they
testified to the presence and the overwhelming weight of the centrist mass
parties which would soon take over the organizational tasks of the degenerating
communist parties: the Bolsheviks would never forgive the Italian Communist
Party for having prevented what was “achieved” by the PCF and the
VKPD (cf. Chapter 17). It is too often forgotten that the 21 Conditions were
directed against the Left as much as against the centrists (who would enter en masse and accept the 21 Conditions:
the latter having served the purpose of isolating the Left). Among the
Conditions, working in the trade unions and parliament were explicitly included
(Conditions 9 and 11), as well as support for “all colonial movements of
emancipation”. Henceforth, being a communist would mean, among other
things, being a trade unionist and a voter. But the defense of the
At first, the Russians expected to open the Executive
Committee of the Communist International to KAPD delegates, but Levi’s
opposition obliged them to grant the KAPD only a consultative vote (cf. Chapter
16). A few days later, the Russians again proposed granting votes to the KAPD, the
IWW and the Shop Stewards Movement, but only the latter two groups were
conceded the right to vote. Zinoviev’s speech on parliament and the trade
unions criticized the French antiparliamentarians, the IWW and the SSM,
although he considered them to be “friends and brothers”. This
speech was followed by an arduous debate on the question of whether the British
communists should join the Labour Party,
which ended in victory for the proponents of affiliation, but only after a long
and acrimonious debate which ended with the Left accepting this position
without admitting its rationale, hoping (Pankhurst) that the Congress would
return to the question for discussion at a later time. The Congress voted in
favor of the resolution, 48 votes to 24: “It was not such an impressive
victory for the Russians when one considers the vast arsenal which had been
brought to bear against the ‘British Left’.”23 We
should not allow the violent ruptures which took place later to mislead us. At
the time of the Second Congress, not only Bordiga (who, from a sense of
discipline, accepted “revolutionary parliamentarism”), but also
Pankhurst and Gorter (cf. the latter’s Open Letter to Comrade Lenin) thought that there were infinitely more
shared views than divergences between their position and the Communist
International--the Russians, they thought, made mistakes because they were
extrapolating their situation to the other countries of the Communist
International--and that experience would lead them to change their positions,
especially since they expected that the movement would grow. Organizational
fetishism appeared in all the currents of the Left, and not only in
A strong current in opposition to the centrists took shape
at the Second Congress. The French delegate of the Socialist Youth, Goldenberg,
decried the fact that the French communists had been attacked “precisely
by those whom we intend to accept into the Third International for the sole
reason . . . that they display a verbal solidarity with its principles”.
He also lamented “this artificial means of bringing undesirable elements
into the International”.25 Soon after the start of the debate
concerning the USPD, after Wijnkoop’s speech, the Estonian
Münzenberg warned the Congress against the danger “of diluting and
weakening revolutionary propaganda and activity”. Lenin interrupted him:
“And who is talking about admitting the USPD?” Münzenberg
replied: “The debate in the Executive Committee has clearly proven it.
The fact that comrades who only a few weeks or days ago were still fighting
with every means at their disposal against the Third International, now declare
themselves prepared to sign, without any reservations, the proposed
conditions—this proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that these conditions
have not been formulated with sufficient precision.” Wijnkoop emphasized
that if the KPD could criticize the USPD, the KAPD could do the same in respect
to the KPD. “Is it totally correct”—he asked
ironically—“to say that the KPD is always in the vanguard of the
masses? This question must be posed here and it must have an answer. But this
would undoubtedly be very difficult in the presence of the USPD. We are not
alone, among ourselves, we find ourselves with these gentlemen, the government
socialists. We must meet among ourselves alone and speak the truth to one
another. But this has been rendered impossible by the Executive
Committee” (by admitting the USPD into the Congress). Ultimately, despite
the 21 Conditions, the KAPD was admitted as a sympathizing party into the
Communist International.
The trade union debate, to some extent, concerned the
The Bolshevik position was also based on the conviction, shared
by the Italian Left, that the trade unions (led by the Party) would be needed
after the revolution to organize production and to represent the immediate
interests of the workers. This was Lenin’s position in the debate at the
10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1921.29
Such a position was justified, at best, in a country like Russia, which is not socialist, but cannot be applied to
a revolution in Western Europe. The problem in the latter case is not one of
representing the workers but of organizing production and society. Such
administrative tasks cannot be undertaken by a trade union: its whole
anti-proletarian past (both by virtue of its organizational structure and its
anti-communist activities) makes this impossible. Quite the contrary, after and
by means of the indispensable destruction of the trade unions, new
organizations will be born which will take control of production and the
regulation of working conditions. By trying to supersede the trade union-party
rupture, the radical German proletarians had at least vaguely perceived that
the communist revolution was not a question of managing society, but of
overthrowing all of its relations. Lenin, as well as Bordiga, at that time,
never advanced beyond a leadership conception, which is but one aspect of the
managerial conception.30
However, unlike what is taking place today, it must be said
in favor of Bordiga and Lenin that they were at least conscious of the goal: an
economy without market exchange. The centralization of their forces, by means
of the constitution of a leadership cadre, seemed to them to be the most
economical road, and even the only possible one, to achieve this goal. Lenin
criticized the “non-centralists” from a tactical point of view:
their inability to resist the reaction. This view was very political and
military and did not apply to a generalized revolutionary movement in which, as
in
In its essence, the German Left cannot be reduced to
revolutionary syndicalism: it went beyond the economic-political rift. It is in
this sense that one should understand the rule established by certain unionen that their members must
acknowledge the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
At the Second Congress of the Communist International, the
“Left” (taken in its widest sense) was split over the trade union
question into two positions which sometimes overlapped. Must the old trade
unions be destroyed or should new organizations be constructed which are both
“trade unions” (acting in defense of the workers’ immediate
interests) and “revolutionary” (fighting for the communist
revolution) at the same time? As in the case of the question of joining the Labour
Party, the Left yielded. Reed declared: “The American and English
delegates tried to introduce a new spirit into the old trade unions . . . the
communists must transform the trade unions or remain isolated.”31
In the plenary session, the Russians acted as if the committee had reached an
agreement, which gave rise to vehement protests, which became more aggressive
as the Bolsheviks sandbagged the debate (by increasing the number of Russian
speakers). Gallacher, although he was inclined to favor affiliation, and would
become one of the leaders of the British Communist Party for several decades,
stated: “The English comrades have the impression that it was simply a
matter of preventing debate.”32 The final resolution
recommended that communists should be present in the trade unions and should
join the Red Trade Union International. But the creation of this organization
would only make the problem worse. Was it a new mass workers movement, radical
yet still based on trade union activities, or was it situated beyond trade
unionism? Was it an attempt to build a trade union international whose ultimate
purpose was to replace the “yellow” International, created in July
1919, or was its goal only to regroup the minorities within the trade unions and
to keep alive the hopes of conquering the old trade unions? The presence of
observers and sympathizers from traditional revolutionary syndicalism (Spanish,
Italian and French) did not make clarifying this issue any easier, and it would
only be resolved under the pressure of events: the “communist”
trade unions would become trade unions like all the others, confirming the fact
that there is no such thing as an anti-trade union trade union.
“The real founding Congress” of the Communist
International33 did not resolve any crucial problems. It ended
without clarifying the trade union question due to a desire not to confront the
trade unions, 34 which were reluctant to yield to the Communist
International’s will to control the trade union movement (some, because
of a revolutionary conviction in favor of trade union autonomy—IWW,
Rosmer—others because of their anti-revolutionary position—Italian
CGL—others oscillating between these two views—the Spanish CNT).
The Communist International and the Red Trade Union International would assume
a defensive posture by allowing the reformist centrals to exclude the
revolutionary trade unions or those which had joined the Red Trade Union
International. In the name of the “unity” of the movement, they
left all initiative in the hands of their adversaries, while their adversaries
knew how to utilize the weapon of unity when they found it useful, and later
forced splits when their interests required them.35 Pushed to the
sidelines, the red trade unions could not exist unless they acted like trade
unions: those organizations with revolutionary tendencies, even if they were,
at times, contradictory, like the IWW, would disappear.
The weakness of the non-Russian revolutionary movement was
manifested in the Communist International’s organizational structure, and
was symbolized by the enormous weight of the Russians in the Executive
Committee. Wijnkoop tried in vain to warn the delegates: “In reality, we
are not building an international Executive Committee, but an enlarged Russian
Executive Committee. I have suggested that the Communist International should
have its headquarters outside of
The Communist Parties were not “branches” of
the Communist International. They had been formed from within, as outgrowths of the social movements in various
countries, often with novel aspects. Despite appearances, it was the Communist
International which had been formed by its sections, even though its
construction was characterized by clashes. The idea of a “mold”
conceals the movement which individuals and groups followed in joining the
Communist International. One could ask why they accepted this mold. For
example, their emphasis on education was well adapted to what was proposed or
imposed by the Communist International, and corresponded to the practice of the
classical socialist movement before and after 1914-1918. To guide, to convince,
and then to lead the class: where the
accent had been placed on education, the communist parties displaced it to
organization. It was the same tendency, but extended. Lenin’s fundamental
counterrevolutionary traits (the Kautskyist theory of consciousness being brought
to the class from without) came from
“Most people are sheep-like and unconscious. If by
some chance they have . . . moments of lucidity, it is under the influence of
revolutionary minorities.”
“The revolutionary problem consists entirely in this:
to build a minority which is strong enough to overthrow the minority of leaders.”37
The obsession with the rupture represented by the
“Leninization” of a large part of the European, and even of the
world’s workers movement, has led to an underestimation of its continuity with certain practices and
conceptions which had roots, prior to 1914, among both socialists and trade
unionists. . . . Anarchosyndicalist
elitism was one of the channels
through which the Leninist conception of the party was transmitted and which
would facilitate its imposition. If the CGTU rapidly came under the control of
the PCF, and if the Shop Stewards Movement submitted to the leadership of the
British Communist Party, it is not because these parties had practiced such
clever manipulation: the educational orientation and the organization of
conscious minorities had been almost naturally transferred from the trade union
to the party.
1. This
chapter deals with the situation of the international movement in general
between 1919 and 1920. The relations between the Communist International and
2. The
complete proceedings of the Congresses of the Communist International will be
published by EDI. Le Premier
congrès de l’IC appeared in 1974.
3. La question syndicale…., p. 12.
4. Ibid., p. 50.
5. Cf.
his biography written by C. Gras (Maspero), and his works on the history of the
workers movement during the war (Vol. I, Librairie du Travail, and Vol. II,
Mouton), and Moscou sous Lénine,
P. Horay, 1953 (republished by Maspero, 2 Vols.).
6. Rosmer,
Moscou sous Lénine, P. Horay,
1953, p. 150 and passim, and
Reichenbach. It was not, however, until the beginning of 1920 that some copies
of Il Soviet (organ of the abstentionist
fraction of the PSI) arrived in
7. Dauvé,
Le mouvement communiste, p. 205, et seq.
8. Lefort,
Les Temps Modernes, December
1948-January 1949, “La contradiction de Trotsky ou le problème
révolutionnaire”.
9. IC, No. 4.
10. J.
Hulse, The Forming of the Communist
International,
11. On
Pankhurst and Fraina, cf. Chapter 17.
12. Bulletin du Bureau Auxiliaire
d’Amsterdam de l’IC, No. 2, March 1920.
13. Le mouvement social, October-December 1972
(on the automobile industry in
14. PC, No. 58, pp. 154-157.
15. F.
Tych, in La révolution
d’Octobre et le mouvement ouvrier européen, EDI, 1967, pp.
195-228.
16. Gorter,
L’Internationale Communiste Ouvrière,
in Invariance, n.d., No. 5, p. 36.
Cf. also the analysis of the Second World Congress made by the Italian Left in PC, Nos. 59 and 60.
17. IC, No. 5.
18. E.
and C. Paul, Creative Revolution,
Allen Unwin, 1920, pp. 121-122.
19. Lenin on
20. La question syndicale…., pp.
30-32.
21. Quoted
in Cahiers du communisme de conseils,
No. 9, September 1971, “De la nécessité de la
théorie”.
22. Oeuvres, Vol. 31, Ed. Sociales, 1961, p.
261, et seq.
23. Hulse,
p. 200.
24. Survey, October 1964.
25. S.
Page, Lenin and the World Revolution,
26. Hulse,
p. 214.
27. La gauche allemande….
289. Page, Note 75, Chapter 12.
29. Dauvé:
Communisme et “question russe”,
pp. 81-82. An English translation of these same two chapters is available in Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist
Movement, Antagonism,
30. It
was only after 1945 that Bordiga rediscovered the communist position of Marx:
cf. Bordiga et le passion du communisme,
Spartacus, 1974.
31. Page:
p. 180.
32. Ibid., p. 181.
33. PC, No. 56, p. 39.
34. PC, No. 60, pp. 9-14.
35. La question syndicale…., pp.
22-23.
36. Page:
pp. 182-183.
37. C.
de Goustine: Pouget, Les matins noirs du
syndicalisme, La Tête de Feuilles, 1972, pp. 80 and 84.
The Coup d’État and the
First Instances of “Workers Government”
and “Anti-Fascism”
The Kapp Putsch (May 13-17,
1920) was an attempt on the part of reactionary elements in the Army to take
the first steps towards building a strong right-wing government. The German
Army (Reichswehr) was reestablished
by the constituent assembly: by June 1919 it had 100,000 men, the maximum
allowed by the postwar treaties. Including the Freikorps, however, by the beginning of 1920 the Army had 400,000
men, which provoked the protests of the victorious powers.
The Freikorps arose during the period of military demobilization and
State disintegration, and their only purpose was to serve as an instrument of
the counterrevolution in
Discovering that 6,000 men
under the command of Lüttwitz (one of Noske’s direct subordinates in
January 1919) were going to occupy
Despite Kapp’s
declaration that “all those who do not report to work will be
shot”, there is no doubt that there has never been such an absolutely
effective general strike in all of history. The bourgeois parties, which had
been very prudent since the end of the war, did not support the conspirators.
The Bank of Germany refused to grant Kapp the 10 billion marks needed for
government operations. Unable to even find a press which would publish his
proclamations, Kapp fled to
The coup was totally
successful only in
The KPD, however, later
declared its support for a policy of “loyal opposition”, defined as
“the renunciation of preparations for any violent action” against a
socialist government. Since the proletarian dictatorship was impossible, it was
necessary to create “a situation in which bourgeois democracy cannot act
as the dictatorship of capital”.5 A perfect definition of anti-fascism: preventing capitalist
democracy from becoming a capitalist dictatorship, without revolutionary action, of course. The entire party
(including Levi, who had just been released from prison) was outraged by this proposal.
A short time later, however, Levi resuscitated the same theme with his
suggestion of a possible gradual transformation of the bourgeois republic into
a soviet republic. It was thus in
Lenin criticized the
right-wing leadership of the KPD in his Infantile
Disorder: the formula of “loyal opposition to a government composed
solely of socialists” is not correct because a government composed of
“social traitors” cannot be called “socialist”. Otherwise,
this was a good example of a “Bolshevik-style compromise”.6
The left, faced with this policy of the central committee, drew the opposite
conclusion, and realized that it had no interest whatsoever in availing itself
of its rights within the party. Understanding that an abyss separated it from
the KPD and that any discussion was superfluous, it founded the KAPD in early
April (cf. Chapter 14).
The Red Army of the
During this period, the
The military and Freikorps troops stationed in the
The workers armed themselves
on two separate occasions, before and after the commencement of hostilities.
The workers still possessed arms which they had concealed at the end of the war
and during the “revolution”, but these would comprise but a small
part of their arsenal. During the first few days after the putsch, the workers
seized weapons from the Einwohnerwehren,
legal organizations created after 1918 to keep order and protect property. Its
members served as volunteers on a part-time basis: they came from a wide range
of professional backgrounds. The radical workers went in groups to the homes of
the members of this auxiliary police force and by fair means or foul, and
sometimes by fraud and deceit, they made them hand over their weapons. Thus,
for example, in one locality, where the Einwohnerwehren
were composed of peasants who had little sympathy for the workers, the
proletarians went to the peasants and proposed that they have a meeting to
discuss the issue of the weapons. The workers’ speakers made long
speeches to keep the peasants away from their homes as long as possible and
adjourned the meeting as soon as they knew that all the arms had been
collected. In addition, despite the obligation of these volunteers to take an
oath swearing loyalty to the
Then, after the first
battles, the workers seized the armories, munitions and equipment of the
regular Army units which had surrendered or fled, and thus equipped themselves
with all the gear necessary to field an authentic army. The insurrection
snowballed, “liberating” all of the
The insurrection began on
Monday, the 15th, as a result of the convergence of two separate
events: a large demonstration of armed workers in Hagen (convoked by the
parties, especially by the USPD, it had no military purpose at all, and was
only supposed to be a peaceful show of workers’ power) on the one hand,
and on the other, a relatively serious skirmish in Wetter, a small city not far
from Hagen.
In Wetter, after the first
days of the Putsch, an action committee had been formed by representatives of
various workers parties. During a popular assembly, unambiguous threats having
been issued against individuals who were “particularly hated by the
working class” (Colm), the committee ordered that these individuals were
to be arrested to protect them as well as to satisfy the wishes of the crowd:
this was the origin of the rumor that “the council republic” had
been proclaimed in Wetter.
The military commanders of
the
The battle began: the
soldiers were barricaded in the train station, while the workers took up
positions in the neighboring streets. The armed workers from the other cities
in the region, who were supposed to meet in Hagen, upon being informed that
hostilities had broken out in Wetter, headed there en masse (despite the opposition of the workers parties) and,
streaming into Wetter in ever greater numbers, assured the workers’
victory over the soldiers, who were annihilated.
A company of regular soldiers
also went to a neighboring city. The Freikorps
had sought refuge in
The rebels came from all
social layers, but there were only a few intellectuals among them, and most of
these were teachers. On this occasion, the regrouping was carried out upon a
totally geographical basis:
neighborhood, town, city, and region. The factories did not constitute, except
on rare occasions, the site for concentration and action. The “red
army” had between 80,000 and 100,000 men, as well as artillery and a
small air force. It was organized around three centers:
The Forms Assumed by Workers Power in
the
The three
“workers” parties (SPD-USPD-KPD) considered the workers’
actions to be “adventurist” and did not accept the violent
intervention of the proletarians except as a force in support of the
jeopardized democracy. In Chemnitz (Saxony) where the KPD, led by the rightist
Brandler, was dominant, the party restricted itself to arming the workers,
awaiting Ebert’s return to power, and opposed the efforts of various
groups, such as that under the command of Max Hölz, to arm themselves and
act independently.11 Germany invented anti-fascism, a policy which consists of defending capitalist
democracy (with arms if necessary) against capitalist dictatorship, and in
repressing any subversive tendencies which go beyond democracy, as if one led
to the other; as if there was a “choice” between the two which
would depend upon the workers.12
Throughout the
In Duisberg, the KPD left
deposed the tripartite executive (SPD, USPD, KPD) and replaced it with an
“executive commission” (left KPD and FAU) which took power by
“demagogically” (Colm) relying upon the armed workers, and arrested
various “bonzes” from the workers parties and trade unions. These
parties would also retaliate against the members of the Duisberg
“executive commission” after the end of the movement, accusing them
of having used the movement as a means of personal enrichment and characterizing
them as “armed gangs”, “armed hordes” and
“irresponsible elements”. In fact, the workers of Duisberg had
indeed conceived of the insurrection as the beginning of the “second
revolution”, and had requisitioned money from the banks and provisions
from the stores and warehouses, and organized free distribution of many goods.
But the bulk of the movement remained legalist and respected the democracy. On
the 17th, in
Defeat
On the 20th the
trade unions declared the end of the strike, but the entire German side of the
A large part of the red army,
evidently, did not recognize the terms of this agreement. The members of the
AAUs, the future KAPists and the anarchosyndicalist rank and file acted in
opposition to the views of the
The
The proletarians were
victorious as long as they relied upon their social functions, utilizing the
productive apparatus for supplies, arms and transport, without, however,
remaining within the boundaries of production. The rebel cities united and sent
help to the workers in other cities. But even in this respect the movement
displayed its weak points, which characterized the whole epoch. After having
emerged victorious from its clash with the Army, using the Army’s own
methods and fighting on its own terrain, the proletarians, in their immense
majority, thought that their job was done and handed over their power to the parties
and the democracy. The red army expelled the military and then transformed
itself into the classical workers movement. The workers had mobilized for
democracy, and those who wanted to go further were mowed down by the same
military force which had supported the anti-democratic putsch and to which the
State rapidly turned. As the Communist
International16 recognized, there existed both a
“republican guard” and a “red army” at the same time:
formed by a coalition of organizations (SPD-USPD-KPD), the first undertook to
preserve order and guard the stores and warehouses. As in
The June 1920 elections
legitimized the power which had been supported at the crucial moment by the
workers. The right having reappeared on the political scene with the putsch,
the political center of gravity moved rightward. The SPD relinquished power.
Its electoral count fell from 12 to 6 million. The new government was composed
of a centrist majority, with the
participation of “populists” (pre-war
“national-liberals”), the traditional representatives of big
capital. The USPD vote grew from 2.5 to 5 million. The KPD, free to practice
revolutionary parliamentarism, obtained a few hundred thousand votes. The
Communist International would do everything in its power to precipitate the
fusion of the USPD and the KPD.
In order to understand the
reality of the anti-parliamentary current among the communists, it must be seen
as the expression of a real and numerically important movement within the
proletarian masses. Even the adversaries of the left admitted the scale of
working class abstentionism in the German elections. Bela Kun made the
following observation concerning the 1920 legislative elections:
“It is hard to
precisely calculate the number of workers who have abstained, following the
party of revolutionary confusion (the KAPD) or the national bolsheviks. The
data from the various large cities and industrial regions, however, allow the
assertion that abstention has by no means been insignificant and that many
workers have expressed their revolutionary point of view through the boycott of
the elections.”17 The same thing happened in the elections for
the Prussian legislative assembly (at least half of
“It can be stated that
in all likelihood the majority of the votes lost by the USPD in the last
elections did not go to any other party.
The proletariat’s “electoral weariness” was a characteristic
feature of the political situation. In
“The abstention of such
a large proportion of the proletariat, however, such as took place in these
elections, could not be schematized by virtue of such simplistic formulas; the
crude reality expressed by such terms as “electoral weariness” and
“abstention” masks two phenomena. If one part of the abstentionist
phenomenon must be understood as a symptom of the proletariat’s lack of ideological maturity, the other
part, on the contrary, indicates that a whole sector of the conscious
proletariat had rejected the parliamentary electoral struggle, perceiving it as
a phase of the revolutionary class struggle which had been superseded. We do
not believe we are mistaken in asserting that the extreme exacerbation of the
situation in
At the beginning of August,
the parliament passed a “disarmament” law which triggered isolated reactions
from the extreme left (cf. Chapter 14). On this front the State would have to
act slowly and with caution, despite the absence of any reaction on the part of
the SPD and the KPD. The decision to seize arms stockpiles in central
1. IC, No. 10.
2. Badia: p. 170.
3. PC, No. 58, p. 110 et seq.
4. On Pieck’s
career, cf. Socialisme ou Barbarie,
No. 14, pp. 62-65.
5. Rote Fahne,
6. La maladie infantile, 10/18, p. 169.
7. La question syndicale…., pp. 23-24.
8. Ibid., pp. 9 and 14.
9. G.
Colm: Beitrag zur Geschichte und
Soziologie des Ruhraufstandes von März-April 1920,
10. La question syndicale…., p. 25.
11. Ibid., p. 26.
12. Engels
had opposed one of the first examples of anti-fascism, in relation to the issue
of boulangisme: cf. PC, No. 56, p. 12.
13. Angress: Stillborn Revolution…., p. 46.
14. La question syndicale…., p. 24.
15. “Bassin de la Ruhr et
Francfort”, in Kommunismus,
16. No. 5.
17. Kommunismus,
18. “BF”, ibid., March 1921.
19. Badia: p. 184.
The Founding of the VKPD
After the leftists were
excluded, in a process which started at the Second Congress (October 1919) and
was completed by the Third Congress (February 1920), the KPD, strictly
speaking, no longer existed. The reports of the delegates to the Third Congress
provided evidence of the party’s utter prostration. In
The USPD, on the other hand,
was flourishing. It took full advantage of the SPD’s deception of its
voters and militants. It had 750,000 members in 1920. This was the raw material
for the construction of a fraternal “mass party” for the Communist
International. Lenin wrote in his Infantile
Disorder, in relation to the “proletarian groundswell” of the
USPD, that the USPD “was conducting a relentless struggle against
opportunism”.2 The 21 Conditions for admission were intended,
among other things, to allow this leftist groundswell to join the Communist
International. In October 1920, the Halle Congress of the USPD voted in favor
of joining the Communist International by a vote of 234 to 158.
On
Even when, during the crisis
of 1929, the KPD accepted a large number of unemployed workers into its ranks,
it had already replaced the SPD in various sectors of the working class, above
all in the recently-industrialized regions which had no socialist cadres.4
Without totally supplanting the SPD, it had become the second great German
workers party. Instead of criticizing the Communist Party’s positions
during the
Based on his study of
Hamburg, Comfort concluded that the members of the SPD did not comprise a labor
aristocracy in the sense of a distinct privileged stratum, but that it was a
sociologically more homogeneous group than the USPD, which was in turn more
homogeneous than the KPD, which included in its membership workers from very
diverse social layers.5 The communist militants were also younger
and less experienced than those of the SPD. This led Comfort to deduce that the
KPD was more independent of an apparatus and, above all, of one (or several)
specific social layer(s) than the other parties. The SPD and the ADGB had not
been able to adapt to modern industrialization and the growth, in both numbers
and importance, of the workers in large industry, especially since the majority
of the Hamburg SPD’s leaders, after the war, were former trade unionists.
On January 8, 1921, utilizing
its new forces, the VKPD initiated a large-scale campaign in the purest style
of the “workers united front”. The central committee sent an
“open letter” to all “workers organizations”, from the
most reactionary trade unions to the KAPD and the AAUD, proposing a joint
struggle against capitalism. Written by Radek and Levi, the letter called for a
campaign to increase wages, dissolve the “bourgeois defense
organizations”, create workers self-defense organizations, and to compel
At the Third World Congress,
Lenin sang the praises of this tactic: “The ‘Open Letter’ is
exemplary. It must be unconditionally defended.” Terracini, a PCI
delegate, requested that such methods be renounced, and quoted (KAPD delegate)
Hempel’s statement: “The Open Letter is opportunist, it cannot be
remedied.” Lenin responded: “The Open Letter is exemplary as the
opening act of the practical method to effectively win over the majority of the
working class.”6
This tactic responded to a
precise objective, as was revealed by the debate within the KPD central
committee which took place on
Elimination of the Former Spartacists
from the KPD Leadership
If a “leftist”
tendency immediately took power in the VKPD, this was in part the result of
unification: the whole party felt the strength of its numbers and thought it
could seize power by non-parliamentary means. In addition, there was a tendency
in the Communist International which, aware of the crisis of Bolshevik power
after the civil war, wanted to bring about a civil war in Germany at any cost,
and dispatched a delegation from the Communist International to Germany, led by
B. Kun; Levi, Zetkin and the other rightists in the leadership would clash with
this delegation.
It was at this moment that
the “Italian question” had a direct impact on the affairs of the
KPD. In Livorno (January 1921), Levi had naturally sympathized with the party
of Italian centrism (cf. Chapter 8).8 The pro-KPD position of the
Italian Left was therefore all the more contradictory in that it had directly
suffered from the effects of the KPD’s rightist orientation. Levi,
displaying his opposition to the PCI as it had been constituted in 1921, proved
that the “principles” he had defended against the German Left were
nothing but the cover for his opportunism. At
The new leftist leadership of
the central committee, led by Frölich, appointed a series of leaders from
the “proletarian base” of the USPD. At the Third World Congress,
the KAPD would speak of a “new, improved and revised version” of
the KPD. This new version was based upon a new leftist tendency which had
appeared in
“The decisive
theoretical aspect can be reduced, expressed negatively: in the inability of
the two groups (opportunists and putschists) to conceive of the revolution as a process; positively
expressed: in their erroneous overestimation of the organization in the revolutionary movement.” For both, the
struggle can only be the product of the organization; they do not see that
there is “a permanent interaction between the preconditions and their
consequences during the course of the action”. “One could even say,
if one has to choose between one of these points of view, that the organization
must be conceived more as the consequence than as the precondition.”
“There is no need to
cite examples to illustrate this mode of thought and action among the
opportunists; the way they make ballots compatible with membership cards, their
expectation that the ‘moment’ will arrive when a sufficiently large
number of proletarians will be sufficiently well-organized, is perfectly
well-known. But it is surprising to confirm the analogous way the putschists
operate. They do not count ballots, but revolvers, machine guns, etc.; a
“good organization” needs less men; its effectiveness is not that
of an electoral machine or a trade union, but that of an illegal military
organization: all of this, in fact, changes very little in terms of their
theoretical foundations. The putschists also conceive of organization and
action as two distinct stages separated from one another. . . .”
“The overestimation and
the mechanistic concept of organization necessarily have the consequence of
neglecting and demoting to second place the totality
of the revolutionary process to the benefit of an immediate visible result.”11
The former Bremerlinke had the illusion that it
could drive the party towards the left, when all it did was help the party make
one of its voluntaristic U-turns.12 Mattick defined Bremen as the
most advanced tendency, but with this proviso: “the ambiguity which
characterized the politics of the Spartakusbund
was to a great extent the result of the conservatism of the masses.”13
According to Frölich, after the “line had been set straight”
at Heidelberg, the party went too far to the right, allowing the opportunity
presented by the Kapp Putsch to slip through its hands.14 The new
leadership defined communist tactics in the following manner:
“Should the action
encounter any obstacles, they must know how to scale back their directives, and
should it be necessary, they must quickly withdraw from the struggle and take
refuge among the masses; but during certain times of tension, the communists
must also go to the masses and assume the initiative in the struggle, even at
the risk of being followed by only a part of the workers.”15
The first clause alludes to situations of the sort encountered in
1. Bock: p. 227.
2. Ibid., p. 108.
3. Minutes, in German,
p. 528.
4. J. Droz: Les forces politiques dans la
République de Weimar 1919-33, SEDES, 1967, pp. 75-76.
5. Chapter 7.
6. Minutes, p. 511.
7. P. Levi and
8. The
critique of centrism made by Bordiga at this congress (PC, No. 50, pp. 51-72) is also a critique of Levi.
9. Gruber:
pp. 304-309.
10. Rote Fahne, February 26 and
11. Kommunismus,
12. La question syndicale…., pp.
27-28.
13. “Otto
Rühle and the German Labour Movement”, in Paul Mattick, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, M.E. Sharpe,
Inc.,
14. Bock:
pp. 297-298.
15. La question syndicale…., p. 47.
The KPD(O)
Not all the members of the
left tendencies immediately accepted the definitive split in the KPD. Before forming
the KAPD, the opposition successively crystallized around three centers:
The Founding of the KAPD
The delegates to the
KAPD’s founding Congress (April 4-5) represented 38,000 militants; other
regions would join the party after the Congress. At that time the KAPD embraced
almost the entire membership of the former KPD, and its social background was
similar to that of its predecessor (derived from every layer of the working
class, with a heavy representation of youth and the unemployed). Despite the
presence of three tendencies (
In effect, this was not a
split from an already-existing organization (despite the fact that the
parties’ acronyms would give the opposite impression, as if the KAPD were
a split from the KPD), but the self-organization, at the apex of a revolutionary
period, of the new current which rejected the weight of the past as it was
represented by the Spartacist leadership, which had been reduced to a mere
skeleton financed by Moscow until it could be grafted onto the left wing of the
USPD. The enthusiasm of the KAPD’s militants resembled that of the first
founders of the workers brotherhoods, unions and leagues of the 19th
century. This newness and this lifestyle which led Rühle to say that
“the KAPD is not a party in the traditional sense” would be eloquently
expressed in the organization’s internal life.
The KAPD asserted that it was
the “party of the masses”, as opposed to the KPD, which was the
“party of leaders” and used the masses for its own political ends.
During this period, the KAPD represented the bulk of the communist party and
the revolutionary masses. Less than one year later, the polemic would seem to
have been reversed, when the KPD became the VKPD and was transformed into a
“mass party” (Massenpartei,
while the KAPD saw itself as the Partei
der Massen), and the KAPD would attack it for this reason at the Third
Congress of the Communist International. But one cannot really speak of a
reversal in this case unless the KAPD were to abandon the position of the
“masses” in the masses-leaders opposition, and pass over to the
“leader” position. A “party of the masses” is the
opposite of a “party of leaders”.
The favorite terrain of the
German Left from its birth to its demise, the masses-leaders debate, born from
the trauma of the “leaders’ betrayal” of 1914, was
particularly pointless. A crucial aspect of such oppositions is the fact that
the positive term contains its truth in the negative term and vice-versa. This is also the case for a
neighboring controversy, the centralism-federalism opposition. The betrayals of
the leaders are contrasted with the free activity of the masses. But as long as
the masses are still “masses”, that is, as long as the proletariat
does not constitute itself as a “class”, the masses will produce
leaders, and to speak of masses is to speak in the language of leaders.
Gorter was more precise when
he elaborated his position on the party as a grouping of the
“pure”, who would not succumb to opportunism. The conceptions
shared by Gorter and the KAPD also involved the same confusions, since the
party of the revolutionary “masses” must necessarily become a small
group when these masses are no longer revolutionary. It is also true that the
Left succumbed to “educationalism”: this was an enduring trait of
the Third International, propagated by Lenin, who tried to replace the
“bourgeois ideology” of the workers with “socialist
ideology”, a trait which the German Left would never lose.2
The majority (
The debate on the KAPD
statutes revolved around “finding the form which would allow the
expression of the will of the masses”. On a different level, this can be
compared to Lenin’s efforts in 1903 to seek statutes which could thwart
the spread of opportunism in the party. These formal debates were
characteristic of this world revolutionary period, along with those concerning
the theme of democracy and the idea of the intellectuals bringing consciousness
to the workers. The currents, or rather the individuals, whose writings escape
this mold are very rare. The trend was so dominant that even individuals who
had criticized organizational fetishism, for example, later succumbed to it:
Trotsky, for one, adopting Leninism after 1917. Democracy, organizational
fetishism and educationalism are typical aspects of bourgeois ideology.3
These political ideas and
practices are reflections of the development of the relation between the
classes of bourgeois society which sank into the revolutionary crisis at the
end of the war. The petty bourgeoisie, often as threatened by the modernization
of capital as the workers, enter the battle in their own way, considering
themselves the salt of the earth, lacking a communist perspective. In
The very short history of the
KAPD shows particularly well how precisely the same statutes were capable of
serving two completely opposed orientations: first, the practical life of a
revolutionary organization, and second, the subsequent decay of that same
organization. It could be said that these statutes were extremely democratic;
but it would be more important to point out that, during the entire period from
the party’s foundation in March 1920 until the summer of 1921, the
statutes were the faithful expression of an organization in which a
“base” in the traditional sense did not exist: each member knew
what had to be done, and he did not join the KAPD to follow orders and to be
told what to do. Congresses and various kinds of general assemblies were quite
frequent. There was no central committee invested with full powers for an
indeterminate period of time: there was, on the one hand, a current affairs
committee (Geschäftsführung)
and also a “Central Committee” (Hauptausschuss)
which met whenever important decisions had to be made, and, unlike the same
structure in other organizations, was on each occasion subject for the most
part to re-election by the party districts, and consisted of the standing
administrative committee and the district delegates. One could say that the
party line was constantly decided by the whole party, which manifested an
enormous force in the KAPD; it was only in order to recuperate this force that
the Communist International tolerated the presence of this party, which never
ceased to openly and violently attack the Communist International’s
opportunism. In the KAPD, throughout its best period, that which Bordiga
denominated as “organic centralism” was actually realized.
When the period of the
KAPD’s decomposition began, the same, quite elaborate, statutes, from the
moment when they were no longer the simple formalization of a real practice,
were used in the service of all kinds of maneuvers in the struggle among the
party’s factions (cf. Appendix I).
Everyone attempted, in their
own way, to escape from organizational fetishism. For Gorter: “The
organization, the union, because it is tied to the workplace, must consequently
always be the object of vigilance lest it sabotage the revolution, by aiming
for small improvements or conquering a position of apparent power.”4
But everyone denounced everyone
else’s fetishism. Mattick wrote that the KAPD “seemed to be
more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks”, 5 due to its
preoccupation with purity. The KAPD and the PCI (formed by radical elements who
managed to subsist within the capitalist world thanks to the power of their
principles) both combined an all-too-sanguinary evaluation of the role of the
party with an overestimation of the workers organizations (unitary
organizations for the former, trade unions for the latter). Their manner of
thinking and their practice were basically very similar, but they differed in
the way they applied identical principles, due to differences between the
German and Italian contexts. What distinguished them was the way each
represented their own and the other’s activity: at this
level the complex interaction of traditions and ideas prevented each one from
understanding the other and the other’s activities. In any event, both
shared the same conception of the party as “nucleus” 6:
“A cadre which can merge with the proletariat when, thanks to the general
development, the latter will be led into combat.” The Italian Left shared
with the German Left the rejection of the idea of conquering the majority
before the revolutionary period, as well as the idea of the program-party:
“Each communist must be capable of being a leader on his own terrain . .
. he must be able to resist and, whatever keeps him going, whatever captivates
him, is his program.”7 It would be idle to try to exonerate
the German Left, at any cost, of the charge of “anarchism” by
quoting the texts where it proclaims its desire for a pure, diamantine party, a
“super-elaborated party-nucleus”.8 Far from providing
evidence of the Marxist character of the KAPD, we understand this, on the
contrary, as the contradiction of a party situated in the midst of a combative
proletariat, but few in number, and obliged to discover a means to reinforce
its cohesion as an organization, deluding itself concerning its role as a
factor driving the struggles forward (cf. the next Chapter). One cannot locate
the most profound aspect of the Left in the most exaggerated assertion of what distinguishes it from the rest of
the proletarians.9
During the first days of
August, a Second Congress was held and adopted the KAPD’s Program. The
whole party was at that time convinced that all the conditions for the
revolution were ripe (one can compare this view with that of the Second
Congress of the Communist International, which was taking place at the same
time: cf. Chapter 11). Hunger riots had broken out in May and June. A bill was
pending in the German parliament, prepared several months before, which would
mandate the disarming of all civilians who had weapons. It was thought that
this would unleash defensive reactions which would have to be “pushed
forward”. The Congress decided that the party should focus on this issue:
but it would fail because it would stand utterly alone in its battle.
An important point remained
unresolved, however: the clarification of the KAPD’s relations with the
In mid-August 1920, the Red
Army was at the gates of
Even one year later (at the
Third Congress of the Communist International), the KAPD would insistently
invoke the “action” of August 1920, accusing the KPD and the USPD
of having abandoned them. According to Jung,
The German communist parties
and the USPD were supposed to be prepared to assist this maneuver and to
undertake an armed offensive. The decision to proceed directly to
Jung, placing the event
within its proper context and considering its importance, did not fail to
emphasize the general apathy of the German workers, which the communists’
military groups had struggled to dispel.
In a general strike of
electrical workers, in October 1920, the KAPD, faithful to its role as
“trigger” of the movement, denounced the betrayal of the KPD, SPD,
etc. The government itself had to repress the strike. After March 1921, the
KAPD worked to set up action committees in the factories and promoted
“Italian-style” occupations. The Fourth Congress (September 1921)
would assign itself the task of “keeping the revolutionary will of the
German proletariat alive”. The KAPD had turned towards activism, becoming
a “party in the traditional sense”. With the definitive ebb of the
revolution, new internal divisions arose and the KAPD began to turn into a
sect. The last revolutionary enclaves were reduced by external intervention
(many were killed in various actions) and internal causes (activism and the
clashes between tendencies). The creation of the AAUD-E was a vain attempt to react
to these developments.
The Debate Concerning the
“Unitary” Organization
Due to their mutual
opposition to the Bolsheviks and the social democrats, all the factions of the
German Left agreed on one point: it was not the “Party” which would
secure power during and after the revolution, but the councils, institutions
which would allow the proletarians to simultaneously exercise both political
and economic power. But the KAPD Program distinguished between
“political” and “economic” councils: a sign of disagreement
over the timing of the party’s dissolution. The AAUD-E represented the
current which supported the party’s immediate dissolution.
The idea of unitary
organization, as we have mentioned above, first appeared in Bremen13:
this point was the only novel feature of the text in which it appeared,
however, which otherwise still advocated a trade-based structure as well as
parliamentarism. The notion remained confused for a long time, and further
evolved only with the wildcat strikes during and after the war. The
revolutionary workers then organized themselves by factories and by regions,
and sabotaged the trade unions and elections.
The confusion, and the source
of later disagreements and splits, derived from the fact that the idea of unitary
organization was also shared by individuals and groups belonging to a party:
the KPD. The Left defended the idea at the KPD’s founding Congress
against Luxemburg and the right, for whom the tasks of the trade unions were to
be carried out after the revolution by the councils.14 Since they
had agitated in favor of an organization which rejected the party, while they
belonged to a party, they arrived at the idea that this party (the KPD(O) and
later the KAPD) must dissolve itself into the unitary organization. Schematically, two positions took shape:
immediate dissolution or dissolution at the end of a “certain period of
time”. This “certain period of time”, of course, generated
new tendencies, from the moment when more refined distinctions began to be
made. In the meantime, as Schröder said in his On the Future of the New Society, 15 the party would be
preserved as a “necessary evil”. The supporters of unitary
organization, not being numerous enough among the proletariat, had no choice
but to join the party.
While the whole radical left
(uniting all tendencies) was organized in the KAPD, the split first began, as
so often happens, over another issue: the position to adopt regarding
Rühle’s position
on
In October 1921 this movement
held its first autonomous conference and gave itself the name AAUD-E, the
“E” standing for “Unitary Organization”. This
conference adopted “The Guiding Principles of the AAUD-E”. The
AAUD-E then had 13 economic districts which counted several tens of thousands
of members, but would decompose even faster than the other left organizations.
The AAUD-E’s theory was
essentially expressed in Die Aktion
after 1920 and in Rühle’s pamphlets, each being a development of the
previous one.18 Pannekoek, although not a member of any group after
1920, showed, in a letter dated July 15, 1920, that he was closer to the AAUD-E
than to the other left tendencies: “The idea that two organizations of
‘enlightened’ workers should exist is false.”19 It
was upon the principle of the unitary organization that the KAUD (Communist
Workers Union of Germany) was founded in 1931, regrouping the remnants of the
various groups of the German Left.
1. Bock.
2. PC, No. 56, passim. The same criticism could be applied to M. Rubel, who
considered Marx to be primarily an “educator”: cf. his introduction
to Pages Choisies de K. Marx, Payot,
1970, and Marx critique du Marxisme,
Payot, 1974.
3. The Veritable
4. Quoted by B. Kun in La IC, No. 18, October 1921. “Du
sectarisme à la contre- révolution.”
5. Conseils ouvriers en Allemagne, p. 102.
6. Hempel, debate on
the report on tactics at the Third World Congress, La gauche allemande….
In English,
see the website, Wage Slave X’s
Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Homepage, “Discussion
of Radek’s Report on the Tactics of the International”.
7. Ibid.
8. Révolution Internationale, n.d., No. 6, summarizing the work
cited above.
9. Letter
from Marx to Schweitzer, October 13, 1868: “The sect does not seek its reason
for existence and its sense of pride in
what it has in common with the class movement, but in a particular aspect which distinguishes it from that
movement.”
10. La gauche allemande….
11. La question syndicale…., p. 38.
12. Der Weg nach unten, p. 186, et
seq.
13. Bock: p. 84.
14. Ibid., p. 98.
15. Kool: p. 353.
16. Cf. Hempel.
17. Letter from Engels to Lafargue,
18. Extracts provided in Bock,
Document XIV.
19. Kool: p. 128.
The March Action was the last
proletarian insurrection of the German revolution. Neither the
The Crisis of 1921
Between the defeat of the Red
Army of the
The winter of 1920-1921
coincided with a social and political crisis in
The order for the
“palace revolution” which was transmitted by the VKPD leadership to
the leftists was inspired by the Communist International’s delegation,
which had arrived in
The KAPD demonstrated its
jubilation: “It is the proletariat itself which has spoken. The masses of
the VKPD have taken action by following our watchword. They have compelled
their leaders to do the same.” (Communist
Workers Daily, organ of the
Max Hölz
The police units arriving
from
Hölz, from a working
class background and himself a worker, “had nothing to do with
politics” before the revolution. Upon his return from the front after the
war, where he had served as a volunteer, he found himself unemployed and, in
his home town in
He was very popular as a
result of his tactic of retribution which consisted of “taking from the
rich to give to the poor”. Quite often, workers who were in a weak
position in their factory would attend one of his meetings. Hölz would
then compel the business owners to pay a certain sum or face reprisals. Besides
extortion and blackmail, his repertoire included freeing prisoners, the
destruction of legal documents and archives, burning the mansions of the rich,
etc. He was equally popular for constantly evading the police. In April 1919, a
reward of 30,000 marks was offered for his capture. He would not be apprehended
until after the March Action.7
The Communist Workers Daily of the KAPD expressed its unequivocal
approval of the attack on the Column of Victory. On the 22nd and 23rd,
identical attacks were carried out, supervised and organized by, and under the
direct control of Hölz and the combat groups of the KPD and the KAPD, in
Falkenstein, Dresden, Freiburg, Leipzig, Plauen, etc., against courthouses and
police stations. These organizations then resumed their usual activities. But
in all of these cities, the workers did not stir. The only regions where
“solidarity” was demonstrated were the
Chronology of Events.
Opposition Develops between the Local
Organizations and
the Leaderships of the KPD and the KAPD
When the strike was called in
the Mansfeld region, the public service employees of
The reaction of the workers
was initially timid, and the strikes would only develop later, after March 22nd.
The workers fighting against those who did not heed the strike call armed
themselves and attacked the police.11 Hölz summoned the workers
to arm themselves in various cities. The first skirmishes took place in
Eisleben on the 23rd: the police intervened and proceeded to make
some arrests. Hölz established his command post in this region, known for
its copper mines. His assault detachments were composed of 2,500 workers. Nor
was he the only one to act in this fashion. The region had a great number of
battle units with notorious or anonymous leaders. Plättner, for example,
played at least as important a role as Hölz in the March battles, without
trying to garner any publicity for his own account.12 These people
were the only real participants in the insurrection. The KPD and the KAPD only
issued the directives, without having any real influence on the course of
events once the fighting had started.
Eberlein, in charge of the
KPD combat groups, also arrived in
“The leadership was in
the hands of proletarian rebels who had lived for a long time under conditions
of illegality and who, although not obeying the directives of the party’s
Hölz’s army
dominated the region for ten days, but only fought particular aspects of capital
without changing anything essential. It was primarily an armed gang15
which executed certain operations. The proletarians constituted themselves as a
military force but would not change anything. Their violence remained without
an objective, and destroyed the visible enemy, but not the enemy’s roots.
It was a negative movement. Occupied
by close to 2,000 workers, the industrial complex of Leuna was not directly
utilized for revolutionary ends. One part of the proletarians remained outside
of the workplace and fought without the social
weapon which, for the proletariat, is production. The other part shut itself up
within the factory. There was neither any coordination between these two
groups, nor was there any concentrated employment of military force against the
State. The movement ran out of steam due to both its purely military generalized offensive, and
because it had ensconced itself at the
point of production. Hölz robbed money, but he did not abolish it.
The rest of
“The little
coordination which existed during the March Action was the work of the Unionen (
Hölz wanted to link up
with the Leuna works, but this proved to be impossible. On the 27th,
he distributed 50 marks to each member of his armed commandos. They went
towards
The “Lessons of the March
Action”
1. The VKPD
Over the course of the next
two months, the VKPD, always under the influence of the Executive Committee of the
Communist International, executed another about-face and slowly abandoned the
“offensive” in favor of legal activity. The Third Congress of the
Communist International (July 1921) took place during the period of this
about-face, at a moment when its main self-criticism was largely directed
against the lack of technical “preparation”, and not against the
insurrectionary directive itself. Shortly afterwards, the Action was
characterized as a putsch, that is, Levi’s critique was resurrected,
after Levi, of course, had been excluded. The reason for his expulsion was that
he had made his opposition public and had insulted B. Kun’s delegation.
But Lenin declared that Levi was basically
correct.18
The KPD’s membership fell
to 180,000 and later rose again to over 200,000 in 1922. Radek was ordered to
be more attentive to the affairs of the KPD. The KPD elected a new leadership
and confined itself to the legal terrain, to agreements between parties and the
formation of coalition governments. As 1923 approached, the Eighth Congress
declared its support for “workers governments”, that is, coalitions
of the KPD and the SPD at the regional level. But a new leftist tendency was
born at this Congress, led by A. Maslow and R. Fischer, representing the
The leftist and rightist
tendencies went to plead their cases to
The history of the German
Communist Party would be a continuous oscillation between the ultra-right and
the ultra-left, characterized by successive waves of exclusions, and influenced
by the vicissitudes of the policies of the Russian government. The debates and
decrees of the Communist International, after the 1921 March Action, certainly
offer the most overwhelming illustration of its incoherence, which even approached
absurdity. Levi was excluded for violating party discipline, although the
Communist International would subsequently basically agree with his position.
Zetkin, who agreed with Levi, was not excluded, but, to the contrary, was
granted (provisionally, until the arrival of R. Fischer) leadership of the
party. The defeat of the March Action helped to condemn the KAPD, judged to be
a dangerous proponent of the offensive at any cost, while the KPD had acted
with at least as much adventurism (fake kidnappings and other
“tricks” to prod the masses to rebellion). These flagrant
contradictions are explained, in equal proportions, by the will of the
Communist International, which was focused on “filling up” its
organization in
The continuation of
“Levism” without Levi also led to the fall of the VKPD’s
first left-wing faction: the former Bremerlinke
lost all of its influence in the leadership. It would not reappear until the
end of the 1920s as an opposition, which would then be called
“rightist”: it would support Bukharin and Brandler-Thalheimer,
advocates of the “Leninist united front” against the supposedly
fashionable leftism of the Stalinist “class against class” tactic.
Frölich would be excluded in 1928 as a “rightist”. “The Bremerlinke appeared as the first and
disappeared as the last expression of Leninism in
To make 1923 the pivotal date
for both
The same holds true for
starting with the evolution of the tendencies in the Russian Communist Party in
order to write the history of
2. The KAPD and Rühle’s
AAUD-E
Gorter and other leaders of
the KAPD published The Path of Dr. Levi,
the Path of the VKPD, whose putschism they denounced: 24 they
blamed the failure of March on the tactics followed by the rightist KPD
leadership since 1919. Reversing its policy in such a brutal fashion, going
suddenly from the legal struggle to the revolutionary struggle, the VKPD had
assumed a putschist attitude. But the March Action, as a real movement of the
proletariat in central
The pamphlet briefly
mentioned “the pressure exercised by certain authoritarian
influences” on the VKPD prior to March, but it was Rühle’s
tendency which more fully developed this theme. As Rühle wrote: “The
workers must know that the Action in central
As for Hölz, captured a few
days after the end of the fighting, he was condemned to life in prison. At
first, his defense was organized by the communist left and then, once the
latter had disappeared, it passed into the hands of “leftist
personalities” on a committee created by the KPD, which made Hölz
into a legendary figure. Hölz himself contributed to his own cult. The
post offices in the city where he was imprisoned were inundated with packages
and letters addressed to him from all over
1. La question syndicale…., p. 27.
2. Cf. the map
reproduced in Angress, p. 136; cf. also Die
Märzkämpfe, 1921,
3. Among
other sources, cf. P. Avrich, La
tragédie de Kronstadt, 1921, Seuil, 1975 (in English: Kronstadt, 1921, Princeton University
Press,
4. R.
Fischer: Stalin and German Communism,
5. Kool:
pp. 131 and 604.
6. Ibid., p. 312. Cf. also his biography in
Angress, pp. 146-147.
7. Hölz
published an autobiography in 1930: From
White Cross to Red Flag,
8. Bock:
p. 303.
9. According
to Badia: p. 178.
10. La question syndicale…., p. 29.
11. Angress:
p. 144.
12. Bock:
p. 302.
13. Ibid., p. 300.
14. Ibid., p. 301.
15. Compare
with Makhno: cf. Communisme et
“question russe”, pp. 88-95.
16. Comfort:
Chapter VI.
17. La question syndicale…., pp. 28
and 30.
18. Kool:
p. 132; and Invariance, n.d., No. 7,
p. 82.
19. Carr:
The Interregnum 1923-24, Pelican,
1969, Chapter 7.
20. Angress:
pp. 242-243.
21. Les Temps Modernes, February 1975,
“Gramsci et Bordiga face au Comintern”; R. Paris’s
introduction to Gramsci’s Ecríts
politiques, Gallimard, Vol. I, 1974.
22. La question syndicale…., p. 29.
23. This
is the case with Broué, as well as Gruber, p. 409. This error can also
be found in Communisme et “question
russe”, pp. 123-126.
24. Der Weg des Dr. Levi, der Weg der VKPD,
published by the KAPD, 1921, pp. 10-12.
25. Kool:
p. 133.
26. Ibid.
German-Soviet Relations: 1918-1922
The “cordon sanitaire” was an attempt
to isolate
Shortly after his release
from prison at the end of 1919, Radek defined “the problem of
“Western culture has
been fused with eastern culture to form a new, infinitely richer cultural
content.”5
Broken on
On May 6 a trade agreement
was signed: this was two months after at least a fraction of the Communist
International and perhaps of the Russian Communist Party had tried to steer
events in
Even though they knew very
little about the contacts between the two countries, the KAPD nonetheless saw
the crux of the matter: its declarations at the Third World Congress would
prove to be totally justified. Krasin, for example, leader of a Russian trade
mission which had arrived in
Collaboration between the German Left
and the Bolsheviks
Within the early KPD, prior
to the exclusion of the Left, the two tendencies also clashed over the issue of
the International: this was a continuation of the disagreement between the Left
and the Center (and within the Center, with Spartacus) at Zimmerwald. The
former were in favor of the immediate creation of an International based on the
existing leftist groups, despite their weakness. The centrists and Spartacists
thought that in order to set up an International, they would have to wait until
conditions matured, judging that they were not yet mature enough; during the
war the Spartacists had not yet abandoned the hope that the radicals might be
able to reconquer the old International. This was why Eberlein spoke at the
First Congress against the immediate founding of the International (cf. Chapter
11).
The First Congress called for
the seizure of power, to which all means of struggle were to be subordinated.
“Revolutionary parliamentarism” was only mentioned as one means
among others. As mentioned above, precise positions were not established in
regard to the trade union question and the party’s organizational
structure. This gave the Left the impression that it was worthy of the
Communist International’s recommendation. It seemed normal to Gorter in
1919 that he should refer to the authority of the Communist International (and
even to that of the KPD) in his text against the majority faction of the Dutch
Communist Party. Indeed, since Gorter, Pannekoek, Roland-Holst and the ISD had
collaborated with the Bolsheviks during the war (while the Spartacists had
adopted a more subdued position), the founding Congress of the KAPD unanimously
approved a resolution which stated that “the KAPD is unequivocally in the
camp of the Third International” (April 1920). The KAPD would never again
make such a sweeping declaration. Finally, the Left’s great theoretical
text, World Revolution and Communist
Tactics, written by Pannekoek at the end of 1919 (but not its postscript)
as well as the texts and even the poems of Gorter, contain apologies for
Bolshevik power.
But the Left brought upon
itself a certain number of reprimands, which arose when the Russians (and above
all, Lenin and Radek) judged that the revolutionary wave had receded. In
prison, Radek established the basic framework for the future relations between
the German and
At the beginning of 1920, the
Amsterdam Bureau was dissolved by means of a simple telephone call from
Rühle and the Conflict within the
KAPD
The KAPD mistrusted the
organizational and tactical centralization of the revolutionary movement,
fearing that, in the conditions of that time, the inevitable domination of the
Russians would cause the requirements of the struggle in the West to be
forgotten. The preference for autonomy (referred to as anarchistic), although
real in some (Rühle), played a lesser role at that time than the
preoccupation with preserving the specificity of the struggles in the highly
developed countries. It is in this sense that one must understand the
KAPD’s assertion: “The tactic of the Communist International is
nothing but the synthesis of the tactics of the different parties, each of
which acts in its own country; there is not, nor can there be, a specific
tactic of the International.”19
The KAPD Congress sent a
delegation composed of Jan Appel and Franz Jung to
When the Second World
Congress was announced for July, the KAPD, without any news from the first
delegation, sent Rühle to
After a brief discussion of
his arrival in
Rühle later described
his first interview with Radek, which was occasionally “very
violent”. “Every one of Radek’s phrases was a phrase from the
Rote Fahne. Each argument, an
argument of Spartacus. Radek is, properly speaking, the grand master of the
KPD. Dr. Levi and Heckert are his tame parrots. They have no opinions of their
own and they are paid by
“I tried to get Radek
to give me the open letter addressed to the KAPD. He promised he would give it
to me, but he did not abide by his word. I reminded him about this again,
several times, but he did not give me the letter. When I found out later that
our two comrades who had led the negotiations had not known about the open
letter until the last moment before their departure, Radek’s behavior
became clear to me from a psychological point of view. He, the worst of
tricksters, the most unscrupulous, at least felt a twinge of shame at the
prospect of revealing the perfidious lies and shameless insults which filled
the open letter, although he was afraid to have a face-to-face conversation
with one of the injured and calumniated parties.”
“The methods which I
have seen employed in
“To begin, I took a
tour of
Rühle attacked the
concept of centralism so prevalent among the Russians, which they had raised to
the level of a “hypercentralism”. But “it is the revolution
which has compelled them to act in this way. These men, the German
representatives of the party organization, had their precious audience, when
they became indignant and crossed themselves upon being faced by the
dictatorial and terrorist aspects of
“Why have the Russian
comrades made this error? Because they are prisoners of the belief in the party. Because they see the party as the
means to bring about the revolution and the construction of socialism. The
party, however, as a form of organization, is the incarnation of the centralist
principle. This is the source of their
error. . . .”
“For the
KAPD—unlike Moscow—the revolution is not a party matter, the party is not an authoritarian, top-down
organization, the leader is not a military commander, the masses are not an
army condemned to passive discipline, the dictatorship is not the despotism of
a clique of leaders, communism is not used as a springboard for a new soviet
bourgeoisie. For the KAPD, the revolution is an affair which concerns the
proletarian class in its entirety; within this class is the party, which is only
the vanguard, most mature and most determined. The masses must raise themselves
to the level of the political maturity of this vanguard, but the KAPD does not
expect this result to be obtained under the tutelage of leaders, discipline and
regimentation. On the contrary: with an advanced proletariat, like the German
proletariat, these methods obtain precisely the opposite result. Such methods stifle initiative, paralyze
revolutionary activity, short-circuit the power of persuasion, and diminish the
sense of responsibility. For the KAPD, it is a matter of giving free rein to
the initiative of the masses, of freeing them from authority, of developing
their self-consciousness, of nurturing their autonomy and thus increasing their
participation in the revolution. . . .”
“
“Nonetheless,
“. . . . The
dictatorship of the Bolsheviks is the dictatorship of 5% of a class over the
other classes and over the other 95% of its own class. . . .” The KAPD
must not join the Communist International, “an association which accepts
people who assume the responsibility for the terror exercised by a party over
the Russian people.” And he would go even further in the Communist Workers Daily of
In early July, Rühle was
joined by another KAPD delegate, the former president of the socialist republic
of Braunschweig—from the end of 1918 to the beginning of
1919—August Merges. During the course of discussions with Lenin and Radek,
they were made aware of the 21 Conditions proposed by the Executive Committee
and upon which the Congress was to vote. Radek guaranteed that if they accepted
the resolutions of the Congress, including the 21 Conditions, the KAPD’s
admission into the Communist International would pose no problem (since the
result was known in advance). Rühle and Merges returned to
Upon Rühle’s
return to
Instead of admitting with
Rühle that there was no common ground at all between the Left and the
Communist International, the KAPD majority believed that further discussion was
possible. It was from this perspective that Gorter wrote his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin in the
summer of 1920, in response to Infantile
Disorder. He wanted to convince Lenin that the KAPD’s positions were
correct for
The Third Congress and the
The KAPD delegation to the
Third World Congress was composed of Gorter, Schröder and Rasch
(Schröder was the political leader of the KAPD, while Gorter was its principle
theoretician). Its objective was to allow the KAPD to at least get a foothold
within the Communist International in order to create a revolutionary
opposition within it.
The delegation attended
various sessions of the Executive Committee. Gorter expounded his theses on
November 24. Trotsky answered him in a speech which contained the essential
points of the best counter-arguments (although of a partial nature), which
would later be reappropriated by the Italian Left in its critique of the German
Left.22 He reproached Gorter for attempting to reduce revolutionary
problems to “an organizational modification”. He accused Gorter of
wanting a small propagandist party
rather than a party organization of
the whole class. It was possible, Trotsky said, that the experience of the
Dutch SDP had influenced more than just the size of the KAPD. It was false, he
said, to maintain that the primary goal was to transform the consciousness of
the workers. Trotsky, like Bordiga after him, compared this illusion (which is
only a partial depiction of the German Left’s position) to the
nationalists of the 18th century and their Aufklärung. But the reform of consciousness was a
characteristic feature of the era. This amounted to a distorted dialogue, in
which it was easy for Trotsky to refer to truths by avoiding the questions
which were effectively posed, but poorly-expressed by the actions of the German
Left: their insufficient expression was the theoretical reflection of the
weakness and contradictions of the practical conduct of the proletariat.
Trotsky was correct, of
course, to recall that “the most important source of the revolution is
still necessity”, and to situate the “degree of education” of
the masses in its proper place. But educationalism did not yet characterize the
German Left as it would later.23 Gorter did not consider
consciousness to be something which comes before
action, as it does in the Kautskyist view, in which the proletariat could not
become conscious except after having been inoculated by socialist ideas. In its
practice, the Left, despite certain imprecise formulas, which are often
produced by any revolutionary tendency, considered that clarification must be
attained through action and not
pedagogy. The Communist International, Lenin, and later the Italian Left, chose
to attack only the weakest points of the German Left by focusing on its
idealist formulations. In his Open Letter
to Comrade Lenin, Gorter noted how Lenin, instead of attacking positions
which had been “officially adopted, often attacks the
‘private’ declarations of the KAPD. The same holds true for his
charge of organizational ‘fetishism’”:
“The German Left,
throughout its first years, demonstrated that it possessed a sufficiently
healthy instinct by not theorizing too much about the form of the unionen, but only about their content,
thus leaving the possibilities open to the future revolutionary movement . . .
one must add, however, that, with respect to the ‘economic’
analyses of the unionen, there were
(particularly in the AAU-E) councilist idealizations concerning the
organizational bases of the unionen...
”24
Finally, on December 5, the
KAPD was admitted into the Communist International “provisionally, as a
sympathizing party with a voice but without a vote”. Its admission was provisional
as a result of the fact that all the resolutions of the Executive Committee
concerning the KAPD demanded that the KAPD should soon rejoin the KPD. The KAPD
thus obtained a permanent seat on the Executive Committee of the Communist
International, occupied first by Goldstein and later by Reichenbach. Upon their
return to
But after the news of the
rebellions of the Russian proletarians against the government, and the March Action,
in which the VKPD demonstrated its inability to lead a revolutionary action,
the KAPD rejected any idea of merging with the KPD.
After the Tenth Congress of
the Russian Communist Party, Zinoviev announced that the next world congress
“would emphasize” the question of the KAPD. For its part, the KAPD
prepared a packet of materials to publicize its theses to the delegates. In
May, it sent a delegation to see if it was possible to create a leftist
fraction within the Communist International. The delegation was composed of
Meyer (pseudonym: Bergmann), a metal worker from
The Left’s
interventions at the Congress demonstrated that the major difference separating
the Left from the Bolsheviks consisted in the fact that the Left based its
tactics on the power of capital.
Gorter’s Open Letter to Comrade
Lenin had reproached Lenin for underestimating the power of capital’s
unity in
Contrary to what Lenin had
said in his speech on tactics, when he had “demagogically” aroused
laughter among his audience, it was not a question of asking oneself whether it
was possible to make the revolution by remaining in isolation.27 The
regrouping of a sufficient number of revolutionaries is necessary: but the
revolutionaries cannot win over the majority of the workers before a revolutionary period. The
Communist International was mistaken in its dispute with the Left when it
insisted that revolutionaries must not hesitate to work in reactionary
institutions (trade unions, parliaments, etc.), as if the Left was above all
concerned with preserving its purity. This was, of course, a temptation for
some, but was not the Left’s primary concern. The enemy would be
strengthened by making people believe that the proletariat could use
parliament, or that the trade union structure was acceptable.
The Communist
International’s reaction to the March Action offers an excellent
illustration of the International’s contradictions. The Third Congress
resolved nothing, since it supported the Central Committee and was in favor of
the strengthening of the KPD through its penetration of the masses. The final
formula, rendering facile homage to the March Action, described as a
“step forward”, elevated the unity of the party above all other
considerations: rather than unity, however, a crisis ensued (cf. the preceding
chapter). Contrary to what Trotsky said, 28 the presence of
numerically powerful Communist Parties in
“With the nascent
theorization of the ‘united front’, the Third International proved
that it had the same view of the ‘workers movement’ as the Second
International: there was a ‘workers movement’, which was now
unfortunately divided, but which had fundamental common interests upon which a
political-trade union collaboration could be based.”29
One could add to the
KAPD’s report on this Congress that its delegates were treated like
intruders in an assembly where “serious politics” were being
deliberated. All the other delegates were hostile towards them; even Radek and
the other leading personalities of the Congress went out of their way to
ridicule them. Lenin began one of his speeches with this phrase: “I, too,
will allow myself to go on the offensive. . . .” Radek and Trotsky were
constantly comparing the KAPD delegates to the Mensheviks and the “two
and a half International” (Martov, Kautsky, etc.). Bukharin’s
intervention took the following form: “With your permission, we must tell
these comrades: these goals, these ideas, totally unite the KAPD with its
detested enemy, with Paul Levi. They rest upon the same theoretical basis as
Levi. (Shouts from the KAPD delegates: and in practice?) If theory is one thing
for them, and practice another, this is proof of their utterly confused spirit.
. . .”
Roland-Holst, in defense of
the KAPD, declared that it would be useful for the Communist International to
have an opposition, and that the leadership of the Congress did not respect the
“idea of justice” in relation to the KAPD, by not granting it the
same possibilities for expression as the other parties. She had previously
presented a more powerful defense of the KAPD in the journal Kommunismus (cf. the next chapter),
30 “The organ of the International for Central and
The Workers Opposition and the KAPD
Quite surprisingly, for the
KAPD, the Workers Opposition was the only tendency at the Congress which went
beyond a simple, courteous critique of the Bolsheviks. Intervening in the debate
on the tactics of the Russian Communist Party, Kollontai devoted most of her
speech to a criticism of the New Economic Policy adopted by the Tenth Congress
of the Russian Communist Party.32 The principle issue was to
discover whether or not this decisive turn in economic policy would in fact
serve to consolidate the foundations and accelerate the formation of a new
system of communist production in Russia. Kollontai responded in the negative:
“These days, the capitalist order exists throughout the world” and
communism is the only system which can guarantee the development of the forces
of production. Insofar as it is a detour within capitalism, and risks a return
to capitalism, the NEP must therefore be rejected, if only from the economic
point of view.
Furthermore, from the point
of view of class relations in
Kollontai advocated an
alternative: “Utilize the creative power of the proletariat which has
never really been used. Enemy forces prevent the expression of this power.
Lenin says nothing about it in his speech about the means required to get the
economy moving; he restricts himself to the technical aspect of the question
(machines, electricity, foreign specialists, etc.). Nonetheless, the essential
point is rooted in the fact that ‘our current system obstructs the
initiative of the proletariat’.”
“If we should continue
down the road of these concessions, I greatly fear that we might arrive at a
situation in which, when the revolution breaks out in other countries, it will
already be too late, that the conscious, just, proletarian nucleus here will
have disappeared. . . . It will be
necessary, for the proletarians, to make a new revolution in
Understanding that, despite
everything, the NEP was inevitable, she concluded as follows: “The only
thing that can save us would be the existence within our party of a nucleus
bound to our old tried and true principles, and that this nucleus should be
present at the moment when this revolution breaks out among us. And should this
decisive turn affect all soviet policies and create a non-communist, simply
soviet republic out of our communist republic, this tried and true nucleus of
communists should be there to pick up the flag of the revolution and help
achieve the victory of communism throughout the world.”
Kollontai nurtured all the
illusions of her epoch. Communism is conceived as the management of the economy
by the workers and she does not take the critique of political economy into
account. She makes consciousness autonomous in respect to the social process:
an idea which consists in believing that a conscious revolutionary nucleus
could “maintain its existence” through an indeterminate period of
reaction. The initiative of the proletariat consequently also becomes an
autonomous factor. The illusion is completed with reference to the aptitude of
what was left of the Russian proletariat, which had launched a reformist
struggle against the Bolsheviks and demanded (like the peasants) the NEP, even
before the Tenth Congress had voted in favor of it. The striking Petrograd
workers had asked for free trade
between the city and the countryside.33 Finally, she maintained the
illusion concerning the ability of living labor (the proletariat), in general,
to make up for the insufficient accumulation of dead (fixed) capital. This was,
forty years in advance, the ideology of the Chinese “great leap forward”,
which would be used by all those who want to increase the rate of exploitation
of the proletariat: fascists, third world bureaucrats, etc., Kollontai not
excepted. It is a distinct form of the “workers utopia”. Kristman,
the theoretician of war communism, wrote in October 1919 in the Autocracy of the Proletariat in the Factory:
“colossal forces lie dormant in the proletariat”.34 What
is of interest in the Workers Opposition and its contradiction derive from the
fact that it was both the workers
solution for Russian capitalist development and the expression of a defeated
proletarian movement (primarily due to its international isolation, but also
because of the destruction of the revolution from within, undermined by the
rebirth of capitalist relations which had been reintroduced, against their
will, by the Bolsheviks).
The KAPD delegates held
interviews after the Congress opened with several leaders of the Workers
Opposition. Kollontai gave them the manuscript of The Workers Opposition. According to Reichenbach, Kollontai later
submitted to party discipline, and asked the KAPD after the Congress to return
her manuscript: but a courier had already brought it to
In one of his interventions
at the Third Congress, addressing the Russian question, Hempel repeated the
gist of Kollontai’s arguments. Trotsky’s response was a masterpiece
of bad faith and falsehood, evocative of his future assassins. The leaders of
the ex-revolution became the leaders of the counterrevolution.
Some time later, a new letter
from the Executive Committee of the Communist International, addressed
“To the Members of the Communist Workers Party of Germany”, stated:
“In the most important questions, your leaders’ arguments coincide
with those of the declared counterrevolution and the Mensheviks.”
Zinoviev would later admit that he had fought the left when the right was much
stronger.37
The KAPD explained the
Communist International’s position by reference to the pressure of the
Russian party which had only carried out “a proletarian and communist
revolution in appearance, or at least only a small part of it. It was, in
reality, primarily a democratic and peasant revolution. It is this
contradiction, which had remained concealed for some time, which has condemned
the international tactics of the soviet republic and the communist party: dictatorship,
blind obedience, hypercentralism, etc.”. The KAPD foresaw that the
This was a constantly
recurring theme among many on the Left: Gorter, in mid-1918, had expounded the
same theme in The World Revolution. Pannekoek,
however, went much further: World
Revolution and Communist Tactics suggests that the Russian revolution
should not be viewed only in connection with
This comparison of Pannekoek and
Gorter—who was closer to the activity of the revolutionary workers and
consequently more of a prisoner of their deficiencies in Germany—gives
rise to the thought that Gorter also theorized (like Lenin, but in the contrary
sense) the limitations of the movement. Its disregard of the agrarian question
demonstrated the determination and the strength of the German proletariat but
it also showed that it had not begun a communist
revolution in the relations of production. Kollontai and Gorter became the
defenders of exclusively working class interests in a situation which
increasingly appeared to be a revolutionary deadlock. Each saw the solution in
a future revolution (even in
1. Concerning
the “bourgeois revolutions” of the 20th century, cf. the
articles in Bilan, a journal of the
Italian communist left, on the war in
2. Battaglia Comunista, No. 4, 1949.
3. Marx,
Engels: Military Writings.
4. Carr:
German-Soviet Relations between the Two
World Wars, 1919-1939, Johns
5. Rühle:
Brauner und roter Faschismus, (1939),
6. Badia:
pp. 117, 182-183.
7. The
IC, No. 9, April 1920.
8. Ibid., article by Pieck in No. 19,
December 1921.
9. On
the German-Russian military links, cf. Carr: pp. 56-94.
10. La Gauche Allemande….
11. Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy,
12. Lenin:
Oeuvres, Vol. 30, Ed. Sociales, 1964,
pp. 49-50, 52.
13. Ibid., pp. 82-83.
14. Ibid., p. 84.
15. Vol.
32, pp. 545-556.
16. Bock:
p. 252.
17. Oeuvres, Vol. 31, Ed. Sociales, 1961,
Appendix to La Maladie….
18. Survey, October 1964.
19. KAZ, No. 64,
20. Der Kommunist,
21. The
Central Committee included: 1) The delegates of the KAPD districts (one per
district); 2) The current affairs committee, elected by the Congress.
22. The
IC, No. 17, and La Question Syndicale… p. 48.
23. Cf.,
for example, Pannekoek’s correspondence with Socialisme ou Barbarie, and his 1946 text published in Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
24. La Question Syndicale…., p. 38.
25. Le Phare, January 1921.
26. La Question Syndicale…., pp.
50-51.
27. Vol.
32, pp. 498-508.
28. La Nouvelle étape, pp. 85-86,
115.
29. La Question Syndicale…., pp.
32-33.
30. July-August
1921, pp. 207-209. Cf. La Gauche
Allemande…., pp. 163-164.
31. Bulletin Communiste, October-November
1927.
32. Minutes,
p. 776. Cf. also L’Opposition
ouvrière, in Socialisme ou
Barbarie, No. 35. Compare with the Manifeste
du Groupe Ouvrier du PCR(B) (1923), Invariance,
No. 6, pp. 44-64.
33. Schapiro:
p. 247.
34. The
IC, No. 6.
35. Rosmer:
pp. 229-230.
36. Bulletin du CEIC, No. 1,
37. The
IC, No. 18, October 1921. Compare
with the lessons drawn by Bordiga from the Third Congress: PC, No. 51-52, pp. 98-120.
38. Die
39. The
ICO, p. 39. But another text of the
KAI, Le principe de l’antagonisme
entre le gouvernement des soviets et le prolétariat (Invariance, No. 7, pp. 94-101), considered
Kronstadt from the perspective of the conflicts between “Trotsky and the
sailors” who were opposed to the “dictatorship from above”
and who were demanding “broader powers for their category”.
Just as the Commune was the “daughter”
(Engels) of the IWA, the German revolution was the daughter of an International
Left which was never able to provide itself with a united organization, but
whose greatest currents were the German Left, which in its struggle even dared
to uphold the programmatic leadership established by the revolutionary movement
itself, and the Italian Left which assumed the historical task of carrying on
the work of the International Left, completing it and formulating it in its attacks
on the victorious counterrevolution; they have bequeathed to us their
theoretical weapons . . . which will constitute the basis of the future
revolutionary movement which finds its greatest historical example in the
German Left. The revolution of the future will not be a mere matter of
“imitation”; it will be a question of continuing the “thread
of time” traced by the International Communist Left.1
The thesis of an
“infantile disorder” of the Left must be jettisoned. The young
communist organizations, in effect, suffered from a crisis of
“growth” between 1918 and 1921 (depending on the country in
question), but one which was decidedly unlike that which Lenin diagnosed in his
celebrated pamphlet. The tendency towards infantilism was a lesser threat than
the opportunist danger. The inability to pose the real problems, to place the
Russian experience into context by distinguishing the tasks of a communist
revolution in the west, to make a decision regarding the political and trade
union structures of the past, in order to demarcate one’s position from
centrism, to have no illusions about democracy and the capitalist state, even a
“socialist” one—this was the real disorder. Far from being
the fruit of a lack of intellectual maturity—even though theoretical
backwardness weighed heavily in the balance—this crisis was the
reflection, among the organized minority, of the proletarian defeat at the very
moment when the proletariat effectively confronted capitalist society and began
to unite against the latter’s concentrated forces (State or para-State,
such as the fascists). Lenin helped to solve the crisis by reinforcing the
reformist elements in the young Communist Parties. He did not cure the disease
of the revolutionary proletariat, he killed the patient. The crisis of growth
would be resolved with the complete passage of the Communist Parties into the
ranks of the counterrevolution.
It is not a choice between a
majority which was evolving towards revolutionary positions, with the help of
the Communist International, and a sectarian and infantile minority; nor is it
an opposition between a centrist “unstable terrain” and a pure and
unchanging communist left. One could pick and choose a series of contradictory positions (even among the
best elements) comprising “attempts to extricate oneself from
difficulties”, from which only a minority would emerge intact by
developing what was essential—and even in these cases, in a contradictory
manner. Instead of compiling a retrospective history whose point of departure is
what the left had ultimately become, we shall situate its evolution and
constitution into small groups within a broader effort focused on clarification
and radical actions.
The Left in
Brest-Litovsk was one of this
epoch’s great revolutionary milestones, as well as the first great
revolutionary defeat. It also marked the appearance of a “left”
which, while opposed to Brest-Litovsk, was at least quite lucid in its
opposition to what the movement was “historically forced to do”. In
the face of the danger posed by the resumption of the German advance which was
penetrating deep into
The “left
communists” went beyond Lenin in their conception of the content of
socialism, insisting on the abolition of value,
which was, however, understood in an administrative sense and not as a social
process: the destruction of capitalism as a system was largely understood by
the Russian left communists as the transition from anarchy to planning.4
The communist perspective was primarily viewed as a management technique. This
current would later be integrated, by its own will, into the Bolshevik
majority, and the European left would remain at the margin of the problem. The
Russians had posed the problem of communism without having the means to realize
it: the westerners, who were capable of realizing communism, did not reach that
stage because the proletariat did not go on the offensive. The European left
would not pose the problem of communism until after 1930. The left communists
tried to defend a program which attempted to be internationalist (cf. Brest-Litovsk) and communist (communist social transformation) at the same time.
Subsequent left groupings would be different: the Workers Opposition and
Miasnakov’s Workers Group represented, in the period after the civil war,
in the purest and also the most direct way, the interests of the proletarians
(cf. the preceding chapter). The world socialist revolution, whatever was
thought and said at the time, was not the order of the day. From that time on,
the workers made their demands within
a social system which no longer depended upon them, but on a national and
international balance of forces which the revolutionaries could not affect.
Neither the Russian left communists nor the European communist left could do
anything to help themselves; they could not even understand their place within
the epoch: their lack of international links was not a result of organizational
or theoretical flaws, but the effect of the non-existence of the proletariat as
an effective international force.
In January of 1916, the
French internationalists formed the Committee for the Resumption of
International Relations, which was composed of two elements: socialist and
syndicalist. Each underwent a split within its ranks. Some of the socialists
(Loriot) and some of the syndicalists (Monatte) joined the Communist
International and fought to reconquer the majority of the SFIO. One part of the
socialists (Sigrand) and one part of the syndicalists (Péricat) wanted a
small organization based on clear principles, which would break with
parliamentarism and traditional politics. In the fall of 1916, they founded the
Committee for Syndicalist Defense. Renamed the Committee for the Third
International in May of 1919, the Committee for the Resumption of International
Relations was asphyxiated under the mass of the SFIO centrists who had suddenly
become “revolutionaries” after 1917, and who would later found the
French Communist Party. There were also leftist tendencies in the Committee for
the Third International, however: a proposed motion of the CTI, published in
January 1921 in L’Internationale
Communiste (No. 5), declared support for abstention when there is an
offensive movement of the proletariat and a revolutionary situation, but also
refused to make this position the grounds for a split.
The Committee for Syndicalist
Defense, which also joined the Communist International in May 1919, only gave
rise to small groups dominated by the ideological weight of revolutionary
syndicalism, which were in turn divided between socialists and anarchists. The
“Communist Party”, founded in May 1919, broke apart at the end of
the year. It confused party and soviets, calling its sections
“soviets”. Its optimism led J. Fabrice to write in September 1919:
“The Communist Party has actually been founded in
It was not the defeat of the
revolutionary movement which caused the Bolshevik “model” to be
“transplanted” (Kriegel) in other countries: it was this defeat
which transformed their attempts to drive the revolutionary process forward
into a neo-reformism which was a continuation of the old reformism. The formation
of powerful Communist Parties did not take place strictly where the
revolutionary movement had been most active, but where the old political and trade union structures had suffered from the most
serious crises. In
The workers’ low
standard of living led to a strike by bank employees in September-October 1918.8
Militants who had previously been involved with the Forderung Group and J. Herzog founded a Communist Party. In
November, the labor movement, led by a “committee” set up by Olten
and Grimm (centrists), called a general strike merely for the purpose of
generating pressure to achieve democratic reforms. The professional employees,
who had enjoyed the workers’ help in October, did not take part in the
strike. The bourgeoisie, as elsewhere, repressed the strike and granted some
concessions. In its Congresses of October 1918 and March 1919, the Communist
Party was severely critical of the Socialist Party (Platten). The Communist
Party participated in the elections of August 1919. Even so, the “Swiss
ultra-leftists” were criticized by the Communist International in
September 1919.9 The Swiss Socialist Party, having undergone a
split, sought extra-parliamentary means of struggle and provided itself with a
flexible organizational structure, the Workers Union. During general strikes in
According to Humbert-Droz, a
French-speaking Swiss communist, before the Second World Congress, the
German-speaking Swiss Communist Party “adopted, on the issues of the
trade unions and parliamentarism, positions which were quite similar to those
of the German KAP”.11 Herzog intervened at the Second Congress
against parliamentarism. Later, he subscribed to the Theses of this Congress,
in its essential points. In January 1921, he conceded great importance to the
trade unions, future “directing organs of communist production”.12
He reproached the Russians for remaining “indifferent” in the face
of “all the maneuvers of the center”. He accepted revolutionary
parliamentarism, with the proviso that he could change his opinion in the event
that it should prove to be opposed to revolutionary interests.
The revolution proceeded more
slowly in this country, although it went deeper, since the
“integration” of its workers by capital was similar to degree
attained by capital in
No Belgian group with a national
membership base joined the Communist International in 1919.14 In the
summer of 1919, the Young Socialist Guards (the youth organization of the POB)
published the first issue of its journal Socialism
and announced its support for the Communist International, but did not advocate
a split. In November, it refused to help the POB in the elections.15
In January 1920, sixty of its members, with Van Overstraeten, a factory worker,
at their head, held a conference and founded the group known as the Independent
Communists of Brussels. Their journal, The
Communist Worker, sided with the left. It tried to avoid the council
fetishism characteristic of the press of other workers organizations (cf. No.
7, June 1, 1920). They sent a delegate to the Amsterdam Conference, for which
they provided extensive publicity. They supported the KAPD. This group remained
small and was limited to
In October 1919, groups from
Ambers, Louvaine and
In September 1921, the WCF
united with the left wing of the POB, which had just been excluded from the
party, and founded the Belgian Communist Party, which had few members. Van
Overstraeten would be excluded in 1928 for “Trotskyism”. The
Communist Party was the heir of the Socialist Party center.
Part of the Russian empire
until its independence in December 1917,
“It was utterly typical
that, during the meeting of the (socialist) party held in June
1917—where, by the way, we had joined the Zimmerwald
International—not one voice was heard demanding that we separate
ourselves from the government socialists . . . the road of democracy, it then
seemed, was open and offered vast possibilities. We expected that we could
avoid the worst outcome by using parliamentary methods. And what has been the
result of this historical error? Were we able to avoid an armed conflict? No!
Parliamentary action was and can only be a danger to the working class
movement. All that it did was to uselessly gather together all the forces which
were necessary for the revolutionary struggle. Parliamentary activity has only
served to deceive the masses; it was used to conceal from them the preparations
of their enemies, the bourgeoisie, when it was the working class which should
have been making preparations. It is now seen that the idea of the democratic
state . . . was historically false.”
“The idea of the
democratic state was an attempt to fill a vacuum, to serve the transition from
capitalism to socialism. But democracy is incapable of assuming the
responsibility for such a mission. It has revealed its historical nature during
the course of the revolution. Although no one had declared their opposition to
it, it satisfied neither the bourgeoisie nor the workers. Its essential
characteristic was, in reality, its lack of cohesion, a weakness which
necessarily afflicts democracy throughout all of bourgeois society.”
“The Social Democracy
claimed it supported the revolution. Yet, what was its rallying cry? Power to
the workers? No, its rallying cry was democracy, and respect for democracy. We
had not understood that, when the revolution broke out, the workers had
violently overthrown the democracy, they had shaken it off as if it were a
nuisance.”
Kuusinen showed how the
socialists used the democracy to consolidate their power. Later, when the
workers rejected the democracy, the bourgeoisie rejected the socialists and
resorted to terror. It is not enough to evoke the necessity of the illegal and
military struggle; it must also be understood how democracy is opposed to the
revolution. This analysis implicitly criticized positions like those taken by the First
Congress of the Communist International in regard to democracy and
parliamentarism, as well as, of course, the later tactics of the united front
and workers governments. The Communist International admitted that democracy
was not revolutionary, but it claimed that one could make use of it. The left, on the contrary, said that in order
to fight it one had to remain outside of
it. At first this appeared to be a slight difference, but it soon
highlighted the abyss which existed between the left and the majority. The
latter thought it could take a non-neutral
social reality and, with certain precautions, turn it into a useful
“tool”.
“Our forces must focus
on abolishing the bourgeois state rather than setting up in its place, either before
or after the revolution, a democracy.” This was the revolutionary
position expressed at that time by the Finnish Communist Party, which had also
expressed its reservations, at the First Congress of the Communist
International, on the topic of the revolutionary use of the trade unions.20
At its founding Congress in May 1920, the party of the socialist left also
interpreted parliamentarism as “a buttress of the bourgeois state”:
“The bourgeois government, in order to stay in power, must avail itself
of the assistance of the representatives of the workers, in every country, in
the legislative assemblies, in municipal governments, and, in certain
circumstances, in the national administration itself. However [. . .] the party
must not make a declaration in advance on its future participation in the
assembly, since such a decision would be premature without considering each
particular situation.”21
Kuusinen’s positions
are even more relevant insofar as he soon abandoned the left to become a
“Leninist” and, later, a “Stalinist”: he was to be one
of the signers of the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943.
Rather than an organization or organizations, the left was a tendency which was
generally stifled by the negative development of the class struggle.
The British revolutionary
movement was, like that of other countries, characterized by regionalism.
Proletarians in
In effect, the WSF rejected
both parliamentarism and affiliation, and formed its own Communist Party in May
of 1920, but it merged with the official Communist Party of Great Britain,
founded a few months later, only to quickly leave it and form an ephemeral
“Communist Workers Party”. The
Workers Dreadnought went into decline in 1922 and 1923, and disappeared in 1924.
After 1920, the militant workers who were members of the WSF rapidly left it
and ended up accepting more moderate positions, as in the case of H. Pollitt,
the future English Thorez. Pankhurst would soon abandon the revolutionary
movement. As a communist, she always based herself on experience. Her radical
positions were not based on reason, with reference to the movement’s
tradition, but referred to the experience which gave rise to it and verified
what she said. Insofar as it was by no means a matter of intellectual progress,
her evolution is of interest. She moved close to communism under the pressure
of events and left it when communism collapsed as a practical movement.26
Meanwhile, the Scottish and
Welsh movements were undergoing their own evolution. In Scotland, the
Shop-Stewards Movement was born in 1915-1916 among skilled metal workers
fighting to preserve the advantages they had gained with the onset of the war
and who were therefore compelled by this circumstance to launch actions which
were radical in terms of their form.27
The Scottish movement, which was very combative, would never manage to go
beyond these limits and continued under the leadership of the Shop-Stewards.
Comparable to the German revolutionary shop stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute: RO), the Shop-Stewards formed a
parallel trade unionism28 due to the inability of the trade unions
to defend their demands: the SSM would quickly enter the orbit of the CPGB,
accepting its ideological control in a National Minority Movement which was
formed to conquer the trade unions. Some working class areas in
The
While the Bolsheviks were
relatively unknown prior to 1917 in the United States,30 the
theoreticians of the Dutch SDP, on the other hand, contributed to the International Socialist Review and the New Review, where Pannekoek published The Downfall of the International in
November 1914.
The Latvian Socialist
Federation, which had affiliated with the Socialist Party, moved towards the
left: in
In 1917, the left had
coalesced around Fraina’s The New
International, largely financed by
The foreign language
federations’ share of SP membership grew from 35% in 1917 to 53% in 1919.
There were three great strikes in 1919. The Seattle General Strike—the
first ever in the
At the beginning of 1919, the
left began to coalesce but hesitated at the prospect of a split. Its generally
“syndicalist” orientation was attenuated in its officially-approved
texts, but remained close to DeLeonism. The majority of its 70,000 members and
sympathizers were from the foreign language federations: the Russians were the
most numerous, followed by the Latvians. At its June 1919 Conference, the
majority of the left refused to break with the party: the minority chose to
leave. The Left Wing Conference’s Manifesto was still DeLeonist: the AFL must
be destroyed, parliamentarism is worthless except in assisting “mass
strikes”, and the future society was to be organized by the
“unions”.32
The
They actually had much in
common. According to Reed, “the program of the Communist Party is
basically theoretical and more general, while that of the CLP adheres to the
principles established by the First Congress of the Third International. . . .
The CP is more political, while the CLP’s program is more connected with
the workers economic struggles.” The two programs admirably complemented
one another; it was advisable to elaborate a “workers program”.34
The CLP defended a position close to that of the IWW in relation to the trade
unions, while the CP considered the AFL to be a “bastion of
capitalism”. “Every strike must be a revolution in miniature. .
.” announced The Revolutionary Age
(CLP), which criticized the strikers of the steel mills for having allowed the
mill owners to collect trade union dues: this is what the AFL was trying to
impose upon the workers. This paper asserted, however, that “the
revolution is at stake in the steel strike”. For The Communist (CP): “trade unionism is the
proletariat’s worst enemy. One of the tasks of the CP is to destroy the
existing trade union organizations.”
The local and regional labor
parties formed during the strike tried to unite in November 1919. This could be
viewed as being similar to the efforts of the German RO or the shop stewards: tempered in the fights against the trade
union apparatus, the militant workers tried to organize themselves as workers. According to the CLP (1919)
the problem was expressed as follows: “The organization of a Labor Party
by the trade unions is an inferior form of proletarian agitation, in order to
preserve the advantages the trade unions have acquired as a privileged caste.
Laborism represents as great a danger to the proletariat as moderate petty-bourgeois
socialism. . . .”
As for parliament, the IWW
tradition, as well as the whole radical movement in its early days, supported
the boycott: the majority of the members of the foreign language federations
were not even American citizens. Even so, some communists had previously
participated in elections in opposition to the candidates of the Socialist
Party right wing. It was decided that the party would participate in the campaign without running any candidates. The communist slogan in the
1919 elections was “boycott the elections”. “At a time when
the proletariat’s present tendency towards mass action must be
reinforced, the elections must be boycotted.”
At the end of 1919
repression, which for two years had been directed at pacifists and anarchists,
fell upon the two Communist Parties, already weakened by their divisions. The
ex-Michigan group left the Communist Party at the beginning of 1920. In April,
another split took place: the majority of the “Americans” and a
minority of “foreigners” left the Communist Party and took the name
“CCP”, with a party journal of the same name (The Communist). Ruthenberg accused the original Communist Party of
defending principles which were out of touch with reality, and of attempting to
be the “party of action”. The original Communist Party responded to
his accusations.35
“The exhortation to be
in ‘contact with the masses’ contains within it the germs of
compromise, of deviations and betrayals in the future. It is the confused and sentimental
cry of those who seem to believe that a Communist Party must remain in
‘contact with the masses’ in every stage of its evolution. They
ignore the fact that this tenacious attempt to circulate among the masses, at a
moment when the masses are not prepared, will reduce communism to a theory and
practice in conformity with the approval of politically immature masses. . .
.”
“These masses, which
will join the party as long as the latter remains silent concerning the
necessity of the use of force to
throw the bourgeois state in the trashcan, will reject this tactic when the
hour of revolution arrives. Consequently, these masses, who have not yet cut
the Gordian Knot which ties them to the socialist ideology of a
‘peaceful’ revolution, will enter the party, and by their mere
numerical weight will oblige the party to change the communist character of its
propaganda and agitation, and will oblige it to revise all of its positions
until it adapts to their political ideals, which are still in their infancy. .
. . Basically, the communist party is not composed of members but of ideas. . .
. We must try to make our propaganda penetrate into the workers environment:
but we do not expect immediate success. Good luck or bad, we shall continue our
agitation, certain that social forces and the disintegration of world
capitalism after the war . . . will compel the masses to heed our
message.”
Ruthenberg and the CLP
entered into discussions about uniting their organizations. The question of the
use of violence was passionately debated, but the most sensitive issue was
still industrial unionism. Both
groups were in agreement about the need to support the IWW and to destroy the
AFL. On the parliamentary question, Ruthenberg distinguished between
“legislative and executive functions”: one could employ the first
(without fighting for any reforms) but not the second. This thesis was
supported by the majority by a narrow margin but the boycott was chosen
nonetheless for the 1920 elections: “When the revolutionary crisis is undermining
the illusions of the masses concerning capitalist democracy, it is superfluous
for the communists to direct their agitation towards the destruction of these
illusions.” Thus was born the United
Communist Party, whose principle journal was The Communist: it had between 8,000 and 15,000 members, most of
whom were foreign-born.
For its part, the composition
of the Communist Party did not permit it to take any interest in the trade
unions or even the IWW. Its radicalism was in part due to a lack of depth and
manifested its lack of social roots in the proletariat. At the same time,
however, it maintained a relative distance from day-to-day matters and had a
better understanding of certain realities.
The real positions of the
Communist International soon became known. Its circular of
This period has been
described as a “crisis of communism”.36 The world
revolution could not indefinitely live vicariously through the Russian
experiences, which could only be validated by the world revolution.
“Because its initial impulse came from the Russian revolution, it rested
upon an illusion: the illusion of the immanent collapse of the entire
capitalist system.”
A unification conference (May
1921) gave birth to the Communist Party
of America. The two parties met there with more or less equal but not at
all homogeneous forces. The new program followed the Communist International line,
at least on paper: “The Communist Party condemns the position of those
revolutionaries who abandon the existing unions”: not only did it
participate in the elections, but its candidates had to propose demonstration
“educational measures”, not so as to win the votes of the bourgeois
majority, but to advance the cause of the party’s agitation, propaganda
and activities.
The Polish Communist Party
was formed in December 1918 from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of
Poland (SDKPL) led by Luxemburg, Jogisches and Marchlewski, and the Socialist
Party of the Polish Left (PPS-L), which had split from Pilsudski’s
nationalist PPS.37 Close to the Left Mensheviks, the PPS-L did not
gravitate toward the Bolsheviks until October 1917. With its dominant position
in the Communist Party, the SDKPL did not officially support either the
Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks: their “above all factions” position
could be compared to that of Trotsky with whom they disagreed on an essential
point: the right of national self-determination, which, in the case of
As a whole, the SDKPL openly
disagreed with Brest-Litovsk: “It seemed to them that inciting the German
soldiers who had invaded
In 1919, the Pole Karsky
wrote: 39 “In England, the revolutionary movement is retarded
by the ‘Irish question’ . . . the proletarian revolution tends
towards the abolition of the class state and the political proletariat cannot
consider creating a political class state: its struggle must tend towards the
creation of a new form of organization: the socialist federation of the
proletarians of Europe.” Around the same time, the Finn Sirola, without explicitly
criticizing Lenin, proved that “autonomy” formed the basis of
“imperialism”.40 In her posthumously published notes on The Russian Revolution, Luxemburg also
cited the Finnish, Polish and Ukrainian examples. The Leninist position was
frequently challenged by revolutionaries from subaltern countries which
suffered under the anti-revolutionary weight of the national question.
As Mattick has shown, 41
the Leninist position on this issue is derived from Lenin’s position on
democracy and democratic rights. Lenin believed in a democratic state in which
the workers could carry on their struggle, thus remaining faithful to the
Second International. His anti-democratic position in relation to the content
of socialism was still quite limited: he showed, especially against Kautsky,
that the dictatorship of the
proletariat realizes the widest democracy.
For him, the democratic state is necessary for the proletarian struggle: it is
the best political form within which the workers can organize themselves (which
is true) for the struggle against capital (which is false) (cf. Chapter 3).
Luxemburg’s perspective
on revolution and liberation from foreign oppression was based on the
proletarian movement in
In the workers soviets formed
at the end of 1918, the Communist Party was often as strong as the socialists.
It even dominated the Dabrova mining region where an ephemeral
Like the KPD during the same
period, the Polish Communist Party boycotted the Constituent Assembly (Sejm) in February 1919. It would only
renounce its abstentionism with difficulty. One of its pamphlets from 1921
would still assert: “the PCP’s boycott of the 1919 elections for
the Sejm was justified because there
was a chance of moving directly to the struggle for power. . . . In such
conditions, participation in the elections would have been tantamount to a
declaration in advance of the result of the struggle. . . .” That same
year, two deputies who had previously been members of the PPS and the Radical
Peasants Party joined the PCP. When the party debated the “united
front” in April of 1922, the left feared that “the tactic of the
united front and the formulation of merely partial demands obscures the
ultimate goal of the movement and in fact leads to the abandonment of the much
more profound goals of the socialist revolution”. The left yielded, but
even the party’s majority did not accept this tactic until after animated
debate. It is curious to note how the center opposed the united front with the
same arguments (which are utterly non-revolutionary) that were used by the
center of the French Communist Party during the same period: since you have
fought against the socialists, they said, how can you offer them your hand
today? One must distinguish between the radical tendency and the attempt to
preserve a trademark image.
The Polish revolutionaries
had foreseen that the creation of new states would be used to contain
proletarians within national frontiers. It would also isolate
“. . . proletarian politics
rejects all political solutions which depend upon the development of a
capitalist world, such as autonomy, independence and self-determination. . . .
For the international camp of the socialist revolution, national questions do
not exist.” The Silesian revolutionary movement was suffocated by
nationalism and confusion as a result of plebiscites. Pilsudski seemed to be a
prophet, with his mixture of nationalism and “socialism”. At that
time “national bolshevism” was an issue not only in
The Communist International
upheld the opposite view. Incapable of truly lifting themselves out of their context (destroying the
multinational state by availing themselves of the nationalist tendencies
opposed to it), the Bolsheviks had a very poor understanding of the ability of
national structures (as was the case, in a different framework, with their
grasp of the power of democratic structures) to squelch the revolution. They
believed that they had correctly assessed the factor of nationalism, and
accused their adversaries of “indifference”, and of
“imperialism”, without grasping the essential point: a world ruled
by capital can only produce capitalist
national structures.43 They thought they had discovered a weak point
in the world system precisely where the latter was demonstrating its power.
Quite soon, of course, their position came under the influence of their foreign
policy (support for Attaturk’s
Under pressure from the
Communist International and above all as a result of its defeat, the Second
Congress of the Polish Communist Party (August 1923) evoked the “defense
of the interests of the whole nation”, under threat from the
“offensive of world capitalism”.
Austria-Hungary44
The Austrian Communist Party
(KPÖ) was formed in November 1918 from various groups or informal circles,
among them the Linksradikalen with
roots in the working class and influence in the socialist party, anarchists,
etc.45 The Wertheim group (more or less anarchist) and the Linksradikalen did not effectively
become incorporated into the Communist Party, however, until February 1919.
Between August 1919 and October 1920, the KPÖ confronted the parliamentary
question. The majority allowed itself to be convinced by Koritschoner, leader
of the former Linksradikalen, not to
participate in parliament; later, in mid-September, he changed his opinion
under the influence of the Communist International. A social democratic left
faction then merged with the Communist Party which, with this contribution, had
close to 15,000 members.
The founding Congress of the
KPÖ had opposed the election of a constituent assembly by shifting
parliamentarism from parliament to the soviets,
which did not resolve the issue.46 There was, at that time, a Volkswehr formed of workers who had been
soldiers in the former Austrian army. At least one battalion was communist. The
Red Guard (radical workers organizations) and the soldiers councils formed part
of it. But who was in command of this army? Who held power? An army was
maintained (and consequently a State), while the State had not been overthrown.
This militia, on the other hand, crushed the riot of April 1919 when the police
were incapable of doing so. The KPÖ also accepted the councils and their
National Executive Committee as an executive organ. An organization is not
revolutionary unless it acts in a revolutionary manner: this was not the case
in this instance. The revolutionaries were, therefore, supporting a capitalist
state organ, a new sort of capitalist state, but one which was capitalist
nonetheless and even more dangerous. At the same time, the KPÖ dedicated
itself to a series of putsches, such as the (unsuccessful) putsch of June-July
1919. This behavior was not contradictory: it was because the KPÖ believed
that the political regime was undermined by a situation of dual power that it
carried out sudden assaults to definitively destroy it. But it was all in vain:
there was no dual power, such as had
indeed existed in
We shall now address the
position adopted by the Austrian communists on the national question. The
position on the national question adopted by Koritschoner, one of the leaders
of the Austrian Communist Party, can be summarized as follows: in opposition to
the various currents of the social democracy of the former
The Austrian Communist Party
was therefore extremely flexible in its attempt to provide an adequate response
to the infinite series of national questions which arose in the former
Austro-Hungarian Empire. In reality, however, Koritschoner always based his
decisions on the interest of the proletariat, and did not recognize the
autonomy of the national question in any respect—unlike Lenin.
Koritschoner also showed, in respect to western Hungary, for example, that this
question did not have any autonomy for the bourgeoisie, either, who emphasized
various national claims, only to later abandon them suddenly, depending on
which position served the counterrevolution. Lukàcs and Gorter, however
(cf. the text reproduced below), the German and Dutch Lefts, and before them,
Luxemburg, had a much clearer understanding of the essentially
counterrevolutionary character of the newly-created states in the east.
The phenomenon which we find
most interesting is the journal Kommunismus,
and its treatment of the connections between the left in
One could consider Kommunismus as a kind of
“semi-official office” of the Communist International.48
Its subtitle presents it as the organ of the Communist International for the
countries of southeast
The September 1920 issue of Kommunismus contained a critique of the
KAPD written by A. Maslow (KPD left). On October 26, commenting on the Halle
Congress where the USPD majority voted to merge with the KPD, Lukàcs saw
this as a “process of sorting-out”. He wanted the USPD left,
“and also, very soon (as we hope), the revolutionary elements of the
KAPD” to join the KPD. After Wolffheim, Laufenberg and Rühle had
been excluded from the KAPD, Lukàcs repeated his appeal to that
party’s revolutionaries: Levi was pleased, and wrote Lukàcs
expressing his wish to welcome them. . . . “The struggle to win over the
mass of the proletariat is far from over, but there is, nonetheless, a mass
party of the proletariat”, Lukàcs responded, without taking into
account the fact that this method was transforming the party into an entity
which was above all real relations.
Roland-Holst, who published a
series of articles entitled “The Tasks of the Communist Party in the
Proletarian Revolution” in early 1921, represented the tendency which was
moving towards the left without truly and thoroughly embracing it: in
theoretical form, it was the precise expression of the actual practice of the
proletarians. We should not copy the Russian Communist Party: European
conditions are different, she explained, explicitly referring to the Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. The
masses/leaders relation is different in
Commenting on the
consequences of the March Action in an article on communist self-criticism and
Levi’s downfall (May 1, 1921), Reval anticipated the Trotsky of 1938:51
“The crisis of the German party is the crisis of its leadership (die Krise der Führer), it is a
moral crisis.” He admitted that the KAPD would never even have existed were
it not for the opportunism of the KPD, but concluded from this fact that the
KAPD would take over the leadership of the German revolution and that
“the KAPD’s left radicalism will be definitively liquidated”.
On the same topic, Lukàcs established a parallel between the economic
crisis affecting the bourgeoisie, and the ideological crisis (a crisis of
consciousness and thus of the party) affecting the proletariat. “The mass
party is only a precondition for the revolution.” Idealism and reformism
would not take long to merge into what would be called “Stalinism”,
justified theoretically and then superficially criticized by Lukàcs.
Founded in 1891, the
Bulgarian Socialist Party was split in 1902-1903 between the
“narrows” (left) and the “liberals” (right). Until 1914
the two parties together had between 1500 and 2000 members; they were primarily
propaganda organizations.52 Their split also divided the trade
unions. The unions were very weak (their active membership was composed of
70,000 artisans and 93,000 wage workers in 1910). The “liberals”
defended
The war was very unpopular in
Between December 1919 and
February 1920, a great strike of railway workers and postal employees took
place, and was defeated by force: several thousand railway workers were dismissed.
The Communist Party acted in an excessively prudent manner in the opinion of
its left faction: the Communist International, however, encouraged the
Communist Party to support Stamboulisky, who was presented as at least leading
a popular movement. Under the leadership of I. Ganchev, a party fraction with
about 1,000 members was formed, which denounced parliamentarism, blaming it for
the Communist Party’s accommodationism. Indeed, from 1919 to 1923, the
Communist Party had overtaken the socialist party and became the leading
opposition party in the Bulgarian parliament.
In May of 1920, without
“intending to show any disrespect to this exemplary party”, Sidarov
tried “to call attention to the deviations in the tactics and principles
of the Third International” in an article published by Kommunismus.54 “Just as
in western Europe, the contradictions which are appearing in Bulgaria are the
fruit of the old tradition of the leadership of the movement and of the absence
of a truly revolutionary tradition. Peaceful evolution within the bourgeois
state has left its mark on the psychology and the revolutionary initiatives of
the communist leadership in
This argument constituted a
refutation in advance of all the justifications for a non-communist policy due
to the backwardness and the specific conditions characteristic of largely
unindustrialized regions. Bordiga, prior to 1924, defended an analogous
position in respect to southern Italy.55
The uprising of a part of the
army in September 1918, under the slogan, “Work, Bread and Return
Home”, was defeated “by the unified power of the
bourgeoisie”. While enumerating other conflicts, Sidarov asserted that
the necessity of struggle “is so strong among the masses that it obliges
the communist party to intervene in this struggle, even if this constitutes an
exception. We deliberately say that the Communist Party only exceptionally
commits itself to this struggle. During the September events, for example, it
held a party conference during the course of which, frankly, it never addressed
these events.” The absence of a united revolutionary leadership favored
Stamboulisky’s freedom of action.
In January 1921, the minority
founded the Communist Workers Party, whose journal, Rabotnicheska Iskra, was published in
An International Communist Left?
This chapter’s
“disjointed” form reflects the absence of relations between the
lefts of the various countries; each practically ignored the other. The
Italians, for instance, reproduced articles by Pannekoek, Gorter and Pankhurst
in Il Soviet, but never devoted any
space to a common elaboration of activities in
There was no international
left; there was, at most, a tendency for its future continuation.57
The lack of simultaneity of events within national contexts and their respective
evolutions impeded the exchange of information. In
The process which led to the
successive formation of left fractions also led to their being destroyed one
after another, and the KAI (cf. Appendix I) was incapable of playing a
coordinating role. The KAI was a site for theoretical encounters and not an
organ for coordinating international activity. After 1921, the Italian Left
received the same treatment which had been imposed upon the Germans: the
Communist International compelled it to mix centrists and communists in the
same party. But the Italian Left did not understand this. It would face the
same problems as the German Left: anti-fascism, united front, fusion with the
centrists, workers government. Except in respect to the trade union and
national questions (which were certainly of capital importance), it would
basically respond in the same way as the German Left: often with more
precision, since the reaction of the German Left was situated on a more
practical level, corresponding to the effective experience of the class, and
sought, where it could do so, a response in action. The Italian Left had
theoretically extended the theoretical-practical critique of the Germans. It
was as remote from the Communist International and the Russian Communists as
the German Left was. But the opposition of the Italian Communist Party came
later, or in any case appeared to
come later, the Italians not having grasped the immensity of their differences
with the Communist International. The Italian Left would misunderstand its
relation to the German Left as much as it would misunderstand its relation to
Lenin.
It is true that some authors,
such as A. Kriegel, consider the communist left, which they call the
“ultra-left”, as something like a vast current which derived from
the anarchists, at a time when the latter were close to the Communist
International and even the Italian Communist Party during its early days.58
But Kriegel conceals the differences within this current and concludes by totally
deforming it to the point of making any differentiations disappear: to include
under this rubric the experiences of Munich and Hungary is a monstrous
caricature which even a sub-Leninist polemicist would not have considered. To
speak of an “international communist left” is not to impose a
structure on a multitude of movements which are as varied as they are unlike
one another. It is obvious that the revolutionary “solution” for
the epoch could not have consisted in a mindless agglomeration of all these
tendencies. Only a minority had arrived at a (relatively) correct view and had
tried to act on that basis. The “German” and “Italian”
communist lefts had in part cleared the way for communist perspectives, while
the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists of all stripes remained trapped
in the past, even though a considerable number of them were revolutionaries.
Even the German and Italian Lefts were still the prisoners of serious errors.
Confusion reigned everywhere, but it
was not shared equally. Spartacism
and Bolshevism were both hybrids halfway between the revolution and centrism.
This contradiction would be resolved. After the twilight of the movement, their
radical aspects (which constituted an always living contribution:
internationalism for the former, revolutionary defeatism and the question of
the state for the latter) lost their importance to the benefit of positions
inherited from their social democratic origins, which can be summarized as
follows: win over the majority of the workers. Little by little, most militants
turned towards reformism and became integrated into the party apparatus, in the
KPD as in the RCP.
The fragmentation of the left
reflected the weakness of the proletariat. Depending on the original
experiences of the various countries, the revolutionaries managed to clarify
some issues and remained confused about others. If the proletariat had
manifested proofs of its internationalism and had truly acted on a worldwide
scale, the left would have been enriched and would have developed alongside it:
but this did not happen. At the time, the only trait common to the proletarians
of the different countries was their attachment to democracy (cf. Chapter 4). Later, proletarian atomization led to
the fragmentation of the left groups and their descent into sectarianism (cf.
Appendix I).
One of the criteria which
differentiated the German Left from the other manifestations of the communist
left is undoubtedly the trade union question. Only the Dutch-German Left
understood that it was impossible for the workers to ever again create
permanent revolutionary workers organizations. Many left communists were
supporters of “industrial unions” but did not see the connection
linking classical and industrial trade unions, and even expected that the
former would be transformed into the latter, and defended systematic activity
within the trade unions.59 Even though DeLeon worked in the old
trade unions, he wanted to create new workers organizations.60 The
national question is the other differentiating criterion. At that time the
German Left groups devoted little attention to the national question, but they
conceived of it in essentially the same terms as the SDKPL, although Pannekoek
opposed Luxemburg’s position on imperialism (cf. Chapter 3).61
Today the national and trade union questions are two crucial criteria to
determine whether an orientation is clinging to the bygone past or preparing
for the revolution.
In retrospect, the Italian
Left is considered by the German Left as one more variant of the much-detested
Leninism. Reciprocally, the Italian Left considers the German Left as a variety
of anarchosyndicalism. These conflicting interpretations allow the
representatives, either official or unofficial, of these traditions to avoid
the question of their common origin.
Where a double supersession was necessary, the defenders of each current
instead became addicted to their own particular special characteristics.
What is extraordinary about
these polemics is the mutual ignorance of the real nature of the objects of
their attacks. Bordiga, in articles from 1955-1957, compared the KAPD to the
revolutionary syndicalists.62 In his texts he frequently compared
the German Left to the Gramscian current. In fact, Gramsci distinguished
between “industrial power” and “political power”. In
its worst formulations, the KAPD did consider that taking power in the
workplace precedes taking political
power. In other formulations, it presents the matter as two parallel moments.
But the ambiguity persisted. In its weakest and most dangerous form, this
conception leads to making the struggle against the state equivalent to the
action of the economic organizations: the rank and file workers organizations
would be strong enough to “make the exercise of counter-violence superfluous
or at least secondary”, DeLeon thought.63 The texts and above
all the practice of the German Left prove, however, that it never reduced
“political” to “economic”. There are, of course, traces
of revolutionary syndicalism in Bergmann’s intervention at the Third
World Congress, for example, 64 but they always recalled the danger
of losing the global perspective. The
same delegate criticized the IWW and the factory occupations in
The Italian Left, like the
groups comprising the German Left, opposed, for example, the English
communists’ affiliation with the Labour Party,67 but insisted on
showing that its disagreement with Lenin on this point was of secondary
importance, since his position contained the principled theses which far transcended this particular issue.68
Lenin’s position in this case rests on the idea (justly refuted by the Italian
Communist Party) that social democracy was the right wing of the workers
movement, rather than one of the forms assumed by capital. The Italian Left
likewise insisted on the masses-leaders opposition, so beloved by the German
Left.69 The KAPD attempted, above all, to promote the most
wide-ranging proletarian action possible. Its activity was not, in any event,
any more unilateral than constantly
repeating the necessity of the party.
The German and Italian Lefts did not possess a correct representation of what
they were doing, since each interpreted its own practice with the aid of
partially false theories. The Germans were prone to democratism, the Italians
to the metaphysics of the party, although neither could be reduced to either
one of these “deviations”. The organizational question inevitably
acquires excessive importance when proletarian action is lacking. The
masses-leaders distinction (cf. Chapter 14), a preoccupation also shared by the
Italian Communist Party, while so poorly expressed by the Germans, was
addressed in just as unsatisfactory a way by the Italians with their
theorization of the party. This emphasis on the masses-leaders opposition was
not so much an attempt to guarantee a democratic organization, as an effort to
prevent the formation of a VKPD-type group or the kind of organization the
Communist International wanted to impose upon the Italian Communist Party. It
was this rejection of the masses-leaders perspective, despite what he himself
thought, which inspired Gorter to write:
“Leadership politics is
not the politics of leaders and centralization—without which nothing can
be obtained, any more than in the absence of a party—but the politics
which . . . holds that the leaders can be victorious if they at least have a
large numbers of people behind them.”70 One could say much the
same of the Left’s educationalism:
“The real mysticism is
. . . that of revolutionary parliamentarism, which thinks it can educate the
working class voters (and in Lenin’s vision even the peasants and the
‘functionaries’) and lead them to believe in the need for
revolution by means of a well-organized presence in bourgeois
institutions.”71 One could quote innumerable Leninist
declarations totally within the “culturalist” orientation denounced
by Bordiga after 1912.72 A text from 1919 has achieved classic
status: 73
“Only parliamentarism,
thanks to civilized culture, has allowed the oppressed class of the
proletarians to become conscious of itself and to create a worldwide workers
movement. Without parliamentarism, without the electoral principle, this
evolution of the working class would have been impossible.” This combines
a partial, Russian point of view with the western social democratic deviation
in regards to consciousness, education and organization as preconditions for action. He would therefore incite the western
revolutionaries to rejuvenate the trade union movement74 in order to
provide the “Communist Party” with a mass trade union75
and electoral base.
The Italian Left’s
organizational fetishism concerning the Communist International and its
centralized “discipline” would continue to unfold.76 So
as not to have to situate itself within the trend towards an international
left, the Italian Left gave itself adversaries which were no match for it, Trotsky
and Luxemburg, 77 in order to avoid confronting the only
interlocutor of its own stature: the German Left. Such a confrontation did not
take place at the time. But defeat had such an impact upon a revolutionary of
Bordiga’s temperament that he forgot what he had written about the KAPD
in 1920.78 Although he did not take the side of the party of the
German Left against the official KPD, Bordiga did not reject it either and
considered it to be the most vigorous aspect of the movement in Germany. He judged
that it would evolve by eliminating its non-Marxist aspects: he did not,
therefore, situate it outside of the
“Marxist” camp, as if its positions rested upon other principles. The Italian Left did not
identify itself with the German Left, but did consider the latter to inhabit a
framework of Marxist principles identical to its own, and not an
anarcho-communist mixture. Urquidi, author of a study of the origins of the
Italian Communist Party, wrote that 79 “A. Pannekoek is the
only foreign author whose name is frequently repeated in the columns of Il Soviet. One could also read various
articles by H. Gorter and H. Roland-Holst in that journal. It is even more
surprising that, from 1918 to 1921, one does not find even one article by
Lenin. The most Il Soviet offers in
this respect are short extracts from Bukharin and Kollontai, and these are the
only Russians published in Bordiga’s journal.”80 We will
recall that in April 1920 Il Soviet
described Pannekoek as an “excellent theoretician of Marxism” and
the KPN as a “very good communist party”.81
Upon issuing a Manifesto to rectify the situation
within the Communist International and the Italian Communist Party, Bordiga
would judge in 1923 that “one might think that it would have been better
to issue this warning sooner. But, as we have said in relation to the matter of
tactics, the disagreement was imperceptible for quite some time: the Communist
International’s method consisted in presenting its own slogans one by
one.”82 The Italian Communist Party began to fall victim (in
this case, as well, due to the weakness of the revolution) 83 to
what it had imputed to the German communists. But the communist left, in
Depending on the environment
where they are encountered, one faction or party is often
“anarchist” or “Leninist” to the other. In early 1920,
Lenin stated that the Marxist-anarchist opposition had been superseded.84
Later, in 1921, he definitively catalogued the German Left under the rubric of
“anarchism”.85 If by “anarchism” one means
the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat and all that implies, then
the KAPD was no more “anarchist” than Bordiga, about whom Lenin
said at the Third Congress: “He has most loyally declared . . . that he
has renounced all anarchism and all anti-parliamentarism.”86
The Italian Left would later be known not for its orthodoxy (compared to the
German Left, with its occasional syndicalist and federalist appearances) but for its doctrinal adherence
to and faith in the Communist International. Bordiga’s position is
somewhat reminiscent of that of Roland-Holst (cf. above). The Communist
International was still a potentially communist force, it had to be preserved.
The Italian Left was moving in
the direction of collaboration with the German Left in 1917-1921, but the
question was never really posed because the proletariat did not transcend the
national framework. The position which maintains that the Italian Left was not
part of the communist left, or that other position which holds that it was the
only communist left, are both founded upon a false criterion: the
Leninist/non-Leninist opposition. As a “Leninist”, Bordiga would be
totally distinct from the German Left. It is the very idea of this
“Leninism” as a reference point for the history of the
revolutionary movement of that epoch, which must again be challenged. One
cannot study history from the vantage point of a time after the period in
question. It was only after 192387 that “Leninism” became
an ideological reference point. In the sense in which the term is ordinarily
used, Leninism has never existed. It is an invention and a distortion of
reality. “Leninism” and “Trotskyism” are products of
the defeat, not its cause or its remedy. It is absurd to use Bolshevism as an
object lesson as Rühle did in 1939, especially when Stalin was at that
time liquidating all that remained of it.88
It would be vain to develop
this or that partial aspect by considering it as the whole. Thus, in 1917-1921,
no one had a global vision, and various degrees of confusion reigned
everywhere. The “German Left” is itself a convenient formula which
conceals quite different realities. Rühle was much more lucid about the
real policy of the Communist International and the need to break with it, but
succumbed to certain federalist and educationalist illusions. Gorter had too
much faith in the Communist International and deluded himself about the
possibility of building a leftist current within it, but had a better understanding
of the need to unify the movement and to strengthen its organization. He was
mistaken about March 1921, which Rühle assessed more correctly. Bordiga
overestimated the prospects offered by the Communist International, without
seeing that the failure of the world revolutionary movement would bring in its
wake a regression on the part of the
Russians and an initially ambiguous policy which would become reactionary
later. We have shown how both the KAPD of 1920 and the Italian Communist Party
insisted on discipline, the need for
an organizing framework to prepare for the movement’s reactivation.89
Their shared organizational fetishism was not catastrophic, however, since all
activity brings deviation with it (by transforming a means to an end), which is
often corrected by the unfolding of the action itself (but not always).
The Left (German and Italian)
confronted the same problems in different countries, and tried to respond to
these problems. In Italy, Bordiga made concessions at the Bologna Congress (October
1919) and at Livorno (January 1921).90 Damen (who broke with the
“Bordigist” ICP during the early 1950s) would write that the
abstentionist fraction should have brought about the schism sooner: in 1919
rather than in 1921.91 The left was diverted from the theme of its
international convergence at the Second World Congress in 1920. Rühle had
contributed to this, by refusing to represent the KAPD at the Congress, but it
was primarily due to the Bolsheviks who arranged everything in order to prevent
the various lefts from approaching one another. “The need to seriously
consider international relations never arose, however, for the German Left.
Perhaps this was the clearest indication of its insignificance.”92
Considered as a whole, the course of the revolutionary movement did not depend
on the Left, but on the extent and depth of the social crisis, including the
greater or lesser capacity of the proletarians to organize themselves with a
view to destroying capitalist society.
1. La question syndicale…., p. 40.
2. Structure économique et sociale de la
Russie d’Aujourd’hui (texts from 1955-1957), Ed. de
l’Oubli, 1975, p. 67. Compare with Schapiro.
3. Quoted
by R. Daniels in A Documentary History of
Communism, Random House,
4. Bukharin
and Preobrazhensky, ABC du communisme
(1919), Maspero. In English: The ABC of
Communism, The University of
5. IC, No. 5.
6. Kriegel:
pp. 393-395, and the documents collected in Le
congrès de Tours, Julliard, Archival Collection.
7. Cf.,
for example, Le Réveil communiste
(1927-1929).
8. Le Mouvement social, July-September
1973.
9. No.
5, article by E. Munch.
10. Le Mouvement social, Ibid., p. 122.
11. Le Phare, March 1921.
12. IC, No. 15.
13. Le pain et les roses, p. 160.
14. Hulse,
pp. 167-169.
15. Overstraeten:
Le Phare, January-February 1920,
“Le congrès du POB”. It is often difficult to ascertain the
dates of birth of these organizations, because the facts change according to
the use of the term “communist party”. The Belgian Communist Party
was officially founded in 1921, but the International Communists of Brussels
(cf. below) sometimes called themselves the “Communist Party”. Mouvement capitaliste et révolution
russe. Le procès de dissolution de l’art,
16. Le Phare, March 1921, p. 401.
17. Invariance, No. 7, for comparison with
Lukàcs on this topic.
18. Page
81.
19. Published
in English in 1919 by the Workers Socialist Federation,
20. La question syndicale…., p. 50.
21. IC, No. 11.
22. Les Temps Modernes, June 1972, “La
contre-révolution irlandaise”.
23. W.
Kendall: The Revolutionary Movement in
24. Oeuvres, Vol. 29, Ed. Sociales, 1962, p.
567.
25. Ibid., Vol. 31, pp. 205-206.
26. One
can get an impression of Pankhurst by reading her report on her trip to
27. The
articles and the recent book by the historian Hinton complement B. Pribicevic: The Shop Stewards Movement and Workers
Control 1920-1922,
28. Too
often idealized in
29. Aldred
had been in contact with the anarchists (reproaching E. Goldman for her
systematic hostility towards
On
the Socialist Labour Party versus the Communist International, cf. J. Clunie: The Third (Communist) International,
Socialist Labor Press,
30 T.
Draper: The Roots of American Communism,
Viking Press,
31. Cf.
his texts from the prewar period in Pannekoek
and the Workers Councils.
32. In
the era of the first trade unions, in
33. Cf.
the Manifestos of the two parties in Invariance,
No. 7, pp. 22-32.
34. IC, No. 10, May 1920.
35. Draper,
pp. 216-217.
36. Ibid., Chapter XV, pp. 246, et seq.
37. Besides
the works of Nettl and C. Weil, cf. I. Deutscher, La tragédie du PC polaco, in Les Temps Modernes, March 1958; and M. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland, Harvard
University Press, 1959.
38. Tych.
39. IC, Nos. 6 and 7.
40. Ibid., No. 9, and Bulletin Communiste,
41. Intégration capitaliste et rupture
ouvrière, pp. 3-38.
42. Kommunismus,
43. One
of the great faults of the Italian Left is that it never overcame the Leninist
view on this point despite the richness of some of its contributions. For
example, Bordiga: Facteurs de race et
nation, in Fil du Temps, No. 5.
44. F.
Carsten: Revolution in
45. L.
Laurat: Le PC autrichien, in Contributions à l’histoire du
Comintern, Droz, 1965.
46. IC, No. 6, “Le soviet des
députés ouvriers in Autriche allemande”, by Koritschoner.
47. Lazitch,
Les PC d’Europe 1919-1955, Les
Iles d’Or, p. 86.
48. Hulse,
pp. 164-167.
49. Invariance, No. 7.
50. Oeuvres, Vol. 31, pp. 167-169.
Lukàcs would soon directly attack the KAPD: cf. The Communist Review, October 1921, “The Problem of Communist
Organization”.
51. L’agonie du capitalisme et les
tâches de la IVa Internationale, a 1938 programmatic text
of this organization, reduced the “crisis of humanity” to the
“crisis of its leadership”.
52. J.
Rothschild: The Communist Party of
53. Rothschild,
pp. 81-83.
54. Kommunismus, Nos. 16-17 and 18. The
journal appended the following note: “Comrade Sidarov belongs to the
anti-parliamentary left wing of the BCP. We shall soon publish a report by a
Bulgarian comrade from the right wing.”
55. A.
de Clementi: “La révolution d’octubre et le mouvement
ouvrier italien”, in La
révolution d’octubre et le mouvement ouvrier européen,
pp. 105-125, as well as Bordiga et la
passion du communisme, p. 199.
56. IC, No. 17.
57. PC, No. 58, pp. 146-157, and La question syndicale…., p. 32.
Cf., for example, the case of the Danish Left, and the notes at the end of D.
Nieuwenhuis.
58. Kriegel:
Aux origins du communisme français,
as well as her thesis, Imprimerie Nationale, 1964.
59. Compare,
for example, the Dreadnought Publishers preface to Zinoviev: The Communist Party and Industrial Unionism,
with Bergmann’s intervention at the Third World Congress. The latter may
be viewed at the website Wage Slave
X’s Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Homepage, “Discussion of
Zinoviev’s Report on the Trade Union Question”.
60. The
German Left severely criticized DeLeonism: cf. International Council Correspondence, March 1935.
61. Cf.
Mattick’s article cited in footnote No. 41 above, and Pannekoek and the Workers Councils, Part
3, Chapter 2. Compare with Bordiga, Prometeo,
No. 4 (1924), “Le communisme et la question national”.
62. Structure économique et sociale de la
Russie…., pp. 66-67.
63. Cf.
DeLeon, quoted in Le Prolétaire,
No. 145.
64. Bergmann:
in La gauche allemande….; for
English translation, see footnote 59 above.
65. Cf.
the example of the trade union question, in
PC, No. 56, p. 44.
66. PC, No. 58, p. 104.
67. La question syndicale…., p. 51.
68. PC, No. 60, pp. 35-39.
69. Ibid., No. 53-54, pp. 75-76.
70. Réponse à Lénine,
Librairie Ouvrière, 1931, reprinted in 1969, pp. 47-48.
71. La question syndicale…., p. 39.
72. Bordiga et la passion…., p. 198,
and PC No. 56, pp. 80-82.
73. De l’État, Oeuvres, Vol. 29, p. 491.
74. La question syndicale…., p. 46.
75. A.
Borcsuk: Contribution à
l’étude des grèves de 1919 et de 1920 en
76. PC, No. 75, p. 71.
77. “Luxemburg
was only the most brilliant and undoubtedly the most important spokesperson of
an international revolutionary current…”, ibid., p. 48. The PCI also devoted an entire issue of its journal
to a refutation of Trotskyism (No. 57).
78. Il Soviet,
79. Cf.
Chapter 11, No. 6, and also, concerning the Third Congress, Rassegna Comunista, Nos. 8 to 13, 1921,
International Reprint, Savona, 1970. For a bibliography, cf. Invariance, No. 8, pp. 58-60, and Sociologie du communisme en Italie,
Plon, 1974.
80. The
left regularly collaborated with the Communist International press from its
beginnings, and the Communist International’s leadership did not try to
keep its distance from this current by demanding different
“principles”. This was true of Nos. 2 (Pannekoek and Pankhurst), 3
(Pankhurst), etc., of the IC. The
French Bulletin Communiste behaved
the same way.
81.
82. Invariance, No. 7, pp. 106-107, and
Gruber, p. 378.
83. PC, Nos. 45 to 50.
84. Oeuvres, Vol. 30, p. 432.
85. Ibid., Vol. 32, pp. 547-548.
86. Ibid., pp. 495-496.
87. Cf.,
in particular, the work of Zinoviev bearing this title, which he defines as
“the Marxism of the age of imperialism”. The Italian Left rejected
this definition, and understood that Lenin did not represent an instance of
“progress” in relation to Marx, but did not correctly situate
Lenin. Lenin both went beyond and fell
short of Marx at the same time. Cf. Bordiga’s lecture, “Lenine
sur le chemin de la révolution” (1924).
88. La lutte contre fascisme commence par la lutte
contre le bolchevisme, in La
contre-révolution bureaucratique. In English: The Struggle against Fascism begins with the Struggle against
Bolshevism, Bratach Dubh Editions,
89. Le Fil du Temps, No. 8 (texts of the
left, 1917-1925).
90. Bordiga et la passion…., pp.
206-209.
91. A. Bordiga: validità e limite
d’una esperienza, PCI (Battaglia Comunista), 1970.
92. Mattick:
“Otto Rühle and the German Labour Movement”, in Anti-Bolshevik Communism, M.E. Sharpe,
A historian of ideas, tying
up loose ends and going over the themes of his research, could establish a
series of correspondences between the German and Italian Lefts, Luxemburgism
and the German Left, the Italian Left and Leninism, and Leninism and the German
Left. This complexity testifies to the fact that there can be no theoretical
synthesis without a practical synthesis through proletarian action. The German
Left was influenced by the SPD left, the SDKPL and Bolshevism (united in the
personality of Radek prior to 1914), the IWW, the wartime mass workers
organizations, and revolutionary syndicalism. Only by virtue of being linked to
an active movement could theory reform itself by avoiding the double pitfalls
of eclecticism and sectarianism. The least that can be done now is to examine
problems on the basis of their real contradictions, and not of their secondary
effects. In conditions which were characterized by both class struggle as well
as revolutionary weakness, as in 1917-1921, one cannot speak of a
“correct” line unfortunately defended by a small minority, whose
more generalized application would have prevented the disaster which befell it.
Conversely, even within currents which were as much the prisoners of the old
movement as was Spartacism, there were tendencies toward clarification.
The communist left was not
the brain of a movement, but the highest expression of its contradictions and,
not manifesting a comprehensive vision, was itself contradictory. It was much
more the product of a situation which was a revolutionary dead end, than the
most advanced element of a generally revolutionary movement which was defeated.
In reality, only a fraction of the proletarians had entered the fray. What J.
Andrieu had feared after the Commune had come to pass:
“The proletariat has
always been beaten because it has drawn back in fear from silent challenges. It
has given the impression that it would attack. . . . Later it has fought
without order or preparation. These are the facts! Neither time nor means allow
us to be defeated again. . . . The struggle for power is nothing but a pretext
for the next day’s throat-cutting.”1
The new movements will not be
like 1919 writ large. It is criminal to idealize this period, from which the
movement must above all retain the clearest example of categorical and
democratic evisceration, on a continental scale, in the history of the
proletariat. It is not in order to reject the past in its totality that
revolutionaries point out some of the defeats of the proletariat (which are
also their own defeats, since they form
an integral part of the proletariat), but in order, by every possible
means, to avoid them in the future. To conceive of the extent of the
counterrevolution is not to pass from one extreme to another, and to completely
transform the classic leftist outlook in order to suddenly discover that . . .
nothing at all had taken place. Interpreting the period as a simple adaptation on
the part of capital to its problems would mean abandoning one naïve stance
for another. This point of view is as “undialectical” as the
concept of the “heroic period” of the “first four
congresses” of the Communist International. Nothing justifies the assertion
that the German proletariat was condemned in advance. The a posteriori judgment which attributes its defeat to
“objective conditions” forgets to situate itself and to re-situate
action in relation to those conditions: revolutionary action does not create these conditions, but modifies them. Absolute determinism is
nothing but an inverted voluntarism, which explains everything by the absence
of the “party”.
“The outcome is not
always the same victory frustrated, one must not always attribute it to the
same causes, and it is always difficult to affirm that a different line of
conduct on the part of the revolutionaries would have altered the
result.”2
In considering the
confrontation between the German Left and the rest of the revolutionary
movement, or what is taken to be such a confrontation, it would be tempting to
quote Engels’ commentary on the Gotha Congress: 3 “On
the theoretical level we are a hundred times superior to the Lassallians, but
we are far from being their equals in political skill.” Once again,
“honest folk” have been cheated by slick politicians. To leave it
at that, however, would amount to making this a political history. The class
struggle in
Both Lenin’s Infantile Disorder and Gorter’s Open Letter to Comrade Lenin are equally
incapable of defining a strategy for victory. The former submerges the
proletariat into the old ruts. The latter does not indicate the
revolution’s means of social transformation: by the time it was written,
the forms of organization which it advocated were without content and were
collapsing. After having witnessed the difficulties encountered in the
transition from one world to another in the revolutionary movements of that
era, Mattick concluded: “The lesson learned was how not to
proceed.”5 Paraphrasing Lenin on the Commune, we could say
about Germany in 1917-1921: it is a movement which must not be ours.6 If one compares the insurrection of
January 1919, the red army of the Ruhr and the March Action, the characteristic
which all three of these uprisings have in common is that they always evolved
within a social framework which, at bottom, remained the same. The sailors who
arrived in
The German Left anticipated
certain aspects of the “modern” revolutionary critique: its
analysis of parliamentarism as a spectacle (“theater”,
“stage”, etc.), for example. But its defeat can also be measured by
the fact that it, too, suffered from a gap between its movement and the organizations
which it had provided itself. The 1921 March Action is testimony to how the
KAPD, too, acted like “a party in the traditional sense”, exhorting
the workers to make the revolution, despite its rank and file’s
“break with the leader/follower tradition”.
It is strange to see how
Gorter, in his Last Letter to Lenin,
denies the divisions on the left. By way of a revolutionary, yet numerically
small movement, the activity of the German Left was also one of the last mass
attempts undertaken to “provide an organization” to the
proletariat, within the midst of the bourgeois democratic revolution faced with
the problem of creating representative
institutions. But this attempt took place at a time when it was no longer
possible. In this sense the German Left was undoubtedly the expression of the
first great proletarian assault, but one which was still carried out within an organizational perspective whose debates
before and after the war (party/class, leaders/masses, centralism/federalism)
led to a conception which was partly false. The war of 1914, by allowing
capital to really penetrate all of society, obliged the communist revolution to
situate itself on the same terrain or be defeated, as in
Afterwards, some people made
a total ideological about-face: “All the objective conditions were
present. Only one detail was lacking, but this was a detail which, in reality,
vulgar Marxism had never taken into account: the subjective will,
self-confidence, the value of moving towards what is new. And this detail was
everything.”12 But this was because the previous struggles had
not led to a new movement (by integrating the workers struggles into capital)
and because the disturbances were too feeble to break with that past (the
democratic political revolution of November 1918).13
The communist left was the
expression of the crisis of the proletariat.
The communist movement was in a state of crisis at every crucial moment,
because it had left capitalist society behind and was building another society
at the same time. Some lost hope; others transformed secondary forms into
fetishes. But the sign of the subversive power of the German Left is
undoubtedly that it prevents us from falling into revolutionary complacency,
the idolatry of the proletariat and the anti-materialist belief in the
inevitability of communism. Because the defeat of the most combative
proletarians affects us so profoundly, it helps us in our efforts to avoid
being defeated next time.14
1. Mémories pour server à l’histoire de la Commune de
París de 1871, Payot, 1971, p. 185.
2. Bordiga: De la Commune à la IIIa Internationale,
in La question syndicale…., p.
52.
3. Selected Writings, Penguin, 1967, pp.133-134.
4. “Comrade
Hungarian workers, you have provided a better example to the world than soviet
5. “Otto
Rühle and the German Labour Movement”, p. 95.
6. Cf. Chapter 3, Note
34.
7. La tragedie de Spartacus, in Spartacus
et la Commune de
8. PC, Nos. 53-54, p. 78.
9. The IC, No. 12, p. 246.
10. Réponse à Lénine, p. 47.
11. Manuscrits de 1844, Oeuvres, Gallimard, II, p. 63.
12. Brauner und roter Faschismus.
13. This
regression allowed the official Communist Party, in 1958, to detect in this
“a bourgeois democratic revolution…realized to a certain degree by
proletarian means and methods”. (Ulbricht, quoted by Badia, p. 136).
14. All
theoretical work is a reaction
against other theoretical works and tends to exaggerate certain aspects. In
general, this study should be read in conjunction with Pannekoek and the Workers Councils and La gauche allemande….
Sectarianism
The disagreements between the
KAPD and Rühle and between the AAUD and the AAUD-E, Mattick writes,
“had no practical meaning. . . . The more one thought in collective
terms, the more isolated one became. Capitalism, in its fascistic form,
appeared as the only real collectivism. . . .”1
The reduction of the great
organizations of the German Left to the status of sects was the consequence of both the end of the revolution in 1921
and of the willingness of a certain number of German Left Communists to
preserve their organizations during a period when they no longer played any
real role at all in the practical struggles of a working class which had turned
in its entirety towards reformist action. Their activity, however, was not
reproduced or permanently revived by the real movement. The groups ossified,
and nothing was left of them except a skeletal apparatus composed for the most
part of old leaders from an intellectual or petty bourgeois background. The
mass of workers who had joined these organizations oriented towards
revolutionary action returned to “normal life”, since, for the
proletariat, the revolution is a moment of “normal life” which
arises when this “life” becomes too intolerable, and when the
capitalist mode of production, which assures the conditions of this life,
itself enters into crisis. The revolution is not a myth, an ideal which must
become reality. The revolution is not “made” by “making
it”, even when everyone enjoys making it.
In the Communist Workers International (1923), Gorter expounds the idea
that the revolution’s worst enemies (for a limited, but extensive period)
are all the workers of all countries.
Despite his own inclinations, this recognition obliges him not only to reject
the willingness to attach oneself “to the masses” in such a period,
but also to reexamine traditional revolutionary activity
(“agitation”, “propaganda”) among the workers. On the
one hand, the understanding of this point undermines the workerist tendency
present in the German Left. On the other hand, it prohibits trying to exhort
the workers to make the revolution. This is what Marx thought after 1850, and
Bordiga after 1945: but a good part of the left did not take this into account
and persisted in its activism.
To speak of sects is not merely to indicate the
small size of organizations such as the KAPD after 1923, or the fact that all
of the left groups taken together, which counted hundreds of thousands of
members between 1920 and 1921, and 20,000 in 1923, had only a few hundred
members when Hitler seized power. The word sect
also characterizes a whole range of political practices.2 People get
together, for example, “on the basis of certain ideas” and work to
spread them (in this case the idea of the councils, the idea of the
self-activity of the masses, the idea of unitary organization, etc.). Sects
have a whole organizational ritual, congresses where speeches are made,
resolutions adopted, schisms of historical importance take place, etc. After
its decline in the early 1920s, the left did “practically” nothing,
that is, its impact on immediate reality was null. Its theoretical activity
primarily consisted of repeating some
ideas which had been produced by the
German revolution; Pannekoek and the Group of International Communists of
Holland (GIKH), however, did undertake some theoretical elaboration of these
basic themes.
The KAI and the Schism in the KAPD
The birth of the KAI
coincided with the decomposition of the KAPD and the AAUD. In reality, it was
still-born. Trotsky was unaware of just how correct he was by prophesying at
the Third Congress: “The danger that it would grow larger is the least of
the problems which would confront a Fourth International, should the latter
ever be founded.”3
On July 31, the Central
Committee of the KAPD appointed a committee to prepare the foundation of a new
international by establishing contacts with various leftist groups in other
countries. Two tendencies soon confronted one another over this issue, to which
was added the question of participation in wage struggles. The first conflict
was between the political and ideological leaders in
The group centered around
Schröder, who was the leading spirit behind an “international office
of information and organization for the KAI”, came into conflict with the
party majority, who judged the construction of an international to be
inopportune before the establishment of the KAPD on a more solid footing, whose
cadres and general capabilities had been steadily diminishing since the 1921
defeat. This anti-KAI majority also wanted the party, as such, to participate
in wage struggles and economic struggles in general, which had, with the ebb of
the revolution, come to occupy a preferential place. The minority, known as the
“intellectuals”, rejected this kind of compromise. While they were
maneuvering to get their line adopted at the March 1922 session of the central
committee, they were excluded by the
After this, there were two
KAPDs, two Communist Workers Newspapers,
two AAUDs and two Kampfrufs (Call to
Struggle), which was the organ of the AAUD. The
For the
After September 1921, the
Dutch Left formed the Communist Workers Party of the
The AAUD-E
The AAUD-E spawned numerous
factions. Until 1925, its leadership was in the hands of Rühle, Pfempfert
and J. Broh (who had left the USPD). There were many expressionist artists on
the editorial committees of Die Aktion
and Die Einheitsfront (the United Front),
the main journal of the AAUD-E. One tendency wanted to unite with the FAUD.
Another wanted to participate in wage struggles and the elections for the legal
works councils—this faction was excluded. Another tendency, the so-called
Heidenau or “smokestack autonomy” tendency, defended absolute
autonomy. Finally, the “council communist” or
“centralist” tendency fought to make the resolutions approved by
the AAUD-E’s Congress compulsory for all the organization’s members.
The latter tendency emerged
victorious and made the AAUD-E into an organization which was no longer opposed
to the KAPD and the AAUD on the issue of “organizational
principles”. The efforts of the Berlin KAPD to achieve reunification were
rejected until 1925. The Heidenau tendency moved in 1923 towards resolutely
anti-organizational positions of principle, mixed with anti-intellectualism: it
dissolved itself in December 1923.
“All organizations
pursue their own survival. The united front of all the creators cannot be
realized in the factories and in the countryside unless the organizations rid
themselves of all their defining characteristics, since they smuggle the
bacillus of schism and therefore the absence of unity into the workers movement
with their programs, their leaders and their factory walls. They constitute an
obstacle to progress. The comrades of Heidenau have arrived at the necessary
conclusions and, first of all, destroy their own organization.”7
K. Guttmann, a member of the
AAUD-E, declared: “In the German proletariat, whatever does not teach
organization is not revolutionary” (Los
von Moskau!, published by the AAUD-E of
In 1925, Rühle, judging
that the reaction was too powerful to justify the continuation of revolutionary
activity, resigned from the AAUD-E. According to the historians of the GDR,
9 he rejoined the SPD. This seems quite improbable, especially since
these Documents from
The AAUD-E joined two other
groups in 1926 to form the Spartacus League of Left Communist Organizations (or
“Spartacus No. 2”) under the patronage of Pfempfert and Die Aktion. The other two groups in this
organization were the Industrial Union of Transport Workers and Ivan
Katz’s group, which had recently been excluded from the KPD for
“Trotskyism”. This fusion earned the ridicule of the KAPD, but the
The KAPD (
The
Two years later, these
statements would return to haunt Schröder and his comrades: they would be
accused of playing a role within the revolutionary organizations which could
not even be attempted within the bourgeois parties.
“The idea that
knowledge is superior to all the other manifestations and functions of human
life has a basis which is easily explained by historical materialism: the
development of mechanical thinking within the capitalist economic form.
Accounting and calculation, which only present knowledge, have become vital
laws for the capitalist economic form, which are reflected in the spiritual
life of bourgeois society through the glorification of the intellect, of
knowledge” (Die Revolution,
journal of the Heidenau tendency, No. 20, 1922).
It was the rejection of
scientism, of the dictatorship of theoretical knowledge and
“consciousness” (preceding action) which is brought by knowledge
and science, as this latter trend was manifested in the socialist movement
(Kautsky): but this rejection would in effect be based upon the framework of a
false opposition between intellect and spontaneity.
In 1925, the principle
leaders of the
The KAPD (
Together with the Berlin AAUD,
the Berlin KAPD was the most working-class of all the surviving left groups.
Its leadership was for the most part anonymous. It was, in brief, more activist
than the other groups, launching numerous calls for insurrection in 1923, but
it was also non-existent outside
The Fifth Congress of the
KAPD (
In 1926, the “grenade
affair” took place, as well as the schism of the Berlin KAPD. The English
press had revealed that the Russians were contributing to German rearmament,
offering
Although part of this
opposition returned to the party in 1928, the wound was healed only by means of
an extreme weakening of the organization, since their return coincided with the
departure of the AAUD-Opposition tendency. After 1928, this KAPD tendency was
no longer any more important than its
The AAUD (
The AAUD-Berlin underwent a
schism at its Seventh Conference in 1927, when the majority declared their
support for participation in the partial struggles of the working class, the
sole proviso being that the workers themselves must conduct the struggles. The
AAUD urged its members to form “action committees” in the factories
to prepare wildcat strikes. For the first time in its history it would
therefore conduct an economic struggle: the struggle of the
During the crucial years
1920-1930, the
Council Communism in the
The Dutch Communist Workers
Party subsisted until the 1930s, holding fast to the positions of the
KAPD-Essen. A small minority, however, including H. Canne Meijer (with whom
Pannekoek sympathized) broke with the party due to the issues of the death
crisis and day-to-day practice. This group, which represented only a few
individuals, established contacts with some members of the
The essential idea of the
text is that the “communist economy”, like any other, needs an
accounting unit to respond to society’s needs without resorting to
commercial accounting and economic regulation by way of the law of value. This
unit is social average labor time. This thesis takes it for granted that
communism will still have an economy,
and that average social labor time would be a measure on a par with the liter
or the kilogram. The theory has the merit of posing the question of communism; but, by introducing the
general accounting unit—a unit of average labor time not determined by
the market—it preserves the value relation, the general equivalent, even
though it destroys its apparent forms: money, etc. Communism, however, as
Bordiga was alone in repeating for many years, is the supersession of all kinds
of commercial value; if this kind of value must be counted, it is in physical
quantities, but not in order to quantify and regulate an exchange which no
longer exists.16
The Dutch leftists, however,
had reinvented a thesis which had already been criticized by Marx in his
critique of Proudhon.17 The idea of a conscious and direct calculation of abstract average
labor time, without passing through the mediation of money, is foreign to the
communist perspective, which eventually only counts in physical quantities (in
the fullest sense of the term).18
The
GIKH was quite consistent and became very influential, since it had the merit,
in comparison to the remnants of the KAPD, of not wanting to “make the
revolution”, and devoted its efforts to small tasks imposed by reality.
Just as the Dutch Left had initially possessed a more accurate perception of
reality than the Germans, who were attached to the illusion of action (SPD,
etc.), the Dutch councilists, after 1930, also had a more realistic and,
ultimately, more effective vision than the vestiges of the movement in
The Reichstag
Fire
There
was also a much more workerist group in
The
numerous small councilist groups of the 1930s went into hiding at the time of
the German invasion. In 1940, however, Sneevliet created the
Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, with the journal Spartacus, “Organ of the Third Front”, which was joined
by many former members of the GIKH. When
Developments
in
Although
there is a paucity of information on the subject, it was in this country that
the leftist movement (of the German type) was actually strongest. In June of
1923, Stamboulisky (cf. Chapter 17) was overthrown by a military coup
d’état. The Bulgarian Communist Party assessed the situation in
accordance with the Russian experience of February-October 1917, and fully
assimilated this military coup with the Kornilov affair. Rejecting the united
front “from above” with the Peasants Union, it remained neutral in
the face of what it assessed to be two equally bourgeois camps. The Communist
International was aware of this and urged the Bulgarians to change course, and
not to follow this “leftist” orientation but to launch an
insurrection, which failed, in September. In this instance the anarchists
played an important role. In the end, the cities had been less involved than
the countryside. Considering the army’s weakness (reduced to 20,000 men
by the postwar treaties), the Bulgarian Communist Party’s strategy was by
no means absurd: to strike a hard blow in
The
evolution of the Bulgarian groups and tendencies then became extremely complicated,
but was nonetheless of some significance. N. Sakarov, who had abandoned the
“narrows” in 1908, and was a patriot during the war, led the
socialists who joined the Communist Party in 1920, presided over the
parliamentary group of eight Communist Party deputies elected in November of
1923, and announced at the end of December in parliament that he condemned the
Communist Party’s insurrection, and that he was committed to legality.23
He was also against the alliance with the peasants which the Communist Party
was then implementing. The exiled Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist
Party then excluded him. Nonetheless, Sakarov himself published, in November of
1924, the first issue of Proletarii
as the organ of the Bulgarian section of
the KAI. According to Rothschild, this journal, which defended Marxist
principles against the two Internationals, viewed
Meanwhile,
Ganchev, leader of the Bulgarian Communist Workers Party in 1920, who had
nevertheless returned to the official Communist Party after June of 1923 with a
small group of followers, published, with the approval of the Communist
Party’s Central Committee, the journal Lach (Starlight: always the proletarian Aufklärung) in October 1923. Ganchev wanted to facilitate a
Sakarov-CP rapprochement and opened the columns of Lach to the two currents without initially favoring one or the
other. He later grew increasingly critical of the Central Committee, without
entirely taking Sakarov’s side. He was eventually excluded, and would
fall victim to the white terror in 1925. The Central Committee emerged victorious,
and Sakarov was reduced to the leader of a small sect. Some of his supporters,
as elsewhere, became “Trotskyists” (S. Zadgorski, who started in
the Bulgarian Communist Workers Party and later returned to the Communist
Party). The Communist Party would have great difficulty in controlling the
unexpected adventurist tendencies of some of its members, and would not achieve
complete control over its organization until the mid-1930s.
Ambiguity
and confusion were so characteristic of the Left that one cannot easily oppose
a “communist left” to a degenerate Communist Party. Sakarov’s
position (as well as Ganchev’s to some extent), rejecting a compromise
with non-working class elements, was, on the one hand, a distorted proletarian
demand (Gorter had correctly written that the workers stand alone, but he was
talking about
Other
Countries
We
shall only deal briefly with some offshoots of the German Left. Issue No. 101
of ICO mentions the existence of
groups in
In
France, a group linked to the GIKH published L’Internationale.27 A “Spartacus
Group” was formed in Paris in 1931, composed of German
émigrés (A. Heinrich) and A. Prudhommeaux. This group published
several issues of L’Ouvrier
Communiste and, later, the journal Spartacus,
propagandizing for the councils and presenting the first description of the
German council movement to a French audience. This group also published the Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, both in
its journal as well as in pamphlet form.28
The
group which founded the ICO at the end of the 1950s came, in part, from L’Internationale.29
Another, much smaller, group, founded in 1959 and still in existence, published
the bulletin Lutte de classes, which
is quite workerist but offers profound analyses of capitalism and workers
struggles.30 In this
sense it recalls the GIKH. The journal Socialisme
ou Barbarie, born of a split in the Fourth (Trotskyist) International,
which rediscovered or re-employed old formulations of the German Left, without
vindicating themselves by ever clearly mentioning their affiliation with that
current, succumbed to council fetishism, only to end, in the 1960s, with
self-management, democracy and group dynamics.31 For all of these
groups,32 “the councils are the parliaments of the working
class”, in accordance with the definition provided by Karl Roche, one of
the founders of the AAUD in 1919.33
1. “Otto
Rühle and the German Labour Movement”, pp. 107-108.
2. Cf. Marx’s
letter of
3. La nouvelle étape, pp. 113-114.
4. La gauche allemande….
5. Between
1925 and 1927, one finds, for example, the bulletin Vulcan, “Organ of the KAI”, published by a second KAI
which was a rival of the first. The bulletin proclaimed “the death
crisis” and called upon the proletarians to join the KAI. It also
outlined an analysis of the development of society towards a pyramidal
structure which would fuse the classes, anticipating the theses of S ou B during the 1960s, and of Invariance during the 1970s. It took
into account the contacts made in the east.
6. Compare
with the first issue of Bilan (
7. Quoted
by Bock, p. 322.
8. Ibid., p. 320.
9. Dokumente und Materialen zur Geschichte der
deutschen Arbeiterbewegung,
10. For
this period, cf.
11. The
Italian Left would also renounce its anti-parliamentarism for several years,
claiming that it was not a question “of principle”. Cf. the
documents collected in the Bulletin
d’Étude et de Discussion of Révolution Internationale, June 1974, No. 7; and Bordiga et la passion…., pp.
223-224.
12. C.
Meijer: Le mouvement des conseils en
Allemagne, ICO, supplement to No. 101, p. 18.
13. Bock,
p. 348.
14. B.
Sarel: La classe ouvrière
d’Allemagne orientale, ed. Ouvrières, 1958.
15. Fundamental Principles of Communist
Production and Distribution, English translation available online at
www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6579/.
16. Structure économique et sociale de la
Russie…, pp. 191 et seq.,
p. 205, passim.
17. Fondements de la critique de
l’économie politique, Anthropos, Vol. I, 1967, Part 1.
18. On
the “estimation of costs” in communism, cf. Un monde sans argent, OJTR, 1975, Vol. II.
19. This
committee published M. Van der Lubbe:
prolétaire ou provocateur?, 1934, reprinted by La Veille Taupe,
1972. Tried by the Nazis at the same time, one of the leaders of the Communist
International, Dimitrov, denounced Van der Lubbe as a
“provocateur”, and asked “that he be condemned for having
acted against the proletariat”. Dimitrov’s wish was granted: Van
der Lubbe was executed…. Cf. Bilan,
No. 3 (January 1934), pp. 81-87.
20. Kool:
p. 530.
21. For
a critique of certain aspects of this group, cf. the Revue théorique of the International Communist Current, No.
2.
22. Rothschild:
p. 143, et seq.
23. Ibid., p. 152.
24. On
25. According
to Kool.
26. The
entire collection of these three journals (1934-1943) was published as a
reprint by Greenwood Corp.,
27. Extracts
from this group’s text, in French, can be found in La légende de la gauche au pouvoir. Le Front populaire, Le
Tête de Feuilles, 1973.
28. A
selection of texts from Bilan on the
Spanish Revolution is available in Bilan:
Contre-révolution en Espagne, 1936-39, 10/18, 1979.
29. The
ICO disappeared in 1973, but now exists in the form of Echanges et Mouvement. For a critique of this current and of
certain aspects of the German Left, see Leninism
and the Ultra-Left in Eclipse and
Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, Antagonism, 1998.
30. Cf.
also its collection Contre le courant.
31. S ou B’s error was rooted from the
very beginning in its definition of capital as a system of management: cf. Communisme et
“question russe”, pp. 15-20, and P. Guillaume’s postscript
to Rapports de production en Russie.
32. We
will not deal here with the currents which, among other things, have tried to
“synthesize”, if one can speak in this manner, the German and
Italian Lefts. Particularly, after 1945: Internationalisme
(later Révolution Internationale),
and then Invariance.
33. Was wollen die Syndikalisten?, p. 6.
The Russian Question
During the 1920s, the
dominant conception was that the peasants were the ruling class in
Another group, which was
close to Mattick, and which published De
Arbeidersraad, did not want to hear anything of “State Capitalism”
and “State Socialism”, and still considered the Bolshevik Party to
be a “peasant party”, even after collectivization: cf. Volume II,
No. 2, February 1936.
A text written by a French
worker who had worked in
Nazism and Fascism
Like the Italian Left, the
German Left of that time had the merit of having denounced democratic anti-fascism
and anti-Nazism as the “worst products of fascism” (Bordiga), as
well as of never having resorted to using the political arguments of Nazism as
the KPD had in the early 1930s, and of never having offered its collaboration
to Mussolini as the Italian Communist Party had at the end of the 1930s.
Under Nazism, the position of
the German Left was to contribute to the formation of communist workers groups
on the same basis as in the early 1920s, but under conditions of clandestinity:
“No ‘special’ communist program for Germany” (cf. Masses, No. 1). Its ideological position
would evolve. Until 1933 it did not believe that Nazism would be successful.
When Hitler took power, the small publications which were still being published
predicted his rapid downfall: the policy of setting the unemployed to work on
various “unproductive” projects would not prevent a new round of
inflation and the aggravation of the deteriorating living conditions of the
working class, which would go on the offensive. They also criticized the false
democratic alternatives. When, after the passage of a few years, Nazism was
well-established, and the situation of the workers had improved, making Hitler
as popular among them as among the other social classes, the leftists were the first
to admit this fact and to try to explain it. They interpreted the behavior of
the German proletarians as the result of what they had been taught in the old
workers movement (Lassalle and social democracy) which had always said that the
State is the providence of all of society: one must expect everything from
State measures and nothing from spontaneous actions (cf. Spartacus, published by a working group of revolutionary workers in
Amsterdam, No. 3, 1936 or 1937). Pannekoek would add his critique of the
Bolshevik cult of the party and its leaders: cf. The Workers Councils, quoted by F. Kool, p. 570.
At this stage, the result was
an attitude of non-participation, of choosing neither side; in the Second World
War, Rühle declared in 1939, fascism-nazism-stalinism would be victorious
because they corresponded to the general tendency of capitalism towards State
Capitalism. It was useless to defend the democracies; the only real alternative
to fascism was the proletarian revolution. “The struggle against fascism
begins with the struggle against Bolshevism”: this thesis was also shared
by Mattick and, in general, by all the leftists (cf. our commentary, Chapter
17).
On the origins of Nazism:
“Fascismus,
Parlamentarismus und Proletariat”, Kampfruf,
Vol. II, No. 9, 1923.
“Der Weg ins
Nichts”, “Radauantisemitismus”, Kampfruf, Vol. IV, Nos. 29 and 32, 1923.1
“Die Triebkräfte
des Antisemitismus”,
“Der
Hitlerprozess—der Prozess Republik”, KAZ
A. Lehmann, “The
Economic, Political and Social Causes of Fascism”, Masses,
On Italian fascism:
“Violence reigns in Italy”, “The road to fascism passes
through democracy”, KAZ Berlin,
Vol. VI, No. 92, and Vol. VIII, No. 35, 1937.
On the eve of Hitler’s
seizure of power in 1933:
“Hitler’s victory
opens the door to civil war”, “Heinrich Laufenberg”,
“Proletarians: Listen for the Signal!”, “Mass
mobilization”, “The roots of national-socialism”, Kampfruf—organ of the KAU after
1931—Vol. XI, No. 38, 1930; Vol. XIII, Nos. 1, 5 and 6, 1932.
“Das tote
Rennen”, special edition of KAZ,
Vol. II, No. 2, 1932.4
“The rolling
stone”, “Domestic political struggles”, KAZ
Kritik an den Waffen!, AAU pamphlet, Leipzig-Chemnitz district, 1931.5
After Hitler’s seizure
of power:
“Diktaturkabinett
Hitler”, “You must still vote!” “Der Bankrott des
National-Sozialismus”, Kampfruf,
Vol. XIV, Nos. 3 and 3-4, February 1933.
“Die proletarische
Front”, “The ‘redemption of the nation’ begins”,
special edition of KAZ, Year 3, No.
2, February 1933.
After the stabilization of
the regime (in addition to the Spartacus
article cited above):
“To the groups of the
GIKH”, Rätekorrespondenz,
No. 16-17, May 1936.
“Is Nazi-Duitsland
Kapitalistische?”, Radencommunisme,
Year 1, No. 8, 1939.6
There is little material
concerning World War Two (in comparison with the Italian Left), and nothing we
are aware of, except the articles by Korsch reproduced in Marxism and Counterrevolution, Chapter XII.
The “Death Crisis”
It would be impossible to summarize the theses and debates on this
issue. For the supporters of the death crisis thesis, we cite:
“Wereldcrisis, wereldrevolutie”, 7 De Arbeidersraad, Year 1, No. 8, August 1935, and an article by
Mattick in Rätekorrespondenz,
No. 4, 1934, a response to a previous article by Pannekoek. This tendency,
after having returned to Luxemburg’s conceptions in the 1920s, saw its
concept of the death crisis confirmed by the social democratic economist H.
Grossmann, who published Das
Akkumulations und zusammenbruchs gesetz des Kapitalistischen systems in
1929 (reprinted by Verlag Neue Kritik,
Fundamentals and Content of Communism
The supplement to the first
issue of ICO published the
translation of a text from 1935 (Rätekorrespondenz,
Nos. 10-11): “Average social labor time, basis for communist production
and distribution”, which summarizes the Grundprinzipien des Kommunistischen Produktion und Verteilung,
reprinted by Rüdiger-Blankertz Verlag, West Berlin. All subsequent texts
on this subject (Mattick, Pannekoek’s Workers
Councils) would accept this idea as their basis.
Various texts show that the
left (after the 1930s) did not theorize its break with democracy,
“freedom”, etc., and that its rejection of the dictatorship of the
proletariat was not just a matter of words: “Communism and Intellectual
Freedom”, Radencommunisme, Year
1, No. 12, August 1939, and “Arbeiders-demokratie in de bedrijven”
by C. Meijer, in the same journal, in 1944 or 1945. This culminated in The Workers Councils.
Most of the texts mentioned
in this bibliography cannot be found “for sale”, but can be
consulted or photocopied at the International Institute for Social History,
262-266 Herengracht, Amsterdam.
1. “The Road to
Nothingness”, “The Anti-Semitism of the Sewers”.
2. “The Motives
of Anti-Semitism”.
3. “The
Hitler-Trial—The Trial of the
4. “The Death
Race”.
5. “The Critique
of Arms”.
6. “Nazi
7. “World Crisis,
World Revolution”.
8. “Workers
Democracy as a Political Position”.
The clarification of what is
known as National Bolshevism does not serve merely a tactical or polemical
purpose, in opposition to those who, since Lenin, have utilized this current to
discredit the left. National Bolshevism also exhibited some of the ambiguities
which have afflicted communism since the time of Marx and Engels: the
revolutionary position to be adopted in regards to war once again posed a mass
of problems.
The communist movement was
effectively absorbed by the democratic and nationalist movement of 1848. This
development had already been of considerable significance even before 1848. The
movement in
It is not enough to claim
that, during Marx’s time, national wars could still play a subversive
role, which role would terminate with the end of capital’s ascendant
phase: the “national bolshevism” of 1919 would thus make no sense
from the revolutionary point of view. We must also ask ourselves about the
strength (and the possible influence) of the communist movement in the epoch in
question: if it was as weak as it was in 1848-1849, then how would it have been
possible to hope for an eventual German victory over Russia when such an
outcome would exclusively strengthen the German bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat? It is surprising that Marx
underestimated the counterrevolutionary force of nationalism. From this
perspective, the “error” of Wolffheim and Laufenberg reproduced
Marx’s error in an absurd form.
The idea of using such a war
to reactivate the revolutionary movement, which is in itself insufficient, is
inscribed within a much broader illusion, that of a “strategy”
which would allow the supersession of the objective limitations of
circumstances by means of ingenious alliances on a planetary scale. The notion
of such a total strategy belongs to anti-materialist scientism. It presupposes
the understanding of rational laws whose rule would provide the key and the
means to action. Often practiced by Marx, and theorized in numerous works by
Bordiga, it became a systematic pathology in the journal Le fil du Temps and in R. Dangeville, whose introductions and notes
to his translations of Marx describe a Marx who was always right and who had
foreseen everything: even when he was wrong, his error was still more profound
than the apparent truth. . . . But it is not a question of counting errors, or
of reconstructing an allegedly coherent system which revolutionaries do not
need. Others, in an opposite sense, enjoy celebrating proletarian initiative
and will to struggle, or theorizing irrationalism, which is only the
symmetrical and worst product of bourgeois rationalism. To speak of
“revolutionary reformism”4 is to take it for granted
that Marx understood that the communist revolution was not the order of the
day, and that he had limited himself to inciting capital to the next stage of
capitalist development. Marx’s reformism is therefore justified in the
name of the immaturity of the preconditions for revolution. This position is
characterized by the intervention of hindsight.
It projects the analysis of the causes of the defeats of bygone days (which is
only possible today) upon the past, as if it would have been possible in that epoch to be certain that any
revolution was condemned to defeat. This conception does not analyze the facts
on the basis of their dynamic, and, as Marx said concerning the Historical
School of Law, history can only be seen “a posteriori”.
Faced with the war, Lenin
only saw a change at the level of political structures and the failure of a
particular orientation, but not the failure of a whole type of workers activity
and organization. In his text published in 1915, Gorter discerned the end of an
epoch in 1914, which also implied, he said, the death of art. He considered
1914 to be a profound, crushing defeat for proletarians. Without being able to
explicitly express it, he had intuited capital’s power, its expansion
over the previous few years, which was only disrupted by the war of 1914-1918.
Characterized by the introduction of the assembly line, the scientific
organization of labor, rationalization, mass consumption, the “commodification”
of social life and large-scale mechanized industry, this dynamism suffocated
the proletariat: the very strict integration of the workers organizations was
only one of its consequences.5 Gorter thus proved to be relatively
pessimistic concerning the revolutionary dawning of the postwar years.
From the beginning, the
position of Laufenberg and Wolffheim was different. Laufenberg, originally from
the
It is likely that Wolffheim
and Laufenberg were to adopt the councilist thesis because the councils could
progressively integrate the whole population. The trade unions and the parties
would be superseded. The particular organizations of distinct social groups
must give way to mass organizations which transcend divisive class lines.
While admitting that the
aggressor-victim distinction had lost its meaning within the context of
imperialism, they accepted national defense in some cases, when a war
threatened “the social economy” as an expression and precondition of
the life of the people. Other revolutionaries did not notice, at that time,
these aspects which anticipated their later evolution.
Even so, these aspects had no
practical application at all during the first six months following November
1918. As related above, Laufenberg, at the head of the Hamburg Council,
demonstrated great prudence, even trying to enlist the help of the bourgeoisie:
“we are the only ones who can guarantee a peaceful transition”, he
declared in a speech on November 30. Judging that the Russian revolution had
little chance of success, he made everything depend on Germany, where he
intended—because the proletariat had already demonstrated its
weakness—to avoid a civil war and, consequently, to not proceed too
hastily, to nationalize, of course, but to limit instances of socialization. He
did not, therefore, advocate abstentionism and even desired, in addition to the
councils, an assembly elected by universal suffrage, in which the bourgeoisie
could express itself and “exercise an influence on the course of events
in proportion to its economic position”. Laufenberg, a member of the KPD
Central Committee until August 1919, thus appeared as the defender of factory
organizations, alongside the rest of the left, although he supported them for different reasons.
On
Stress on the nationalist
aspect became more acute, but coexisted for a long time with a class analysis.
In June of 1919, the
“The councils system
groups together all the workers . . . behind the class interests which are the
interests of socialism and the nation. The factory councils will become an
element of national unity, of national organization, of national fusion,
because they comprise the basic element and original cell of socialism.”
One week later, another
editorial called for a “proletarian Wehrmacht”,
formed by a workers militia and a Red Army under the command of the councils,
in order to “continue” the war. But the KAZ was against any national bolshevism on the part of the army
high command. It reproached Spartacism for its putschism: “the revolution
will break out like a natural phenomenon”, “not by means of
rebellions and putsches”. It expected that, in the context of the second
revolution and the continuation of the war, there would not be a social peace (Burgfrieden), as in 1914, but a
revolutionary union, this time to the benefit of the proletariat and the whole
people, rather than the bourgeoisie. In effect, the war was necessary because
The official history of the
KPD, published in 1929, did not include the accusation that Laufenberg and
Wolffheim carried out “negotiations” with the military. According
to this history, several thousand
Their Appeal to Proletarians, published in May of 1920, was issued in the
name of the Central Committee of the KAPD, which immediately declared that it
had not been consulted regarding the publication of this pamphlet. The ship
hijacked by Jung for his journey to
In
From a nationalist
perspective, National Bolshevism represented a process of becoming conscious of
the capitalist tendency to dissolve the middle classes and the proletariat into
a mass of wage “workers” (which, in a way, achieves the abolition
of the bourgeoisie-proletariat distinction).
* See, also, the author’s new updated comments on
“The National-Bolshevik Aberration and its Meaning”, included in
the “Epilogue” to this revised English language edition.
(Translator’s note).
1. Cf. Un monde sans argent: le communisme, Part
2.
2. Cf. Marx-Engels, Correspondance, Êd. Sociales, Vol.
I, 1971, p. 539, Note 1.
3. Le néo-babouvisme
d’après la presse (1837-48), in Babeuf et les problèmes du babouvisme, Êd. Sociales,
1960, pp. 247-276. See also: A. Maillard, La
Communauté des Egaux, Ed. Kimé, 1999.
4. A
topic discussed in several issues of Invariance.
5. Cf.
the upcoming issue of Lutte de classe devoted
to this theme.
6. Stratégie communiste et dynamique
conservatrice…., p. 86. Chapter V (pp. 84-144) is devoted to “A
communist nationalism”, the would-be “
7. Dupeux,
p. 98.
8. As
Broué does, p. 317.
9. Dupeux,
p. 136.
Texts
Foreword
Any pretense to having
collected the “best” of the German Left in the following section
would be vain. One would also have to consider previously available texts,
above all Bricianer’s book on Pannekoek and the volume entitled La Gauche allemande. Textes. [Four of
the texts featured in the latter volume, The
Program of the AAUD, The Guidelines of the AAU-E, extracts from The Guidelines of the AAUD and The Leading Principles of the KAI, are
included below, along with several other recently-translated texts of the
German Left—translator’s note.] All three of these quite dissimilar
works, when taken together, present a complex picture of the Left. Our
selection does not place particular emphasis upon “councilism” and
workers self-organization (except for the Wolffheim text), which occupy ample
space in Bricianer’s book. Nor does it privilege, as do the documents in La Gauche allemande. Textes, the role of
the organization (especially that of the KAPD). Fully intending that this work
should complement the two others mentioned above, we did not want to restrict
ourselves to just picking out the most important aspects of the Left for the
revolutionary movement, but also wanted to highlight the Left’s context
and the actual extent of its impact on its epoch. Laufenberg’s text, for
example, is of great interest insofar as it shows exactly what did and what did
not take place. Likewise, Gorter provides a quite accurate if somewhat limited
notion of how most communists experienced and viewed the events of their time.
His “Last Letter to Lenin” also reveals a certain tendency on the
part of the KAPD, as well, to present itself as a “party in the
traditional sense”, as the March Action demonstrates.
This book, as well as the
Left itself, could be superficially criticized for having overemphasized the organizational aspect of the revolution.
This is true, but what we need to know is precisely why this is so. There are
no “subversive social movements” or “communist
movements” which are not embodied in one or another organizational form.
Every content implies a form. The weakness of the communist organizational
structures in
The critique of
organizational formalism is revolutionary to the extent that it discovers
within this formalism the organization of the absence of the revolution and
consequently the organization of non-revolutionaries; but it does not by any
means rule out the necessity of organizing and, if necessary, organizing in the
most monolithic manner, when facing the tasks of the revolution. Otherwise,
“the communist movement” becomes just as vacuous a formula as the
intellectuals’ concept of “the revolution”. We have not, in
any case, written a history of the communist movement or of the movement of the
proletariat in
For reasons beyond our
control having to do with “intellectual property” rights, we were
unable to reproduce Lukàcs’s Organizational
Questions of the Third International, originally published in Kommunismus (March 15, 1920). We have
already discussed (cf. Chapter 17) what distinguished this journal, and
Lukàcs in particular, from the communist left. The radicalism of Kommunismus possessed only a surface
resemblance to that of the left. For example, the “active boycott”
advocated by B. Kun, which consisted of taking advantage of the occasion of
elections in order to carry out as much propaganda and to get as much publicity
as possible, without running any candidates, leads to conferring upon electoral
campaigns an importance which they lack and which democracy is always trying to
impose. It is curious, however, to see Lukàcs developing in this article
a theory of organization for the Communist Parties, and above all of
collaboration between them, which reproduces to some degree, on an
international scale, what the KAPD had in fact realized within its own ranks.
We have seen how the KAPD insisted on a multiplicity of contacts and
initiatives on all levels, establishing links directly between its various
groups as well as in conformance with its formal organizational pyramid.
The KAPD was founded upon the
necessity for unifying the proletariat, in opposition to its division into
categories, strata, etc., maintained by the trade unions. Like many other
revolutionaries in
A serial accumulation of
national parties leads to nationalism. Internationalism must also be manifested
by its own kind of structures.
The correctness of
Lukàcs’s position is proven in a negative sense by the evolution
of such parties as the Polish Communist Party (cf. Chapter 17). Each Communist
Party based its growth as a political (and preferably parliamentary) force
within the framework of its particular State, and thus re-invented nationalism.
In the regions where capital was relatively weak and was hardly capable of
spawning viable nation states, any construction of Communist Parties upon the
exclusive basis of such States was contrary to communism. Lukàcs
referred to “the mining region shared by Poland, Czechoslovakia and
German Austria, which all depend on this region for their coal supplies; the
Ruthenian northeast of Hungary was divided between that country,
Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Ukraine, etc. These issues demand a permanent
tactical collaboration among the proletarians involved; they can neither be
abandoned to the isolated actions of the various parties, nor can they be made
to depend upon the decisions of distant central committees. . . .”
For such regions,
Lukàcs proposes a flexible organization which groups the communists of
the various States who reside in the same region within a relatively autonomous
structure. Instead of just adding distinct Communist Parties together, they mutually
interpenetrate one another: “One and the same party must be represented
on various central committees.” Therefore: “The structure of the
International . . . must never place
obstacles in the way of the establishment of relations directly between the
parties themselves. . . . The Second International only admitted national
movements grouped within the apparent unity of the International: the Third
International is made up of living groupings, based on movements which have
overcome the narrow-mindedness of the ‘national’ point of
view.” To despise this position today, however, by charging that it did
not go far enough, would be historically false. One cannot judge this position
without taking into account the concerns which animated it. Compared to the extremely
rapid transformation of the Communist Parties, not to speak of the current
situation where even the leftists do not directly attack the concept of
national defense, such a stance allows us to measure the weight of 50 years of
counterrevolution.
As our final text, we
reproduce an essay by Pannekoek written after the period dealt with in this
book, because it addresses an important debate within the left, but also, and
most importantly, because it goes beyond the reformist and radical versions of
crisis automatism. The recently-published French translations of the works of
Mattick and Grossmann provide a new impetus to this debate. We must also
mention that during the period when he wrote this text on the crisis debate,
Pannekoek still retained a “materialist” point of view: his
conclusion does not substitute proletarian action for the “crisis”.
Later, and especially after 1945, he would make consciousness and
consciousness-raising the motor force of the proletarian movement. [For reasons
of space, the Pannekoek essay has been omitted from this new revised edition in
order to make room for other texts which have not yet appeared in English
translation. An English translation of Pannekoek’s The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism, which was originally
published in Rätekorrespondenz in
June of 1934, and was later published in English translation in Capital and Class (Spring 1977, tr. by
Adam Buick) can now be viewed at the Marxists.org
website—translator’s note.]
Heinrich Laufenberg1
Preface
This small volume owes its
existence to the editorial committee of the Archive
of Social Sciences and Social Legislation, who invited me to
explain the role and importance of the council system. I have restricted myself
to a historically faithful account, based on the proceedings and policies of
the Hamburg Council and, given its general interest, I publish this work
without any substantial modifications in order to make it accessible to a wider
public.
What follows includes that
part of the events in question in which I was personally involved. The events
of the days between November 6 and 11 are therefore not treated here. The
uprising of the
H.
The council movement, which
in
A few days after the victory
of the sailors’ revolt in
At the beginning of the
revolution, a popular assembly gathered on the Heiligengeist fields decided to
confiscate the old newspaper of the
An agreement was reached
between the various socialist parties, which called for the formation of a
General Workers Council with approximately 500 members representing the
factories, and, as an executive committee for this General Council, a new
Workers Council to replace the provisional one, which would consist of three
delegates each from the old party, the trade unions, the USPD and
the Party of the Radical Left, respectively, as well as 18 representatives from
the factories. This executive committee’s presidium, referred to as the
Workers Council, would be formed by one representative from each party
mentioned above and the trade unions, and three representatives from the factories.
The election of the president of this body was carried out like a political
election. A representative of the radical left group, which would later become
the communist group, was elected President of the Workers Council;
this, as well as the general political composition of the Executive Committee,
was a reflection of the role played by the communist and independent fractions
in the events of November 6.
The Executive Committee of
the Soldiers Councils, the Commission of Fifteen, which later became the Commission
of Thirty, formed a consultative body together with the Workers Council, with
the proviso that only the soldiers would be involved in resolving purely
military issues. This Commission soon created a Commission of Seven as a High
Command. The personnel of the Soldiers Council had already changed in the first
few days. Its composition presented a wide range of political views.
Bourgeois-democratic ideas prevailed among the majority, and some of its
members were sympathetic to socialism, but ignorant of socialist ideology; only
a few were convinced socialists; the only issue that concerned all the soldiers
was their next military assignment. If the Workers Council, with its diversity
of parties, had a common basis in the working class, such a common foundation
did not exist among the representatives of the Soldiers Council. This meant
that, the more clearly the class position of the Workers Council’s policy
was manifested, and the more that different opinions became evident, the more
the majority of the Soldiers Councils, for the moment, fell under the influence
of the Workers Council and its communist-independent leadership; this became
obvious as soon as the Council proceeded to clearly and firmly set out its
position in respect to the old political powers.
The debates which took place
in the Council prior to the publication of the manifesto were heated and
somewhat turbulent, since all the representatives of the old party defended a
position which was profoundly opposed to the new principles set out in the
manifesto. Against the idea of working class rule, upon which the manifesto was
based, they supported the demand for popular sovereignty, and proposed a motion
to that effect, tailored for the Bürgerschaft
by the social democratic faction. The motion called for the immediate recognition
of universal suffrage, with an equal, direct and secret vote for the elections
to the Bürgerschaft and the
other municipal governments of the Land,
on the basis of a proportional system of representation, for all the adult
citizens of both sexes; that all special elections for privileged status should
be abolished, such as those which had hitherto been held for the nobility and
landowners; that the Senate should be elected by the Bürgerschaft for a limited term, and that its membership
should no longer be restricted to certain professions; and that the city
administration should be democratized. Immediately after the introduction of
the new electoral law, elections for the Bürgerschaft
should take place, in order to deliberate on the new constitution and the new
organization of the city administration. The Workers and Soldiers Council
deliberately and as a matter of principle went beyond the motion of the social
democratic fraction, in order to express, in the most unequivocal manner, the
fact that a power shift had taken place. The manifesto declared: the Senate and
the Bürgerschaft no longer
exist, the Land of Hamburg will in
the future form part of the German Peoples’ Republic; but the leadership
of the Council was aware of the fact that, as they acknowledged during the
debate, the communal functions previously exercised by the Senate and the Bürgerschaft as community
institutions still had to be carried out, and that, furthermore, the last word
on the future of each Land would
depend upon the course of events in the Empire as a whole, and that in the
meantime a declaration concerning the nature of the Hamburg Land was necessary. The Council took
action on these two matters shortly afterwards, as the indisputable voice of
the complete sovereignty which had passed into the hands of the institutions of
the working class; by precisely assigning particular tasks, clearly defined and
fundamentally distinct from their former prerogatives, to the old powers, the
new regime showed that it was master of the situation and the old powers. Even
during the late hours of the night, the proclamation was delivered to the
newspapers, and was also publicized by means of wall posters.
The first task was to secure the
Senate. Since it constituted the apex of the administrative apparatus, whose
uninterrupted functioning was of great interest to the Workers and Soldiers
Council, above all so as to prevent any problems with the circulation of money,
and thus with the payment of family subsidies and the wages of workers and
government employees. The Council pursued the goal of not destroying this
apparatus, but of transforming the bureaucracy into a popular institution, and
securing political control in all of its decisive aspects. The transition to
the new situation was achieved without any friction. In memorable negotiations,
the Senate submitted without resistance to the existing situation and also
declared its willingness to cooperate on the basis of the new state of affairs.
The Council issued a decree assuring the continuity of all administrative
authorities and commissions, to which the public was to bring its appeals as in
the past. A declaration of the manifesto of November 12 stated that
In parallel with the
negotiations with the Senate, negotiations took place with representatives of
the bourgeois industrialists and the retailers, wholesalers and industrial
chambers of commerce, as well as the banks, which led to the formation of an
economic council. These representatives of the bourgeoisie also resigned
themselves to the fait accompli of
the shift in political power. Renouncing their demand that the Bürgerschaft should be
re-established with its old prerogatives, they proposed the establishment of a
system of local representation. A debate was held in the Council on the
question of whether the municipal parliament should be composed of
representatives of the Workers and Soldiers Council, of the councils of white
collar employees, civil servants, teachers and other professionals, or whether
the old Bürgerschaft should be
provisionally reinstated as a representative municipal body. While the
representatives of the old party without exception wanted to maintain the old
institution of the Bürgerschaft
and to have it meet as a constituent assembly in the near future, the
representatives of the independent fraction agreed that the old Bürgerschaft should be convened,
but were opposed to holding elections in the near future, since no one could
foresee what the next few weeks would bring. The representatives of the left
radicals, however, proposed that the Bürgerschaft
should be treated in exactly the same way as the Senate. Since it was at that
time impossible to completely eliminate the Bürgerschaft
and to replace it with the General Workers Council due to the danger of
international repercussions, the Council, by virtue of its revolutionary
powers, had to provisionally convoke the old Bürgerschaft, within the framework of and in accordance with
the tasks of municipal representation. The proclamation was issued from the
very beginning that the universal, equal, direct and secret right to vote was
established for all representative bodies in the state
To assure its effectiveness,
the Council had to create its own logistical apparatus. Needless to say, from
the very first moments of its existence, it had at its disposal a
well-organized office, and also created a press department in order to present
its policies outside of Hamburg, which at first caused some problems, since
this department, although in the hands of the Workers and Soldiers Council, was
staffed by men of a bourgeois-democratic cast of mind, and expressed political
views which by no means accorded with those of the Council. It took several
weeks to remedy this situation, when the Council closed this office and formed
another with a totally different staff. At its first session, the Council had
already created three committees: for social policy, medicine and transportation.
To these, others were soon added: committees on external relations and the
press, food supply, justice and prisons, security and police, public health,
construction and housing, education, trade, shipping and industry, finance,
military affairs and indemnifications.
The most important
departments were those which dealt with justice, education, trade and industry,
social policies and security. The justice committee had the job of solving
problems which resulted from the Council’s edicts, or their
interpretation. It also had to elaborate new norms for the penal system and the
regulation of administrative justice and, in general, was responsible for
changing the practice of penal law and eliminating reactionary laws. The
security committee was in charge of adapting the police apparatus to the new
situation, as well as creating the basis for the total liquidation of the old
army apparatus and the introduction of a peoples’ militia, composed
essentially of members of the three socialist organizations. The education
committee’s mission was to transform the entire school system, from
elementary to secondary levels, with the goal of establishing a unified school
system. The committee on trade, shipping and industry was in charge of
reincorporating
Among the first measures of
the Council, the implementation of the fundamental economic requirements of its
labor policy stands out. At its second session it decreed the eight hour day,
with the provision that, should the owners close their businesses in protest
against this decree, the factories and workshops would be reopened by force.
According to its manifesto, the whole sum of wages previously paid was to still
be paid on a weekly basis, including payment for days not worked. From then on,
the eight hour day or, where this was not practicable, as in the cases of food
supply and transport, the working week of 48 hours, was set as the maximum. The
wages to be paid were to be at least the same amount as had been paid for the
previous regular day’s work. Consequently, hourly wages and piecework
rates had to be raised until they reached the old daily wage, with the
obligation to completely eliminate piecework as soon as possible. Overtime,
where necessary, had to be paid with an extra premium, as stipulated for each
case. These rules had to be rigorously obeyed and enacted without delay. Any
infractions were to be severely punished, with the provision that the offending
business could be expropriated by the Workers and Soldiers Council. The terms
of this manifesto were not uniformly implemented, since the regulation of
piecework was in the hands of the trade unions, and the resolution of
complaints was under the control of the department of social policy, with the
bulk of responsibility for such matters, which was at first the within the
jurisdiction of that department, being later transferred to the trade unions.
Nonetheless, the rules providing that the wages for the reduced work week had
to be “at least” equal to the previous weekly wage, and that
piecework had to be eliminated “completely and as quickly as
possible” naturally stimulated more demands along the same lines. Nor was
the situation to change much when, some time later, certain aspects of the
manifesto were more clearly formulated, in order to regulate the situation in
those enterprises where the reduction of the working week could not be
immediately and completely enacted. The workers’ attitude would continue
to be largely determined by the initial proclamations.
Already, among its first
acts, the Council addressed the problem of unemployment, since the number of
unemployed soon surpassed 70,000, while those who could only find part-time work
numbered over 100,000. The Senate and the Bürgerschaft
had previously, prior to the revolution, decided to create a labor office,
responsible for job placement, assisting demobilized soldiers, and organizing
unemployment benefits; the latter consisted of 6 marks for a married couple
without children, 1 ½ marks for each child up to a maximum of three, and
4 marks for single persons, which would cost the Land of Hamburg three million marks each month. Since this labor
office had not yet been established, and the Council faced many problems on all
fronts, the resolution of the matter had to be postponed until mid-December.
This delay led to vast demonstrations of the unemployed, but the Council
eventually managed to achieve a satisfactory settlement of the problem. It
proposed to the unemployed that a permanent commission be established, elected
by the unemployed with the widest possible representation of professions and
industries, which would be in permanent contact with the Council, with
representatives in the labor office and its various delegations, to maintain
oversight of its operations. While military field kitchens supplied food at
very low prices to the unemployed, and jobless people became involved in
running these services, the Council ordered an increase in unemployment
benefits: one mark extra for single persons and two more for couples. An
attempt on the part of the Senate and the labor office to reduce these
increases was vetoed by the Council. Only later was it decided that the total
subsidy for each family could not surpass 7 ½ marks per week.
The Council’s activity,
especially in the economic domain, encouraged the creation of new councils. The
latter were formed among every category of civil servants, teachers, police,
firemen, railroad workers, etc., as well as councils of white collar employees
of every kind. The demand, often expressed by such councils, to be directly
represented on the Workers and Soldiers Council, was not granted, since the
number of members of the Executive Committee and the respective proportions of
representatives of the parties and the factories had already been fixed, but
direct and permanent liaisons were nonetheless established between the
different councils and the corresponding committees of the Workers and Soldiers
Council, in most cases with the department of social policy.
As soon as its working
departments had been created, the Council began to organize the political
control of the administrative apparatus. This control was exercised by means of
the activity of those institutions (the committees) mentioned above, as well as
by means of commissars who were dispatched to the most important departments.
However, as was the case with the activity of the Council itself, there was a
lack of trained personnel, as well as resistance from the higher functionaries,
which had been a problem since the first day of the new regime and which had
only grown stronger since then. Political control of the administrative
apparatus could only be achieved by integrating it into the social democracy
and thus reducing it, once it is free of any bureaucratic constraints and
formalities, to its basic tasks, in other words, leaving it in the hands of the
population itself and basing the municipal organization on the council system.
But these difficulties did not prevent the Council from purging the
administration of its most pernicious elements by means of a simple decree, as
in the case of the high-level Prussian functionaries in the suburbs of
According to the resulting
decree, all the councils of the
Organizational measures and
managerial tasks, of course, embraced the most diverse matters. The provisional
Workers and Soldiers Council had formed a food supply committee, and its
permission was required for the export of foodstuffs. Until then, such
regulation had been in the hands of the War Supply Office and, in order to
improve the system of food supply, it was demanded that this Office’s
administrative district be extended from
The fact that the farmers did
not deliver the prescribed quantities of food led to serious problems. Already
in its first session the Council had discussed how to establish good
communications between the city and the countryside, as well as a system of
organized collaboration. It called for, among other things, the formation of
peasants’ councils, and carried out an extensive propaganda campaign on
their behalf. These proposals, however, never came to a vote and were never implemented.
Nor, after petitioning the imperial government and the Armistice Commission,
were the Council’s efforts to reopen the offshore fisheries successful.
An economic council was
formed under the auspices of the Council and representatives of industry, the
banks and import-export firms, whose mission was to stimulate the resumption of
trade, especially foreign trade. This collaborative effort did not, however,
prove to be fruitful, since the divergence of opinions concerning the
resumption of production and distribution was quite profound, and immediately
became apparent. While its collaborators considered capitalist practices as
natural, the Council was aiming for socialization. Consequently, only a few
sessions of this economic council were held, with no practical results. The
Workers and Soldiers Council naturally did not agree with the economic
council’s demand that wages be reduced, although the trade union
representatives readily showed some good will in that respect, which entailed
no minor problems from the workers point of view. Since all socialist
production is production in the interests of the consumer, the Council proposed
that consumer prices be reduced, and that the first steps should be taken
towards the reorganization of the distribution process. It proposed that the
materiel stockpiled in the shipyards for the construction of submarines be used
instead for the construction of rolling stock for the railroads. Recognizing
that production is the basis of social life, it sought to fundamentally
transform the role of the working class in production, putting the factories
under its control, both socially and technically. The possibility of
socializing the bakeries was debated. Since the twelve largest bakeries were
capable of producing enough bread for the whole urban area, the elimination of
the small and medium-size enterprises and their transformation into mere
distribution centers would have implied important savings in industrial
resources and raw materials, which would then have become available for other
uses. The socialization of the fishing industry was also discussed with
representatives of the fishermen, as its transfer to the control of the
For these reasons, the
Council sought to create fixed rules for the consolidation of the council
system, while simultaneously maintaining the economic council in a certain
relation of dependence. Towards this end it presented a series of regulations.
These decreed that the economic council was an institution created as a
consequence of the revolution, and that it had to present its proposals to the
economic and industrial committee of the Workers and Soldiers Council, which
would examine and approve them, prior to taking the necessary steps for their
implementation. It mandated a workers council for each enterprise with more
than twenty workers; enterprises with fewer than twenty workers were to join
others of the same kind in order to elect factory councils; casual laborers
were to unite according to their job categories in order to elect workers
councils. All workers over the age of sixteen, according to this proposal, were
granted the right to vote, and all those over the age of 20 would be eligible
for office. The workers council was responsible for the orderly operation of
the enterprise, as well as the control of its administration in its social,
technical and commercial aspects, and the regulation, together with its owners,
and in collaboration with the organizations of workers and white collar
employees, of working conditions and wages. Where agreement on such issues
could not be achieved, an appeal would have to be brought before the committee
on social policy of the Workers and Soldiers Council, which would issue its
ruling, with assistance from experts from both parties to the dispute. In
general, the factory councils were to exercise the functions which had been
delegated to them by the General Workers Council, without being prevented from
doing so by either the factory owners or the old authorities. The General
Workers Council set the rules for and established the framework of its field of
action and the extent of its prerogatives, a resolution which would have
enabled it, and, according to the intention of the authors of its proposals,
had to enable it, to assume at any moment and to their full extent, all the
political functions of the executive. The deliberations on this matter
continued, and finally, when the Council’s power dissolved, and it no
longer had the power to implement its proposals, they were liquidated on their
own.
The workers in the urban area
also naturally took advantage of the revolution to improve their standard of
living, and to attempt to restore its pre-war level. Assisted in their efforts
by the manifesto on the eight hour day and the rapid phase-out of piecework,
the shipyard workers, for whom the latter stipulation was of the greatest
concern, managed to practically eliminate piecework, despite the attempts of
the owners to reintroduce it. In order to compel the payment of wages for the
days when workers had attended the mass demonstrations, the Council closed one
factory, arrested its owner, and confiscated his bank account. The Council
repeatedly intervened on behalf of the seamen, in order to secure higher wages
than had been granted to them by the sailors union and the ship-owners’
association. In the plumbers strike the Council exerted pressure on the
employers and imposed the recognition of the demands of the workers. In short,
it supported wage demands with all of its political and moral prestige. In
negotiations with the shipyard owners, the Council’s department of social
policy reminded the owners that they had previously used political power to
their own economic advantage, and tersely declared that the working class would
henceforth do the same; it applied its own legal principles without any concern
over the prospect that the big capitalists, who had never concerned themselves
with the workers’ sense of justice, might consider this to be an
injustice. These acts profoundly changed the relation of forces between the
workers and the owners. The department of social policy went far beyond the
means which had until then been decisive in relations with the owners, whether
it was the strike or negotiations between one organization and another,
replacing them with completely new methods, trials before the Council, organ of
political power of the whole working class, organized or not. Without being in
a position to exercise a dictatorship in the strict sense of the word, wielding
merely a subsidiary power in the apparatus of the bourgeois state, the Council
largely eliminated, in the decisive political arenas, the old organs of
negotiation and struggle, and transformed them into organs of the
Council’s policy. In a later stage, during the city transport workers
strike which lasted more than a week, it clearly proved to the whole world the
importance of an energetic display of political power for the satisfaction of
the demands of the working class; the Council was not, however, capable of
rapidly ending this public calamity, nor could it meet all the workers’
demands, or protect the public from a steep fare increase.
One of the Council’s
most important tasks was the regulation of public security. It turned to the troops
in the barracks and formed police patrols with some of them, while those not
suited for such duties were transferred to honor guards, work details or other
already-existing detachments. Besides their food and military pay they received
a premium of three marks per day, as had those soldiers who were already
assigned to police duties. Their maximum number was set at 2,400. At first the
situation gave cause for concern: the police commissioners retained their seats
on the Bürgerschaft, frustrated
with waiting for their new orders and the satisfaction of their complaints.
Order was reestablished by means of prompt dismissals. Enlistments for the Freikorps were also banned by the
Council, which also ordered the dissolution of the youth militias.
In its socialization policy,
the Council was aware of the need to restructure
At the beginning of December,
the Hamburg Council convoked an assembly of delegates from all the
region’s workers and soldiers councils in order to consider the proposal
to create a unitary economic region on the lower
The Council was more
successful in the field of education. It brought proposals before a series of
professors, in order to settle the question of the university and to make the
The Council also promptly
addressed the issue of housing and construction. It recommended that the State
buy all available building construction materials, and proposed special
measures to prevent real estate speculation.
The Council’s sovereign
exercise of its rights was indisputable. The Council, rather than the Senate,
reduced a murderer’s sentence to life in prison. Upon their return from
the front, it was the Council, as representative of the state, which welcomed
the troops, while the Senate, as representative of the city, addressed them
afterwards. It decreed that, at official events, the flags of
Since it was foreseen that
the Conference of German States would also discuss the question of a
constituent assembly, a debate took place in the Council concerning the
position its representatives would defend in relation to this question. The
right wing socialists rejected a council regime and demanded a prompt
convocation of a constituent assembly. The USPD delegates supported this
position in principle but wanted to delay the convocation of the constituent
assembly for as long as possible, in order to allow the returning soldiers to
participate, to prepare women for the electoral process, and to first secure
the achievements of the revolution by initiating socialization. A USPD speaker
said that the days of the soviet government were numbered, and that it would
not be favorable for the compromise reached in the interest of the revolution
by the three factions, if one of them were to declare itself against the
constituent assembly. The representative of the communist wing of the movement,
however, emphasized that political power had fallen into the hands of the
working class, although the latter was not presently capable of exercising its
dictatorship: this was prevented by the fact that the revolution had been for
the most part the achievement of the army, and even then with the decisive
support of bourgeois elements. If the revolution was to continue in a smooth and orderly manner, and, at the
same time, the political power of the working class was to be secured, if a
sharpening of class contradictions and even a civil war were to be prevented,
then only one road remained. There was danger from both the right and the left.
From the left, because, as attempts were being made to prevent the installation
of a soviet system and to reinstate the capitalist order, the influence of
syndicalist and anarchist elements would grow, and with it the danger of armed
insurrections. From the right, because the restoration of capitalism would be
accompanied by the rearming of the bourgeoisie. To prevent these two
possibilities, and the consequent civil war, from taking place, the total
political power of the working class must be maintained in order to assure
socialization; the bourgeoisie, however, had to be offered the chance to
influence the course, the form and the manner of socialization, in accordance
with its numerical importance in society. The convocation of a constituent
assembly meant the demise of the workers’ power: the political power of
the bourgeoisie would not be questioned, if the workers did not enter the
electoral struggle as a united class. Whoever wanted to preserve the political
power of the working class could not therefore support the convocation of a
constituent assembly, which the bourgeoisie was loudly demanding. However,
alongside the organ of the rule of the working class, the Central Council, a
parliament could be created, elected by a general vote, which, under the
control of the workers government, and with clearly-defined responsibilities,
would provide a certain margin of maneuver for the bourgeoisie, so they could
defend their interests during the course of socialization. This argument, which
was also schematically outlined during the Conference of German States, since
it was not possible to present it in all of its details, had practically no
support on the Council. On the contrary, the positions of the various party
factions were directly opposed to one another on a question which was not
merely a simple matter of the division between the working class and the
bourgeoisie, but revolved around the question of power as it affected the
working class itself: the power structures of the old organizations transformed
the struggle for the leadership of the class into a struggle over the position
and identity of the personnel of its leadership.
The course of events in the
Empire thus had to have negative consequences for the political position of the
Hamburg Council. On the question of the legal foundations of the State, upon
which the reorganization of the Empire had to be based, there were serious
differences of opinion between the two leftist factions. Each had essentially
distinct assessments of the national assembly. The attempt of the communist
council delegates to get the Council, and particularly its left wing, to accept
a common line did not prosper. For this reason, on the important question of
Hamburg’s external policies, many said: concerning the domestic policy of
the Empire, the influence which the left factions exercised over the Soldiers
Council in other matters failed from the first moment, and the bourgeois
component of the Soldiers Council was able to prevail, which led to a situation
where the Hamburg Council’s external policies were harmed by what
appeared to be its strong points in Hamburg itself. On the other hand, the
exclusive political rule of the working class was more accentuated in
While it was the
Council’s policy to try to exercise an increasingly more strict control
over the bourgeois administration, organically integrating itself into its
highest offices, the old party, in contradiction to this policy, appointed four
senators in Altona. In the trade unions, a vigorous attack was launched
regarding the composition of the Council; its dissolution and immediate
elections were energetically demanded, which would have endangered everything
which had been achieved, with the obvious intention of negating the
Council’s policy and carrying out a total about-face, an attack which
curiously took place at the same time as the first session of the Bürgerschaft. Already, at this
first session, the president was going to present a motion, supported by all
the factions, to grant
Meanwhile, fundamental
transformations had also taken place in the Soldiers Council. In order to
establish parity with the Workers Council it had, without consulting anyone,
increased its membership from 15 to 30, and the representatives of the old
party and the trade unions were well-prepared to easily take advantage of this
change and the consequent increase of the bourgeois element, in order to set
down roots in the Soldiers Council and to convert it into their own secure
fortress. How much the situation had changed could clearly be seen when the
Soldiers Council addressed the issue of the popular militia. The committee
responsible for implementing this measure set forth rules which dictated that
the militia would be composed of dedicated militants from the three socialist
groups: regardless of individual political convictions, it must not be the
instrument of any one socialist faction or its policies. As an organization
independent of the security service, which it had to assist in certain circumstances,
its members would keep weapons in their homes, and would in principle be
economically dependent upon only their day jobs. The militia depended upon the
central government, although the day-to-day command functions necessary to
fulfill the militia’s specific task remained in the hands of the
territorial government: this task was to safeguard the revolution. The motion
was defeated due to the resistance of the representatives of the old party and
the leaders of the Soldiers Council, and these two groups managed to table the
discussion and leave its future in the hands of the Soldiers Council. This
signified the elimination of the popular militia as far as
This was the situation when
the First Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils convened in
Faced with the divergent
tendencies which wracked the Council, the Council’s leadership called for
the unity of the whole working class, in order to secure and to extend the
revolution and its conquests. This goal was not hindered by an attempted coup
against the Council which involved various former members of the Council and
its press office, together with bourgeois editors, financial circles and
politicians. Several editors of the Echo
were also in on the plot, as they had to confess in writing while under
interrogation. The plotters wanted to arrest fourteen members of the Council to
hold as hostages, in order to execute them in case of a revolutionary
counter-action, as they said in a leaflet. On the basis of a proposal which had
previously been prepared by the Council, in assemblies convoked for this
purpose, it was ruled and decided that, in order to prevent the recovery of the
forces of reaction, the security forces must be composed exclusively of
dedicated revolutionaries, and that all the stores of arms and ammunition
should be under the exclusive control of faithful troops, and also that the
Committee of Seven of the Supreme Soldiers Council, which was in command of the
troops, should be composed solely of determined revolutionaries.
Officers’ military insignia and uniforms were also prohibited, all
officers were required to disarm, and the soldiers councils were made
responsible for the loyalty of the various military units. Officers were
allowed to be members of the councils if they were elected by a majority of
their detachments and were known to be convinced supporters of the revolution,
demands which, in a more detailed and somewhat modified form, were approved by
the First Council Congress, where they became famous under the name of the
Hamburg Seven Points. In order to help bring about the political unity of the
workers and to provide more publicity for the Council’s policies, it was
demanded, recalling the revolution’s first measures, that the Hamburger Echo should be placed at the
disposal of the Council. When the
The watchword of unity
heightened the workers’ consciousness of belonging to one class, and its
most profound significance was that under no circumstances whatsoever, and
under no political pretext, should the members of the working class ever take
up arms against one another. It also helped members of the old party and
independent social democrats to move towards the left, and, furthermore, if
this watchword of unity did not prevail, the structure of the Independent
Social Democratic Party (USPD) would have been compromised, since this party
contained two distinct factions. In general, however, the negotiations concerning
a unitary organization, then taking place in Hamburg, could only construct the
basic framework for the future, while the general direction of events could
clearly be seen in the fact that the basis which had been established for a
fusion of the organizations was undoubtedly favorable for the communists: the
revolution had created new conditions which made the unification of the
revolutionary working masses possible. In the future, the politics, tactics and
organization of the working class had to be oriented within the framework of
the revolution. The Würzburg program had lost all meaning after the
revolution. The
But it was precisely the
considerable success of this call for unity which exacerbated the differences
of opinion among the Council’s leaders and, after the First Congress of
Councils, the attacks commenced against the power of command exercised by the
soldiers councils, the representatives of the Berlin government and the trade
unions no longer concealed their aversion for the workers councils, and doubts
arose concerning their sincerity in proposing to undertake socialization. When
the situation in
Despite the tumultuous
proceedings, the debate in the Council crystallized around the question of the
relations between the council system and the trade unions. The right wing socialists,
who insisted upon the preservation of the old organizational jurisdictions and
relations, were told that the revolution was not over, and that its basic
effectiveness resided in the consolidation of the council system. Since it was
primarily an organization of the factories, which places the latter under the
control of the workers, the council system was also a new way to conceive of
the construction of the economy and society, and was at the same time the
culmination of the organization of the working class, embracing both its
political and its economic aspects; it expressed the unity of the class and
was, furthermore, incompatible with separate political and economic
organizations, which the working class had created within the framework of capitalist
society for its fight against that society. In principle and in practice, the
council system therefore superseded the political and trade union apparatuses
of the pre-revolutionary era. The demonstration which was taking place at that
time, whose purpose was to bring awareness of the council system’s new
tasks to the masses, was, despite the circumstances which accompanied it, the
beginning of a new era in the struggle in
Since on that same evening
excesses had been committed at the Hamburger
Echo, with much destruction on the ground floor, the Council president,
taking action to pacify the crowd, decreed that the building should be closed,
provisionally prohibiting the publication of the newspaper to prevent new
incidents, and above all because numerous provocateurs had infiltrated the
crowd. This measure was also applied, for reasons of fairness, to the second
socialist newspaper published in the city, that of the independent social
democrats, and this edict was later ratified by the Council. A committee was
formed to deliberate upon the question of what concrete conditions would have
to be met for the Echo to be
reopened. It ruled that the measure which had been proposed after the coup attempt,
and which had been approved by acclamation in popular assemblies, must be
implemented immediately, and that the newspaper, by means of an equal allotment
of editorial positions, must be transformed into an organ of the Council. The
committee understood, of course, that it would naturally have to simultaneously
suspend the publication of the newspaper of the Independent Social Democratic
Party, thus assuring unity on the terrain of the press, and in the future, the
unity of the political organization as well. However, before the Council could
implement these measures, it was prevented from doing so by the arrest of the
Council’s president, who was seized in the meeting hall, with threats and
by force, by security troops; at the same time, the Soldiers Council occupied
the Echo with a strong contingent of
soldiers, to protect it against the Council’s ruling.
As a result of these events,
the old party organized a large demonstration which took place on
A phase of dictatorship by
the Soldiers Council began. Not only did it spread the idea among the security
troops and soldiers that the left wing and the Workers Councils were planning a
putsch, but a long and bizarre series of arrests of alleged Spartacists took
place, among people who, while not always totally inoffensive, had nothing at
all to do with the Spartacus League. The Committee of Seven even ordered the
arrest of the leader of the delegation of the shipyard workers which had
demanded the closure of the trade union offices, charging him with the
completely baseless accusation that he, a Russian, had called for armed
resistance and the occupation of the trade union offices, and that his
identification papers were forged. Upon the request of the Foreign Minister,
and against the will of the judge presiding over the case in
The new leadership began to
systematically curtail the Council’s political power. It proposed
immediate elections for the Bürgerschaft.
The communist group, of course, had not only never opposed the election of a
communal representative body, but had recommended it from the early days of the
Council. But the old party had a much more ambitious goal, that is, to reinstate
the Bürgerschaft in its old
position and with its old rights. The Council, which due to personnel changes
in the Soldiers Council, was increasingly dominated by right wing socialists,
decided, after extensive negotiations, that it would elect a new municipal
parliament, which would have the old name of the Bürgerschaft, and that all those who had voted for the
national assembly would have the right to vote in this election, if the date
set for the elections in Hamburg came within six months. Another ruling
followed this one which went much further, according to which the Bürgerschaft would be a legislative
body, with political power. According to the decisive first article of the
ruling decreed by the Council on the elections for the Bürgerschaft, its tasks, besides the management of day-to-day
affairs, consisted in debating and approving a new constitution, and
formulating and passing the laws required to complement the new constitution. A
motion to the effect that the ruling must be in accord with the manifesto of
November 12, 1918, in other words, that the Council had veto power over any
decisions concerning the constitution, which was a prerequisite of political
power prior to the accession to power of the Council, was rejected. An attempt
to at least assure a reorganization of the Senate, adapting it to the new
times, also failed, and its opponents explained that it was not the
Council’s job to decree such decisive rulings and that the new Bürgerschaft should regulate such
matters. These decisions basically corresponded to the stance of the imperial
government, which no longer recognized the Council as the bearer of political
power in
The factional disputes in
Particularly during the
Council’s last days one could note that various attempts to create a
special tribunal with jurisdiction over all questions involving the revolution
and the power of the Council, which could not be judged by reference to the
existing laws, had not borne fruit, thus rendering the Council’s rulings
unenforceable. Whenever business owners appealed the rulings of the department
of social policy before the courts, the latter ruled that the
department’s decrees were not legal. And everything remained as before.
Although a proposal to create a special tribunal was submitted to the justice
committee for debate and elaboration, no definitive decision was reached, and
when a tribunal was nevertheless created, its president, a high court judge,
resigned because the tribunal was not compatible with judicial procedure.
When Liebknecht was buried in
The outcome of the political
and military success of this action would be of more benefit to the military
than to the imperial government. The same was true, or even more so, of its
possible further consequences. The government would never feel safe as long as
it was not master of its coasts. But if it were to establish itself here, the
military gang will have gained a base where, one day—perhaps while
fighting against the imperial government itself—it might join forces with
the English troops of the Entente. The intention of the Council’s left
wing was to keep the government and its military away from the coast, and it
was possible to achieve this goal. Given the forces of the formations of armed
workers in
This policy ultimately failed
as a result of the serious disagreements among the Council’s factions,
even though unity among the workers themselves took a great step forward, and
the general swing towards the left obliged the right wing socialist leaders to
clearly distance themselves from the government’s militarist policy. The
disagreements among the factions led to the resistance of the Hamburg Soldiers
Council and its leadership to the orders of the Ninth Army Corps High Command.
A vivid display of personal grudges! Amidst these events the Hamburg Seven
Points met their definitive demise, buried by precisely those who had
previously used them as a springboard for their first promotions, and who had
shortly thereafter distinguished themselves, following the general trend, as
government favorites.
These events decided the
Council’s fate. Its activity from this point on would be nothing but
agonizing and disgraceful death throes, from which the communist
representatives kept their distance. The immediate consequence of this death
spasm, for the workers, was the total paralysis of the department of social
policy. Even in the Council, its activity was violently criticized
because—although this had been true since its inception—its rulings
clashed with the judicial norms of imperial law; since the revolution had only
replaced the prior sovereignty with the Council, it was said, the Council’s
jurisdiction must be limited by the laws of the Empire; this constituted an
attempt to base the revolution upon bourgeois law, which was possible because
all the courts had recognized the imperial government. It finally occurred to
the department’s supporters to subject all the department’s rulings
to the Council’s enabling clause. But the justice department, which had
been assigned the task of examining the case, proposed submitting an appeal to
the courts to test the validity of the department’s rulings. An old
experience was once again verified: when you have political power, legal
formulations are an easy matter. When power is lost, legal formulations cannot
overcome and eliminate the resistance of reality.
Up to this time an
arbitration committee had yet to be created. The demobilization commissioner
declared that until such a committee was nominated, he would name one in its
place. There were thus two departments of social policy, with overlapping
functions, one based on a decree of the imperial government, the other on the
shattered political power of the Council. The end had come for the department
of social policy, and the decision to bring the matter before the General
Workers Council amounted to no more than a ploy to gain time, faced with the
necessity of recognizing the full significance of the situation, which would
have been more dignified.
Since the Council had
withdrawn from the political arena, there were some debates on this problem,
but no definitive position was adopted. When the new Bürgerschaft met for the first time, with a majority of right
wing socialists, the Council president, also a right wing socialist,
surrendered the Council’s political power to the new parliamentary body.
In accordance with the policy of the imperial government, the new Workers
Council, which was meeting at the same time, would no longer exercise political
functions, but only economic ones.
An apolitical council
system—an impossible demand, a political fantasy! The government, with
the help of loyal military units, defeated the revolutionary remnants of the
old army. But it has not yet been able to stop the workers’ revolutionary
strikes, nor will it be able to do so, so it seems. Chained to the bourgeoisie,
and to the compromise it concluded with the bourgeoisie, which entailed both
the rejection of any socialization as well as the elimination of the councils,
it will have to reject any concession which could endanger this coalition, and
with it the continued existence of the government itself. Even more important
is the fact that it has retreated on both these points before the pressure of
the strikes. It promised that the councils would be institutionalized in the
constitution, that socialization would be carried out, and that the legal
foundations for socialization would be created. However, the different parties
to the labor process recognized by the government contradict the fundamental
idea of the council system. The so-called Socialization Law is a stillborn law,
which does not go beyond the juridical principles of the legal state, and the
taxation of the coal trade is the opposite of a socialization measure. While
these concessions and the way they were made could only strengthen the
contradictory intermediate position of the government, without satisfying the
working class in any way, the pacification ploy of making the councils
participate in socialization contains an even greater contradiction.
Only those who hold political
power can carry out socialization. Socialization is only possible by
confronting and fundamentally transforming the old bureaucracy, by radically
confronting capitalism, as an economic principle and as a social class, by
totally replacing the existing social powers, by completely reorganizing the
laws of property, production and distribution. And in this vast process of the
transformation of all of society, the councils are the revolutionary and
transformative instruments of the working class. Who would believe that, having
found a solution for these problems, relegating the councils to the economic
sphere is the most urgent political task of the present and the greatest social
problem of our culture in the future?
The councils in large
industrial factories embrace, as a matter of principle, control over the enterprises
in the technical and commercial aspects as well. In the smaller and more
decentralized industries, their tasks are even more daunting. Here they will
lay the foundations for concentrating production into larger units. Savings, in
the widest social meaning, are now a vital necessity for all of society. A
private capitalist economy saves in each particular capitalist enterprise,
while a socialized economy saves on the level of the economy as a whole. Even
if it closes small and medium-sized enterprises and therefore destroys private
capital, an economy undergoing socialization will intervene in this manner if
required by the general interest, or if this can be done without serious
consequences. In this transformation towards higher forms of production, in the
employment of labor power and physical plant which will have thus been freed,
the factory councils will be as indispensable as the councils of the towns, the
cities and industries, since such a reorientation of industry would be
impossible without a corresponding reorganization of its administration.
As a new social principle of
organization and administration, the council system opposes to municipal
politics, which is the basis of the private economy, and therefore of
capitalist society, the idea of the union of all those who work in production
on the basis of the nature and location of their production. Just as the era of
tribal organization had its own forms of group socialization, and the era of
the private organization of the economy manifests forms of interconnection
between essentially different groups, so too does socialized society create its
own particular new forms of union and integration. The blood ties of tribal
organization as a constructive principle of human economy and society were
succeeded by the no less simple idea of one’s residence, of municipal
politics within a country or a territory. This principle, which has dominated
civilization for thousands of years, is now replaced by the principle of labor.
To the idea of municipal politics, and its highest manifestation in democracy
and parliament, is contrasted, without being totally disconnected from those
two concepts, the organizational and administrative idea of the councils, which
is radically opposed to the former notion. This does not imply that a social
organization which has taken thousands of years to develop and has attained its
latest bourgeois-capitalist form during the last several centuries can be
rapidly and totally established upon entirely new bases. The two social
principles, perhaps for a very long time, will be obliged to accept practical
compromises and to coexist. What must be decided upon now is not the absolute
elimination and destruction of the old principle, but the question of which of
the two principles should dominate society, which one of them must prevail over
the other. Until now, the ties of nationality have been based upon coercion
from above. The new system will organize the nations from below. And it is
precisely due to this fact that the new system will obtain the security which
will allow it to prevail over the old, which no foreign forces will be able to
prevent or oppress, and which will bring in its wake, in all regions and
throughout the world, with the guarantee of domestic invincibility, the
possibility of the unlimited expansion of the world socialist order.
1. Heinrich
Laufenberg: Die Hamburger Revolution,
Fritz Wolffheim
The German revolution, whose
political phase ended on
This is why, prior to the
revolution, both the political and trade union movements, despite their laying
claim to the revolutionary traditions of 1848, were essentially reformist. The
workers movement was reformist because it recognized the class state, because
its principle goal was to try to influence the rulers from within an
institution of the class state, from inside parliament. It was reformist in its
trade union struggles because, rather than organizing the working class with
the objective of destroying the bourgeoisie, and abolishing the principle of
hiring wage labor, its goal was to negotiate with the employers, guaranteeing
their future existence, and thus to try to obtain more favorable wages and
working conditions for particular sectors of the working class. And when the
party and trade unions participated in the class struggle, they did so only
within the framework of the existing state. Even in the heat of the struggle,
in strikes, it was, for the trade unions, not a matter of attempting to destroy
the bourgeoisie but of compelling particular groups to yield to certain demands
of particular sectors of the working class, demands which were framed so that
their satisfaction would be possible, and would by no means jeopardize the
future prosperity of capital. This must be kept well in mind if we want to
clearly understand whether the trade union form of pre-revolutionary times
corresponds to the needs of the German proletariat now that it has carried out
a political revolution. Having destroyed the power of the landowners and
princes which the bourgeoisie had at its disposal, the originally political
revolution has destroyed all powers which could have blocked the
proletariat’s road to power. Then the proletariat faced the question:
what kind of state should be organized? Should a capitalist state or a
proletarian state be born? The old capitalist state was overthrown by the
revolution; when it fell, there was no state at all, and the decision
concerning what kind of state should replace the old one which had fallen was
in the hands of the proletariat. The proletariat has not become aware of this
fact; it was not accustomed to reflecting on the nature of the state. The
proletariat had customarily restricted its efforts to gathering together a
mountain of white slips of paper every five years, so that its so-called
representatives could climb up to the heights of parliament. In matters
relating to economic organization, the proletariat has been prone, or
compelled, to yield all decision-making power to a small group of leaders, and
to limit itself to paying its dues, so that a small number of leaders can enjoy
a safe and secure existence. These were basically the functions of the
proletariat in Germany, and if its trade union and political organizations were
used for anything else, it was with the intention of transmitting the
stultifying mental training for which the school and the barracks had so nobly
prepared the German people, the party and the trade unions, as well as the
workers, who might otherwise have developed revolutionary ideas. Since the only
thing which the essence of the state has to deal with now is revolutionary
activity, it tries with great determination to get the German proletarians to
exercise themselves over the question of whether this or that indirect tax is
more or less beneficial for the landowners, rather than the problem of
analyzing the nature of bourgeois power, and what kind of power the proletariat
has to create in order to eventually organize that power as a state. All the
Kautskyists spoke of the conquest of power, but how to achieve this conquest is
not the subject of their study, nor do they want the workers to attend to the
matter. Now, when it has been two years since a proletariat which is not as
cultivated as the German proletariat, the Russian working class, showed what
means are required for the conquest of power, and upon what basis this power is
subsequently organized, then all the Kautskyists come and implore the German
people, for the love of God, not to imitate the “cruelties”
unleashed by the destruction of the bourgeoisie as a class in Russia.
The German proletariat had
grown accustomed to following its leaders; the whole world only appeared to it
as a prison courtyard, and no one was more surprised by the successfully
concluded German revolution than the German proletarians themselves. Had this
not been the case, if their capacity to speak and to think had not been so
astoundingly lost, then at that moment, at least, they would have asked what
had to be done to defend the power they had conquered. This question would have
been the question concerning the essence of the State.
Lassalle, who lived during an
era when bonzes did not yet exist in
the German workers movement, solved this problem. “The State”, he
says, “is the concentration of all real means of power existing in a
people.”2 The concentration of machine guns and the press, the
rule over the banks, the rule over the means of production, the concentration
of all military and economic organizations, this is the State. And what is
decisive for the rule of the State is the question of which class among its
entire people possesses the strongest means of power.
The power of the High
Command’s generals consisted in their control over the whole ensemble of
great masses of arms and men. When this circumstance changed, when the workers
and soldiers took all the means of power into their hands, and the other
classes amounted to nothing, then all that had to be done was to organize this
power and to add to it the rule over the press and the proletarian state would
have come into existence. The institutions of this proletarian state developed
quite spontaneously among the masses in the days of the revolution. The
military organizations were in ruins, the police and the courts, as well as the
administrative bureaucracy of the state, were paralyzed. To prevent chaos, and
to organize economic relations, the workers and soldiers councils were
organized throughout Germany, as if by a natural process, which in the first
days of the revolution had concentrated all power into their hands. The union
of all the German workers and soldiers councils and their solid foundation in
the masses of working people, in the mines, in the factories, in the
countryside—this organization was the State. Within the framework of this
organization the proletarians who possessed arms would have created a military
organization: the Red Army. It did not occur to the proletarians that it was
necessary to immediately firmly safeguard their power and to reorganize it.
Whenever they thought in terms of organizations, they had in mind the concepts
of their old organizations, the social democratic parties and the trade unions,
which were born in the class state, and had matured within it, and which had
neither the will nor the ability to safeguard proletarian power, to organize
the proletariat as a State; not only had these parties and trade unions been
integrated into the bourgeois class State, they had also become an essential
part of it, and when all the organizations of the bourgeois State trembled when
everything collapsed, they did not tremble, they became the backbone of the
reborn bourgeois State. This is how the proletariat of
That such a misfortune should
have befallen the proletariat is due in part to the fact that it was by no
means prepared to carry out a revolution. But besides this circumstance there
is another one which is very important. The proletariat had been accustomed to
view the revolution as essentially a political change, and thought that, once
this political change had taken place, the other change would only be a
question of time, and that when the old political forms are destroyed, there
would be an evolution towards a socialist society, and that the proletarian
struggle would no longer be necessary. And, once again, it was the social
democratic party and the trade unions which nourished this belief within the
proletariat, and which had forgotten, or wanted to forget, to explain to the
proletariat that the proletarian revolution is not exhausted in bringing about
changes in political forms, but is essentially an economic revolution, a
revolution whose task is to basically revolutionize the whole economy. If the
political revolution was carried out by means of the uprising in the streets,
the same cannot be true of the economic revolution, which cannot be
accomplished by means of armed actions, but must take place where the economic
process has its roots—in the factories. When it is a matter of providing
a country’s economy with a completely new economic foundation, one must
go to the roots of the economy, so it is not enough to rectify some random
surface phenomena of the existing economy. Its roots are in the factories, that
is why the revolutionary economic struggle of the workers begins in the
factories themselves. And if the revolutionary struggle of the proletarians
begins and ends in the factories, and if the goal of this struggle is to put
these factories at the service of the proletariat, then the only way to
organize the proletariat for this struggle is on the basis of the factory
organization.
The old trade unions were
created during an era when the proletariat did not find itself in the midst of
an economic revolution. Capitalism was still expanding, attaining higher forms,
and
Even before the war, this
form of organization rendered the workers incapable of putting their forces to
the test against capitalism in mass strikes. Because the old trade unions had
fragmented the masses into groups defined by trade, they did not have the mass
strike in their programs. As a result, the great shipyard workers strike of
1913 was defeated, because the workers’ form of organization was not
suited to the needs of a mass organization. The old trade unions were
organizations of leaders who carried out the bulk of trade union activity; it
was the leaders, not the masses, who negotiated. The leaders did not want the
masses themselves to carry out actions. For these leaders, the strike was a
last resort to be utilized in emergencies, rather than the natural weapon which
the strike constitutes in a revolutionary period. In a revolutionary period it
is no longer only a matter of improving working conditions, because capitalism
is dying, capitalist society can no longer improve working conditions: now it
is a question of destroying capitalist society. This can only be done by means
of a continuous series of revolutionary mass strikes which, constantly
spreading and successively embracing all industries, will shake the economy of
the whole country to its very foundations and finally compel the capitalist
class to declare bankruptcy. It is bankrupt now, but does it abandon all attempts
to stage a recovery, or does it confess its incompetence? No, the capitalist
class does no such thing; it cannot do that, that would mean suicide. This will
only happen when the proletariat compels the capitalist class to do it. The
principle means to achieve this goal is the revolutionary strike.
This strike, which can break
out because of simple economic demands, possesses a political dimension because
it affects the masses in such a manner as to threaten the existence of the
whole economy by spreading to other sectors of the economy. This has been
clearly demonstrated by the miners strike. Due to a shortage of coal, railroad
operations were curtailed and the transport of commodities was paralyzed.
Whether or not the miners were aware of this, the fact that they joined the
strike as one great mass itself has had political effects. And this is the
second reason why the old trade unions are incapable of leading the struggle of
the working class during revolutionary times. The trade unions are prepared for
partial economic struggles; the old social democratic party is prepared for
political-parliamentary struggles. A struggle which is revolutionary, and
simultaneously economic and political, can only be carried out by the masses
themselves. This is only possible within organizations which are created for
the purpose of conducting such struggles. Where these struggles have broken
out, where the workers have plainly seen the incompetence of the old trade
unions is where this new form has now become a reality. The miners organized by
mines, and among the mines by regions, and all the districts together into a
There is still a great deal
of hesitation; many workers still feel a certain fondness for their trade
unions due to old habits. But revolutionary times demand revolutionary
decisions, and whoever makes sentimentality the basis of their activity can win
three political revolutions but then lose them because of the lack of an
economic organization, just as the German proletariat has come to lose almost
everything it gained after the first German revolution. The German proletariat,
which is ready to conquer state power so as to organize a socialist economy,
cannot do so unless it has first organized itself for this economy. If
socialism is to be more than merely a bureaucratic scheme in which, instead of
local employers, a centralized bureaucracy directs the economic process, and
rules the working masses, as is now being attempted, then the proletariat must
organize against the centralized bureaucracy in order to become a pillar of the
productive process. This is the difference, and this is why the trade unions
hate the factory organizations.
A trust, which is a kind of
North American corporate entity, can dissolve itself today, and reorganize
itself in a new form tomorrow. This is a completely natural process for it when
it encounters obstacles which impede its operations. The trade unions, however,
cannot dissolve themselves after a revolution in order to reorganize on a new basis.
They have to preserve their old centralization, their old bureaucracy, and do
so in order to organize the white guards to make factory organizations
impossible even before they arise. This is how things stand now. Today, when
the workers are well enough organized to begin the process of transformation,
where they have a sensible leadership, the trade union bureaucracy joins the
white guards to fight against those who want to form revolutionary trade
unions.4 If a trade union were to be dissolved, and the next day,
the workers were to begin signing up for the new form of organization, what
would such an event signify? It would signify that the masses would have an
organizational form in which they could freely develop all of their forces. For
the leaders of the trade unions, however, it would mean they would no longer be
needed, and this is why the bureaucracy will not agree to such a thing, and are
merciless with the factory organizations.
As everyone knows, we have
the enterprise councils, 5 which will be institutionalized in the
recently-created bourgeois class State. This State will give the councils a few
rights, and more duties. Their principle duty will consist of endeavoring,
together with the employers, to increase each enterprise’s productivity.
This cannot be the task of the revolutionary factory councils. As long as the
class State exists, the proletariat is at war, and the factory councils must be
organs of the revolutionary struggle. They must unilaterally defend the
interests of the workers, even if this means that the enterprise goes bankrupt
ten times, since, in this economic order, it is not interested in assuring
profitability. The proletariat today has no interest at all in the recovery of
the capitalist economy, but in its collapse. Each step towards recovery is a
step backwards for the proletariat. Each increase in the profitability of any
enterprise only fixes the chain more firmly which has once again bound the
hands of the proletariat after the political revolution. But if the factory
councils are not to be institutions dedicated to preserving capitalist
exploitation, but rather institutions of the struggle of the revolutionary
proletariat, then they must not be controlled by the counterrevolutionary trade
unions, which are institutions of the class State, but, instead, by the workers
in the factories. The workers should not consent to any interference whatsoever
in the running of these enterprise councils, especially by the trade unions.
For this reason, as well, the proletariat needs factory organizations. Only if
all the proletarians in an enterprise are united in a factory organization
would they be capable of controlling everything that happens in the workplace.
As long as this organizational form does not exist, the proletarians will be
dispersed. Therefore, if you want to put an end to this dispersion into trade
unions and parties, this can only be achieved if a new form of unity is
created, a form of unity in which all the workers, whatever their trade, or
their party, can together coordinate the affairs of the enterprise. This would
only be possible in a factory organization. If the workers in a factory have to
work together, regardless of which political tendencies they endorse, they
could also carry out negotiations with each other and manage their own affairs
within the factory.
The only condition for
membership which the factory organization will have to establish, besides
getting out of the trade unions, is that each member must defend the principle
of the proletarian class struggle, and that he share the conviction that there
can be no peace between the employers and the proletarians as long as the class
State exists. A declaration to that effect is completely sufficient. This will
keep out all those elements which used to be called “yellow”, and
unite all the revolutionary workers, even if their political positions diverge
on some points (which is of no account for activity within the factory), in a
unitary struggle against the employer, and against the employers as a class.
It is not by chance that it
is just now, in
Whoever has a firm
determination to assure that power remains in the hands of the proletariat, must
also be sure of the road to follow. Whoever wants the political struggle to end
in the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the economic struggle to result in
the transfer of production into the hands of the proletariat, can only have one
slogan:
Get out of the trade unions,
Create factory organizations!
1. Fritz
Wolffheim, Betriebsorganisation oder
Gewerkschaften?,
2. This
is certainly not a quote from any of Lassalle’s writings. Lassalle often
dilated on the purpose of the state. To the “night-watchman idea”
of the state, which, according to Lassalle, the bourgeois maintains, Lassalle
opposes the “idea of the state of the workers as a whole” (to be
realized by universal suffrage), which would be identical to the idea of the
state. Lassalle meant all those who have a part in productive activity, be it
manual, administrative, scientific, educational, etc. The state would then be
the “unity of all individuals in an ethical whole, a unity which will
multiply the individuals’ forces a million-fold. Its purpose will be the
education and development of the human species towards freedom”.
Ferdinand Lassalle, Gesammelte Reden und
Schriften, edited and with an introduction by Eduard Bernstein, Vol. II,
Berlin, 1919, p. 195 et seq., and pp.
240-241. The quotations are from the following works: 1) Arbeiterprogramm Uber den besonderen Zusammenhang der
gegenwärtigen Geschichtsepoche mit der Idee des Arbieterstandes
(speech before a
3. As
a result of the legalization of freedom of association for certain categories
of workers (the railroad workers, for example), there were no longer any
obstacles standing in the way of joining a trade union for those workers
affected by the new law. Note that the “free trade unions” are the
social democratic trade unions.
4. In
1919/1920, the expression “revolutionary trade unions” was also
used by other left communists, who would later—at least after their break
with the “Red Trade Union International”—consider it a contradiction
in terms.
5. Betriebsräte, the councils which
sought to be simple reformist bodies and sought state recognition.
6. On
the Industrial Workers of the World and Wolffheim’s relations with this
“revolutionary trade union”, see Chapter 9 of this volume.
Hermann Gorter
The communists are distinguished from
the other working class parties by this only. . . . In the national struggles of
the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the
front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all
nationality. . . . United action, of the leading civilized countries at least,
is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
Manifesto of the Communist Party
When
one has dedicated as many years of one’s life to the theoretical
propaganda of Marxism, i.e., scientific socialism, as has the author of this pamphlet,
and then decides to cease to do so in Holland, at least temporarily—and
at the very moment when socialism is passing from science to action—then
one would want the last stage of one’s labors to be as clear for the
workers as the previous two stages were.
In
newspaper articles (in the Tribune)
the results of this work have been published, but in a dispersed form,
largely inaccessible to a wider public. They can be found in their entirety in
this pamphlet.
The
first period of my propaganda for scientific socialism in
The
second stage was the struggle carried out together with the SDP for the
revolutionary unity of the Dutch proletariat.
The
third stage was the struggle against the leadership of the SDP (now the
Communist Party), and for the revolutionary unity of the international working
class. This last stage of my work might appear, to many workers, to be less
important than the other two. In reality, however, the struggle for the
revolutionary unity of the international proletariat has now become the most
important task.
This
is because both the Dutch Communist Party and the Third International are
suffering from the same opportunism which ruined the SDAP and the Second
International. And this opportunism appears to be preventing, or at least
retarding, the unity of the international proletariat and the victory of the
revolution.
This
is why I want to explain the character and the development of my struggle
against the leadership of the Communist Party of the Netherlands1 as
clearly as possible.
My
last word on the Dutch Communist Party will be directed against the worst enemy
of the working class.
The
growth and concentration of national capital into syndicates, cartels and
trusts, i.e., into monopoly capital, and the rule of finance capital over all
other kinds of capital, led to the world war between the most important
financial groups of the world’s great powers, and the states grouped
together under their leadership.
The
working class did not rise to the occasion of this challenge because it had not
formed a revolutionary unit on either the national or the international level.
Consequently, the war broke out without any significant resistance on the part
of the workers.
And
when the war was underway, the working class could again do nothing, precisely
because of this lack of international unity. If this unity is not produced by
the revolution, it is quite likely that the revolution will be defeated in one
country after another.
Because
now, after the war, international capital—whatever enmity may exist
between national capitals, whatever their disagreements—is firmly united
against every national revolution. And they are joined by the social democratic
parties, the social patriots who supported the war effort; and by the
pseudo-Marxist parties (the Kautsky tendency) which everywhere commit the same
act of treason as they did during the war, so that a united front is
constructed throughout the world, an international front, which fights against
any revolution for communism, and therefore against the international
revolution as a whole; a united front of England, America, Germany, France,
Italy and Austria, of Clemenceau-Renaudel, Ebert-Noske, Wilson-Gompers, Lloyd
George-Thomas, etc.
If
anyone still has any doubts that this is the case, just look at
Against
this united front—this much is clear—only a revolutionary united
front of the international revolutionary proletariat can fight effectively. A
national proletariat and even several national proletariats together, would be
defeated by this united front.
In
addition—and this is of the utmost importance—not every country
undergoes economic collapse at the same time and to the same degree. Capital is
in a much stronger position in
Already,
during the war, and even at the beginning of the war, this was where the great
question arose: How to achieve this international revolutionary unity? And
above all: What kind of tactics must the international proletariat, and thus
each national proletariat, employ to make this unity possible, to fully realize
it? These were the most important questions for the communist revolution. There
are no reflections on these questions, nor any theories, in Marx and Engels, or
in Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin.
This
is why I have concentrated all my attention on this question since the
beginning of the war, and have tried to provide an answer in two pamphlets: Imperialism, the World War and Social
Democracy and The World Revolution.
This
question became yet more pressing, and its solution all the more urgent, when
Kautsky betrayed our cause, and Rosa Luxemburg was assassinated.
My
answer was: the proletariat can only be victorious in its struggle and in the
revolution, if it treats the imperialisms of the two camps of the great powers
as equivalents, as they actually are, if it fights the imperialism of the two
camps, that is, of all nations, as if it were one single imperialism. I have
tried in every possible way, in the two pamphlets mentioned above, to prove
that this answer is correct.
And
the day probably approaches when it will be proven that the tactic I have
defended since 1917 was the only correct tactic.
If,
as is most likely, the Russian soviet republic is attacked again, or if the
German revolution breaks out once more, the unity of the American and European
proletariats will immediately become necessary. Because Anglo-French-American
imperialism, supported by Scandinavian-Dutch imperialism, will immediately
confront this revolution with military or economic means, or with both at the
same time. And then the proletariat of
The
same would be true if the revolution were to break out in any other great
power. It was this tactic which gave rise to my disagreements with the
leadership of the SDP (CP). The SDP’s tactical conceptions were
fundamentally different from mine. Before outlining the evolution of my
struggle against the SDP leadership, I shall set the record straight concerning
the following point:
One
argument employed by Wijnkoop against my international tactic was as follows:
Gorter diverted the Dutch proletariat from its most essential task. This task
is to bring about the revolution in the
The
revolution in the
Only
when capital is severely shaken or is overthrown in the largest countries will
the revolution also take place here, as a result of export and import and trade
difficulties, etc.
By
revolution, we mean the demolition of the existing society and the construction
of a new one. The revolution comprises both
of these moments.
Besides
the power of Dutch commercial, industrial and agricultural capital, the
revolution is also currently impeded by
Consequently,
when Wijnkoop said that my tactic hinders the most essential task of the Dutch
proletariat, he was mistaken.
However,
preparatory movements are possible in the
But
has there been an occasion where the Dutch party could have taken part in the
international revolution? Yes, there has been one point where the Dutch working class and the international
revolution intersected, and that was the struggle against Entente capital when
the latter was on the verge of victory, and then when it had won the war.
That
was when Entente capital threatened the Russian, the Hungarian, the German and
the world revolution, and the Dutch proletariat could have intervened by
revolting against Entente capital where it was possible to do so.
This
was the tactic which I recommended but which was rejected by Wijnkoop and Van
Ravensteyn.
We
also see that when the Dutch proletariat first acted in a revolutionary way, it
was when it confronted the Entente, and not when it carried out a revolution
against Dutch capital, which in Wijnkoop’s opinion was its
most essential task.
Thus,
far from having hindered the cause of the proletariat, my tactic has promoted
it.
On
the other hand, we see that it is precisely Wijnkoop’s and Van
Ravensteyn’s policy which has held back and still holds back the
proletariat at the very threshold of linking up with the world revolution.
And
now, to the issue at hand.
While
browsing through the issues of the Tribune
from the war years, it becomes apparent that, from the very first day of the
war, it leveled fierce criticisms against the imperialism of the Central
Powers, but (apart from a few observations formulated in the mildest terms by
Henriette Roland-Holst) either said nothing about the Allies or more or less
took their side, although they were certainly no less “responsible”
for the war, or less cruel.
Consistently,
and as a matter of principle, the Tribune
never attacks the imperialism of the Entente, but savages Austro-German
imperialism in innumerable articles.2
One
could cite hundreds of examples of this anti-German and pro-Entente position,
but I only want to highlight this tendency’s opposition to my own
position, so I shall restrict myself to examining its most typical
characteristics, which I have already cited on previous occasions.
In
April of 1917, Lenin, Zinoviev and many other Russian
revolutionaries traveled from
In
July of 1917, Kerensky, under orders from the Entente, launched his
final offensive against the Germans. It was a last-ditch, desperate attempt to
save Russian capitalism. The Russian revolutionaries demanded peace so that
Russian capitalism could be annihilated and the world revolution could begin.
They were therefore correct to oppose the Kerensky-Brusilov offensive.
But
the Tribune, and the leadership of
the Communist Party in the
Nor
did Wijnkoop and Van Ravensteyn agree with the peace treaty signed by the
Russian communists at Brest-Litovsk. “Such a peace”, the Tribune announced on
These
three facts prove that the leadership of the Communist Party subordinated
everything to the defeat of Germany and the victory of the Entente, even the
beginnings of the Russian revolution—the model for the world revolution.
And, therefore, that it did not see that the victory of Entente imperialism
implied great dangers for the world proletariat, dangers at least as serious as
those which would have accompanied a German victory; that it did not fight the
two imperialisms with the same dedication; that it favored one of them, and it
did not see that the world proletariat had to, and still must, form a united
front against international imperialism. That is, its opinion was diametrically
opposed to mine.
Even
so, for the first few years of the war, this policy was at least plausible. At
that time it appeared that
But
when the
This
is why comrade Luteraan published a very good anti-Entente article in the Tribune of
But
the editorial committee, without actually directly addressing the question,
responded in the most pathetic manner, which led me to believe that the
situation was even worse than I had thought. The editorial committee obviously
did not want the Entente to be criticized in the Tribune. As a matter of principle it had never done so, and it did
not want anyone else to do so, either.
I
then immediately wrote, at the beginning of October 1917, an article for the Tribune, which criticized German
imperialism as well as that of the Entente and the
Ultimately,
Wijnkoop obliterated a very important, perhaps even the most important
objective of the international proletariat: the struggle against the two
imperialisms, the unification of the whole international proletariat against
imperialism in its entirety—just as Troelstra previously obliterated the
voice of the opposition.
Why
did the leadership of the Communist Party do this?
It could not be because it wanted the
revolution to break out in
The
reason is to be sought in opportunist electoral tactics.
The
SDAP was pro-German. A large part of the Dutch workers, however, especially the
syndicalists and anarchists, sympathized with the Entente. It was thought that
these latter workers could be won over by not saying anything, as a matter of
principle, against the Entente. The Communist Party’s leadership’s
search for immediate electoral success was the reason why it stifled an
even-handed and objective critique, and thus prevented the consideration of
problems of the greatest importance for the proletariat.
The
second reason was its limited point of view, which led it to think that it only
had to fight one imperialism, instead
of both of them, that it had to deal with one part, instead of taking on both
imperialisms as a single whole.
By
its suppression of free speech the leadership of the Communist Party has shown
that it has used every means at its disposal to bring about the triumph of its
one-sided, pro-Entente policy. It has shown that, in order to further its petty
partisan interests, it has followed the same tactics in foreign politics as
Troelstra did in regards to domestic politics. It has shown that it did not
want a pure, and therefore strong party (even though currently a small party)
like Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but a party strong in numbers and above all in
terms of votes (!)5 It has, in a word, shown that it cannot be
relied upon: although it definitely stands to the left of Troelstra and the
SDAP leadership, it comes from the same mold. It has subordinated international
class interests to partisan domestic interests. It has in addition shown that
its policies were partial to the Entente.
When
But
in 1918, when Anglo-American imperialism had practically assured its eventual
victory, when it assassinated (sic) the Russian revolution and its victory had
thus become the greatest danger to the world revolution, then the policy of the
SDP leadership became a crime.
Because
at that moment, only the unity of the international proletariat against the
leading power of international capital, against Anglo-American imperialism,
could save the Russian and the world revolution.
Despite
all of this, however, the leadership of the Communist Party (at that time the
SDP) did not renounce its tactic: it finally publicly confessed its stance in a
declaration of principles. In the Tribune
of
“In
fact, the
According
to the editors of the Tribune, the
So,
what is really happening?
The
This
is the goal which the
It is
for this purpose that it is creating an army more powerful than any other, it
is developing its own militarism, it is building a fleet which can compete with
the world’s most powerful navies, with each one separately, and with
several at the same time. And it is for this purpose that it is militarizing
all the institutions of the
And
the Tribune responded to these
developments in the following manner: The United States did not take part in
the war for any material interests. Not for territorial, economic or financial
interests!!!
The
The
assertion of the Tribune’s
editorial committee contradicts the entire development of capitalism, which
teaches us that every great capitalist state, due to a constantly-increasing
mass of surplus value, is forced to expand and thus to attack. It contradicts
everything we observe in the policies of the other great states. No evidence at
all is provided in its defense. I have provided evidence in my pamphlet on
imperialism that all great states, and therefore
I
was right, then, when I said that the Tribune
not only fails to mention the Entente’s objective, or conceals this
objective, but also considers the imperialism of the Entente in a more positive
light than German imperialism.
Just
compare its treatment of the Entente with all the abuse directed by the Tribune’s editors at German
imperialism.
But
the Tribune’s editors go even
further. They state:
“Above
all, Wilson wants to protect the Union (the United States) from a terrible
future danger, and to create a new capitalist world order, in which it will be
possible to keep this danger at a distance more easily, if not prevent it
altogether.”
“In
which it would most likely be possible to prevent, even forever, serious
clashes between the great powers. This is the material basis of its
‘idealism’ and its war craze. A capitalist ideal, of course, but an
order which would undoubtedly mean a higher level of development. . . .”
“This
imperialist ideal implies . . . nothing less than the possibility, the goal, of
preventing the capitalist world from (once again) undergoing a terrible
catastrophe, like the one it has just suffered for the last four years.”
And,
as the editorial committee said of
I
was therefore not just exaggerating when I said that the editorial
committee’s policy was favorable to the Entente.
And
that its policy has a positive assessment of the goal of Entente imperialism.
After
saying that the United States is not fighting for material advantages, it
states that the United States, the whole Entente, and even all of
Europe’s pacifists, want a new world capitalist order to arise, in which
serious conflicts will not exist, or will at least usually be prevented!
It
preaches a reformism in foreign affairs which may have the same consequences as
Troelstra’s reformism did in domestic affairs.
In
this respect, the editorial committee of the Tribune joins the company of all the reformists and social
patriots, all the false Kautsky-style Marxists, all the pacifists, all the
demagogues like Lloyd George, Wilson, Czernin, Max von Baden, etc.,
etc., and all the bourgeois parties, who are endeavoring to fool the workers
with the idea of a World Alliance and a worldwide peace.
The
most stupendous deception ever perpetrated against the people in the history of
the world has begun. And the Tribune
participates in it without proffering even the shadow of an argument.7
And
all of this contradicts everything which Marxism has ever taught us. It is the
most extreme example of a pro-Entente policy, and it is the policy of the
editorial committee of the Tribune.
The
reader will therefore recognize that I was correct when I suggested that the
editorial committee of the Tribune,
once having advocated a pro-Entente policy, still has to do so now, and that it
would have to continue to do so in the future. Because whoever defends such an
opinion concerning American, English and Entente imperialism, will also have to
support this imperialism in their political practice, in the chamber of
deputies. Because even if they recognize that this imperialism is
anti-socialist, it is in their opinion infinitely better than the German
variety.
But
now there is much more to take into consideration.
The
entire position of the party leadership, as it relates to both domestic as well
as foreign politics, now becomes clear.
When
it was not guided by its anxious desire for immediate political influence, by
its desire for the support of anti-German elements in
We
can now understand why the party leadership only fought German imperialism and
never, as a matter of principle, that of the Entente. We can now understand why
it suppressed Luteraan’s opposition as well as mine, and persecuted
others.
We
can now understand why it did not want to participate in the Zimmerwald
conferences.
We
can now understand why it had some reason to criticize the journey undertaken
by Lenin, and others, through
We
can now understand why it approved of the Kerensky-Brusilov offensive. In
addition to its previously-mentioned ardent desire for power, all of this was
due to the opinion that the Entente’s policy really was better than
Germany’s and that—under Wilson’s leadership, and under the
leadership of American capital—the Entente’s policy sought, and was
capable of achieving: “An order which would undoubtedly mean a higher
level of development,” as it says in the Tribune.
This
is what lies behind the whole policy of the Tribune
and the SDP.
But
all of this has nothing to do with reality. It has become clear that everything
written by the Tribune’s
editorial committee is wrong. The Peace of Versailles has offered convincing
and definitive proof of this assertion.
Like
all opportunism, theirs also produced ambiguities. They had to make the workers
believe that all imperialism was to be fought, but this injunction was only
absolutely clear in regard to German imperialism. This was quite obviously
revealed in their position on the Russian revolution. They sent a telegram to
Lenin, expressing their complete agreement with his tactics, and saying that
peace would have to arrive via revolution in all countries. But they forgot to
add that their primary goal was
The
leadership of the Communist Party (at that time, the SDP) has nonetheless continued
to practice this tactic even in its subsequent political activity in
parliament.
The
worst possible scenario, that Wijnkoop and Van Ravensteyn would also declare
their support for the Entente and
It
would be of no help to them at all if they were to say that they are leaving
the implementation of the necessary measures to the bourgeoisie. It was they
who proposed: By all possible means. They are therefore responsible, since they
had previously accepted all possible means.
The
SDP called upon the other socialist parties, the German, English, French and
North American parties, to hold firm to international ideals during the war,
and not to support the war. It demanded that comrades be prepared to suffer
anything, hunger, the destruction of their countries, the death of their women
and children, and their own deaths. But then, when the SDP itself and the Dutch
proletariat had to suffer hunger—suffering a thousand times less severe
than that endured by many countries involved in the war—then, for the SDP
and the Dutch proletariat, it was no longer necessary to uphold their
international ideals!
It
was thus all for the sake of appearances, nothing more: the protests against
the social patriots as much as the glorification of the Bolsheviks. When it was
necessary to put one’s own skin at risk for the international, to put the
international above national interests at home, the party failed to rise to the
occasion. In this respect, with this failure, the SDP has adopted the point of
view of Kautsky, Longuet, etc., in the matter of political practice.
It has elevated petty and parochial national
interests above international class
interests. Our times require, however, that party
interests be disregarded in favor of all international
class interests. Or, more precisely: that
party interests should become identical with international interests.
Only
if all the proletariats—the English, North American, French, and
Scandinavian, in the first place—can accomplish this goal, would it be
possible for the international revolution to succeed. This must be the basic
line, the fundamental idea underlying the international politics of the
countries mentioned above, and indeed of all countries. International interests
must merge with the national class struggle, completely impregnating it.
Furthermore,
Wijnkoop and Van Ravensteyn did not protest when they faced a concrete test,
when
Once
again, it was the same tactic: all out against German imperialism, nothing
against Anglo-American imperialism.8
And
despite everything, there can be no doubt: all the proletarians must confront
all the imperialisms as a whole, and thus, now, above all, the dominant
imperialism of world capital, Anglo-American imperialism.
Anglo-American
capital must be attacked in every country. A united front must be formed
against this capital, which has the ascendancy and the leadership (in the
struggle) against the world proletariat, and which is now oppressing the whole
world, but especially Europe, Asia and Africa, the “civilized”
countries as much as the “barbarous” and all the colonies. And
which, thanks to its infinite resources spread throughout the world, might be
able to resist the tide of bankruptcy and revolution. And which is today, as
In
every country, and especially the neutral countries as well, which serve as
bridges between the world’s imperialisms—everywhere, wherever the
world’s imperialisms are attacked in the manner described above, wherever
a struggle based on this policy is carried out by the workers in the great
powers, who are decisive with regard to the final outcome, all the workers, and
first of all, naturally, the transport workers, must refuse to lift even one
finger for Entente imperialism.
In
This
was my tactic.
By
not acting in this manner, the editorial committee of the Tribune and the parliamentary fraction of the Communist Party
harmed the unity of the international proletariat. With their support for
Anglo-American imperialism (for bread alone!) they have truly betrayed the
cause of the world revolution.10
Naturally,
a leadership which acts in such an opportunist manner in relation to this most important
international issue also runs a serious risk of practicing an opportunist
policy in domestic politics as well.
When
the war ended, all my “prophesies” about Anglo-American imperialism
were proven to be correct. That, for instance, the Peace of Versailles would
break
But
even today, when the Entente has razed all of Eastern Europe, when it has
subjected the whole proletariat of Eastern and Central Europe to terrible
sufferings, when it threatens the Russian revolution with death, drowned the
Hungarian revolution in blood, stymied the development of the German and
Austrian revolutions, today, when in all the countries of Europe and North
America, including the neutral countries, the revolution will not be just a
revolution against each national bourgeoisie, but also against English and
American capital, which control sources of food supplies and means of
transport, today, when England and the United States have, even in all the
other countries of North America and Europe, assumed the leading role in the
leadership of world reaction, even today the leadership of the Communist Party
does not take the stand it should against these powers, England and the United
States.11
With
the strike of
This
is made apparent by the reaction of the Communist Party’s leadership to
the Peace of Versailles. A critique of its position on this issue will complete
this portion of my argument.
The
Peace of Versailles, imposed by American and Entente capital, means, I repeat,
endless sufferings for the European as well as the Dutch proletariat. Food
shortages, scarcity of goods, unemployment, higher taxes, nationalism and
chauvinism, rearmament, new wars, a new world war, such will be the
consequences of this Peace. The European continent will be rendered powerless,
and all international capital will be subjected to the rule of
Nonetheless,
the Communist Party, following the recommendation of its leadership, has not
joined the protest (at the last party congress Wijnkoop still viewed this
protest as “a lot of hot air”) against the Peace of Versailles.
What
are the causes of this behavior, which is at first sight so strange and so
absurd?
The
first reason is: It did not want to miss the chance to strike a blow against
the SDAP. The SDAP protests the peace; the Communist Party, then, must not do
so! This opportunist reasoning, which has no other purpose than attracting
votes and seats in parliament, is so miserable that it is not worth the effort
to waste even one word on it.
The
second reason: The Peace of Versailles is directed against German imperialism,
whose destruction is of the utmost importance. German imperialism (and with it
its inseparable allies, the Ebert-Noskes) protested against the Peace, so as to
rally the German nation around it once again. Therefore, we must not protest
against this Peace which will destroy German imperialism.
This
argument once again proves how limited the attitude of the Party’s
editorial committee and leadership is in the domain of foreign affairs, in
relation to the cardinal question of imperialism.
Because
first, by not protesting one weakens German imperialism, but at the same time
one reinforces Anglo-American imperialism, which, as I have demonstrated, was
as dangerous as the German variety, but is now obviously much stronger. Now
that German imperialism has been defeated and lacks everything, it will have
little chance of seizing world power. Anglo-American imperialism has won, and
has acquired world domination.
Secondly,
the Peace of Versailles is not only directed against German imperialism, but
also against the German communist revolution. The German revolution has been
paralyzed by the occupation of the country, the interruption of supply
shipments, etc.
Third,
when the German communist revolution soon broke out once again, Entente
imperialism formed an alliance with German imperialism against the revolution,
as it had formed an alliance with Kolchak, Denikin and Mannerheim in
Thus,
by not protesting against the Peace of Versailles, the Communist Party of the
In
other words, it exhibited the same stupidity in its position on the Peace of
Versailles as it had shown in its position on Kerensky’s offensive.
The
Dutch Communist Party has furthermore distinguished itself in this respect from
all the other communist parties.
The
Italian, French and English communists publish protests against the Peace of
Versailles in their press. So do the Swiss, Norwegians and Swedes. And the
Russians, too. And also the German Communist Party. The leadership of the
German party declares in its official newspaper, the Kommunistische Räte-Korrespondenz of
“But
the proletariat cannot remain trapped in slavery to either the domestic or the
foreign bourgeoisie. If this peace means upholding the dictatorship of Entente
capital, with or without the help of German capitalism, then we are for war
against both the foreign as well as domestic exploiters.”
“We reject the Peace of Versailles,
because it is a pact between the bourgeoisie of the Entente and the bourgeoisie
of
“But
we are not fighting the bourgeoisie of the Entente in a common struggle with
the supporters of rejecting the peace negotiations, but against them. Our struggle against the Entente imperialist is
simultaneously a struggle against the Ebert-Scheidemann government, against the
regime of German capital. And since we are engaged in a serious war with the
dictatorship of German capital, within
Heinrich
Laufenberg says that the world’s revolutionary proletariat must unite to
fight the Peace of Versailles. He sees the way, and the key, to world
revolution in the common struggle against Anglo-American imperialism.
The
All
the communist parties attack the Peace of Versailles in their newspapers.
And,
finally, the Third International protests against the Peace of Versailles, in
the person of its president Zinoviev, and has passed a resolution at its
Congress in
“The
‘democratic’ states of the Entente are practicing an extremely
reactionary policy.”
“Reaction
is victorious (in the Entente countries as well) all over the capitalist world,
when it falls under the influence of the Entente.”12
As
we see, the whole Communist International protests against the Peace of
Versailles.
Therefore,
the whole Communist International defends the same point of view I have
defended since 1914, and which I have disseminated in opposition to the
leadership of the SDP and the Dutch Communist Party since the summer of 1917.
But the Dutch party, a member of the Third International, does not protest the
Peace of Versailles.13
The
only correct position is: Struggle against the Entente, but not alongside the social
patriots, not together with Scheidemann, but in absolute independence.
Furthermore,
as was reported, when Wijnkoop informed the Congress that the Italian and
French parties had called upon the proletariat to go on strike because of the
Entente’s attack against Russian and Hungarian communism, he only told
half the truth.
As
the official newspaper of the English party, The Call, reported in June of 1919, the French and
Italian parties called upon the proletariat to strike not just against the
Entente’s intervention in
And
anyone—anyone among the militants of the Communist Party of the
Netherlands—who admits that the Peace of Versailles is producing
interminable sufferings for the proletariat; that the struggle in Europe
against this peace could continue long into the future; that the Peace of
Versailles is also directed against communism; that Entente imperialism will
form an alliance with German imperialism against German and world communism;
that the leadership of the struggle in the united front against communism is
now in the hands of England and the United States, and that this leadership
position in this struggle will be increasingly dominated by these same
countries, to which the Peace of Versailles has granted world
rule—whoever acknowledges these facts, would not mention only half the
proclamation of the Italians and French, as the leadership of the Communist
Party desires, but the whole proclamation.
But
is it not true that the German revolution has to defeat German imperialism
first? Does the world revolution not depend upon this first step?
Of
course, both these questions could be
answered in the affirmative. Nothing is certain. But we have never denied this,
and we have always approved of all propaganda against German imperialism.
But
this is not how these questions must be formulated.
Because
the question is not whether the German revolution has to prevail first, and
whether the world revolution depends on this eventuality, but: How can the
German revolution be victorious?
In
this case there can only be one answer: Anglo-American imperialism will form an
alliance with German imperialism against the revolution,14 and the
German revolution will immediately confront not just German imperialism, but
also French-Anglo-American imperialism.
It
is therefore the duty of the German communists, and, consequently, also the
duty of the Dutch and all other communists, to simultaneously fight both German
imperialism and French-Anglo-American imperialism. Why? On the twenty-first of
June you attend the demonstration against intervention in
The
Peace of Versailles itself, with all the difficulties and adversities which it
may pose for capital, is essentially an agreement between the two international
imperialist camps. Adverse or not, it signifies peace between the two of them.
German
capital has accepted it; it wants to comply with its terms and pay reparations.
That is, English, American and German capitals want to join forces in order to
resume the exploitation of the international proletariat.
Viewed
in this manner, which is the only correct perspective, the Peace of Versailles
is a peace between international capitalists, but a declaration of war on the
international proletariat, and is directed against the revolution of the world
proletariat.
And
the Dutch communist proletariat, led by Wijnkoop and Van Ravensteyn, did not
protest against this peace! And the Communist Party loyally followed them!
The
statesman-like tactic and wisdom of Wijnkoop and Van Ravensteyn, which consists
in attacking German imperialism, fighting only German imperialism and not
Anglo-American imperialism (Wijnkoop said: “We are proud of it”),
is thus an erroneous and short-sighted tactic. In reality, it helps
Anglo-American imperialism, which is allied with its German counterpart; it
therefore helps international imperialism.
German
and Anglo-American imperialism, i.e., world imperialism, closes ranks against the
revolution in such a way that it is necessary to attack both imperialist camps,
and all imperialisms, as if they constituted one single imperialism. If one
wants to fight German imperialism, one has to attack Anglo-American
imperialism, and vice-versa. The
tactic of the leadership of the Communist Party helps both of them; it helps
world imperialism against the world revolution.
From
everything which has just been briefly summarized above, one can conclude that
the way chosen by the SDP and the Communist Party to fight world imperialism,
that is, its foreign policy, has been bad in every respect.
Its
position on Lenin’s return to Russia, on the Kerensky Offensive, its
defense of Wilson and the League of Nations, its suppression of the freedom of
speech within the Communist Party in regard to criticism of the Entente, the
practical support it gave to the Entente through the concession of ships and
the port of Rotterdam, its failure to protest against the Peace of Versailles,
all demonstrate that this is true.15
This
is why, in 1917, 1918 and 1919, I rebelled against the party leadership.
All
of this shows that the leadership of the Communist Party in the
What
great change leads to the revolution? The fact that the masses must do
everything themselves. Only the masses, when they attain national and
international unity, can bring communism.
But
in this struggle the masses need a vanguard. This vanguard is the International
Communist Party. This vanguard must be absolutely pure and faithful to its
principles. Pure in its means and its ideas. Because if it is not, the masses
will become confused and lost.
That
is the way it is in every revolution. There was always a nucleus, a vanguard, a
minority, which finally became the majority. Such was the nucleus of the geuzen, Cromwell’s
troops, and the various class groupings in the French revolution. As well as in
the Paris Commune and the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Karl Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg wanted the German Communist Party to be a nucleus of this
kind.
Given
that the masses, when they unite, can now defeat capitalism and build
socialism, all efforts must be
focused on the goal of preparing the masses for this task. The preparation of
the masses must be the sole objective.
Compromises,
opportunism, the suppression of free expression, the deception of the masses,
concealment of the intentions and the lust for power of the party or its
leadership—all of this is now absolutely harmful. As has been proven in
Instead
of taking the pure way, we see, as in the conduct described above, that the
leadership of the Communist Party applies an erroneous tactic, and aspires to
power (!) for the party and for itself.
We
see how it concludes compromises and competes with the other parties for
popularity. We see that to achieve these goals it even suppresses freedom of
expression.
Recent
examples include its collaboration with Kolthek and its friendly attitude
towards the NAS, 16 its involvement (in competition with the NVV) in
the municipal council’s campaign to raise money for hunger relief in
Vienna, its demand for nationalization of the land (in competition with the
SDAP’s socialization program), which is also counterrevolutionary at this
juncture, and its presentation of England (where the situation could become
revolutionary, but where the workers still have done nothing revolutionary, and
where, should English capital survive the crisis, the workers could become
collaborators in the oppression of the international proletariat) as a model.
Such
opportunism proves that the goal of the leadership of the Communist Party is
not the enlightenment of the masses, but power for the Party and its
leadership. Expressed in one cold, clear phrase: The leadership is not building
the party for communism, but using communism as a means for the aggrandizement
and power of the party and its leadership.
That
is what I have been fighting against for the last three years.
I
hope that this summary explains my struggle on behalf of the workers. My
struggle is founded on good reasons, reality has proven it to be correct, and I
had no other purpose in mind than to achieve the revolutionary unity of the
international proletariat, which is absolutely necessary for the triumph of the
revolution; this struggle, like the previous one I led against Troelstra, was
for the revolutionary unity of the Dutch proletariat.17
I
once again insist, before the forum of all the comrades and friends of the
struggle: The leadership of the Communist Party has failed on every question of
importance over the last few years: Kerensky’s offensive, decisive for
the Russian revolution; English and North American imperialism, which is the
bastion of the counterrevolution; the League of Nations and the Peace of
Versailles, which are the principle weapons against the revolution; as well as
in relation to various questions of primary importance in domestic Dutch
politics, and its evaluation of the German revolution, which is the nucleus of
the world revolution. In all of these international issues, events have proven
that I was right. My tactic has been vindicated on every point.
Let
us put aside this insignificant conflict within the Dutch party, and
concentrate on the most important facts regarding the great international
movement of the proletariat.
We
note that the second phase of the history of the evolution of socialism is
coming to an end, or has already concluded. The first phase was the socialism
of the time before Marx: Utopia. The second was the phase of the development of
socialism as a science—from 1847, the year of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, until the Russian
revolution in 1917. The third phase began in that year: socialism in action.
Fact
number one is the fact that the second phase has ended.
Fact
number two is the discovery of the form by which the revolution and socialism
can become a reality: the soviets, the workers councils. Born in the shops and
the factories, they are spreading throughout all of society. They grant, from below, all economic and political
power to the laboring classes. Sole, exclusive power. Dictatorship. They are
building the new state which replaces the old one, which will finally
“die”, and will be transformed into a new society, which will no
longer know class rule.
Fact
number three—as important as the dictatorship and the workers
councils—is the unification of the international proletariat, which is
finally beginning to take place. In 1847, Marx and Engels called upon the
proletarians of all countries: “Unite”. But seventy-six years had
to pass before the proletarians could heed that call. It was the concentration
of capital into industrial syndicates and trusts, it was monopoly and finance
capital, it was the world war, it was imperialism, which finally brought the
proletariat together into a united front. The Third International of Moscow is
the embodiment and the symbol of this fact.
Now
we see the workers take up the fight
in every country, in the revolution against monopoly, against big finance
capital, against imperialism, against world capital.
Now
we see the soviets arising in various forms everywhere.
Now
we see the coming of international unity everywhere. We see that the revolutionary workers of all countries are uniting
against imperialism, that they are joining together under one watchword—workers councils—that the Moscow
International is assuming their leadership, that they are joining together to
fight all imperialisms, that they view imperialism as a single whole, and that
they are beginning to form a single
united front against it.
And
this international unity must continue to grow.
Capitalism
itself guarantees that it will.
It
guarantees the new imperialism; it guarantees the recent and upcoming wars, and
the next world war, which already threateningly looms.
It
guarantees the consequences of this first world war and of the Peace of
Versailles.
And
most of all, it guarantees the identity of the leaders of the imperialist
powers:
It
also guarantees the new
Now,
the
Against
all of these forces, the international proletariat will join together more and
more, and its unity will be created by the struggle against the power of
international capital.
There
can be no doubt that an opportunist tendency can be perceived in a large
proportion of western European communists. In
And
when the working class of every nation has been united in one struggle against finance capital, against monopoly, against
imperialism, which organize and rule all of society, and against its leaders,
against imperialism as a whole, when this has been carried out everywhere in
the same way and under the same watchwords, when all those who create capital
unite against all imperialisms, viewing them as a single whole, when, from this
perspective, they join together by their own will, forming a single whole, then
no power will be able to resist them, and they will be victorious.
The
entire international struggle, each and every national struggle which is now
taking place, contributes to this process of unification, it comprises this
process.
Those
who feel—like the editorial committee of the Tribune—that this international unity of the proletariat against
international imperialism is still a utopia, something impossible; that the
proletariat only has to defend itself against its own imperialism (I naturally
acknowledge this necessity, I have never doubted that this is the task which is
nearest at hand); and that this is the way to victory, such people once again
prove that, first, they do not understand imperialism, and second, they are
blind to reality.
They
are the naïve souls who, seeing how easily the Russian revolution won its
first battles, now think that it will be the same everywhere else.
But
the world revolution is not so easy and so quick.
The
world revolution is a long-term revolution, it requires endless efforts, and
will have its times of advance and its times of reflux.
It
can only win by means of unity.
The
adjustment of tactics and their subordination to, their determination by, their
dissolution into, international tactics, is therefore the sole precondition for
its victory.
Just
as, in the past, the workers of one
trade in one workshop joined one association, compelled by one boss
to fight one struggle; and later, the
workers of one trade in one city did the same, compelled by the
city’s owning class; then the workers of one trade in one country,
compelled by the owning class of the nation; and, as the workers of all
countries are joining parties opposed to the bourgeoisie, so now for the first
time the proletarians of all countries are uniting, compelled to do so by
monopoly, finance capital and the imperialism of all nations.
Those
who do not believe in the necessity of this union of the world proletariat in
one front against world imperialism, which they consider to be impossible,
overlook the fact that the prior unions mentioned above, such as in one workshop, in one city, in one trade,
in one country, in one party, also seemed impossible. But
they became realities nonetheless.
International
unity in one front against
international imperialism will also become a reality. The proletariat of
The
Dutch proletariat will also be a part of this, despite the errors of its
leaders. Perhaps, we hope, these leaders will exchange their current tactics
for better ones.
This
struggle, this process of unity against world imperialism, that is, against the
existence of capital itself, is the world revolution, in which the Russian and
German revolutions are only episodes. This unity against all imperialisms
combined, against world imperialism as a whole, this unification of the world
proletariat by the world imperialism of global capital—and by its
struggle against the latter—this unity for the world revolution, is what
I want to foment with my struggle against the leadership of the Communist
Party, and with my recent theoretical-Marxist propaganda.
And
this struggle for unity is becoming the driving force behind the actions of the
masses, their workers councils and the revolutionary struggle in each nation.
I
will repeat once more, for the last time: if, during the coming spring, the
Russian revolution is attacked again, or if, during this summer, or thereafter,
the revolution breaks out again in Germany18—in Germany, where
the situation is probably more revolutionary than anywhere else—in
Germany, which is the key and the gateway of the world revolution, and whose
revolution is infinitely more important than the Russian revolution, because
its success would endanger English and American capital, and world capital as
well—or if a revolution breaks out in another great power, in France or
England, then the unity of the world proletariat against
Anglo-American-French-German capital, against world capital, will be necessary.19
The
Dutch proletariat and the international proletariat have to be prepared for
this eventuality, and they have to prepare today.
And
even if the world revolution is defeated, if the whole world war and the
current bitter struggle turn out to have been a lesson, a test for the
international proletariat, from which it must learn to form one single revolutionary unit, then
unity is also the first and principle requirement, and the guarantee of
victory, which will soon be achieved.
In
any case, the international tactics which I defend are necessary, they must be
combined with the national revolution, they must be one and the same thing.
Because
the world revolution will not only take place in national struggles, but in a
great international struggle between labor and capital, between communism and
capitalism.
A
theoretician can never do more than show the workers the final goal of the
movement, as accurately as he can, and the road to be followed in order to
reach this goal. This, not being a leader of the masses, is his task.
The
world proletariat, then—which, by means of action, through the soviets
and by way of the national revolutionary struggle, achieves global unity
against the organized imperialism of global capital, and thus brings about the
world revolution and victory—will more exactly and correctly formulate my
last word of propaganda for scientific socialism in Holland.
With
this, I conclude—at least for the moment—my theoretical propaganda
for communism here in
-August, 191920
Notes
* H.
Gorter, Het opportunisme in de
Nederlandsche Communistische Partij,
1. It
will soon be possible to obtain a general perspective on my theoretical labors
in the form of ten pamphlets which will appear as a complete series under the
title, “Het Communisme”:
2. I
opposed this tactic of the Tribune (in
the issue of February 8, 1918); my first argument was as follows: just as the
domestic policy of the ruling classes divides the workers by means of such
stereotypes as religious and liberal, conservative and democratic,
etc.—differences which have practically been eliminated precisely by
imperialism—the imperialists now divide the workers, only on a much wider
scale, on a world scale, into the followers of one imperialism or another. It
is only by means of this division that the imperialists of all nations are now
achieving their goal. What, then, does one accomplish by fighting German
imperialism with more vigor than one employs against Anglo-American
imperialism? One supports the lie upon which the division of the workers is
based.
3. That
the Russian communists agreed with me on this issue, and would certainly not
have approved of the Tribune’s position,
is clear. Trotsky writes, in Soviet Power
and International Imperialism: “The offensive of June 18,
Kerensky’s offensive, was the most terrible blow struck against the
working classes of all countries, as well as the most terrible blow struck
against the Russian revolution.” Terrible, because the toiling masses of
all countries expected “that the Russian February Revolution would show
itself in its full magnitude and teach something new”, and then had to
see that the new government pursued the same “rapacious” goals as
Czarism. Trotsky also saw the Peace of Brest-Litovsk as one more consequence of
the (failed) June 1917 offensive. L. Trotsky, Die Sowjet-Macht und der internationale Imperialismus,
4. We
must at this point briefly insist upon the fact that we have always completely
approved of the struggle against German imperialism. We have only demanded that
the Entente be fought as well.
5. This
question was of the utmost importance, since, prior to the revolution, an absolutely pure party is needed, which
will accept no compromises of any kind.
6. The
attempt of the
7. I
have also refuted these notions in over twenty pages of my pamphlet on
imperialism.
8. This
is what I said in the Tribune of
The
decisive international reason, the sole valid reason from the international
revolutionary point of view, not to loan ships to
The
Dutch proletariat must prove to the entire world that it is the enemy of all
imperialisms, that it stands in solidarity with the proletariat of all nations,
and that is why it fights every imperialism, even if it must itself suffer as a
result.
9. I
am not saying that such action (as I had recommended) would have been
successful at that time in
When
I fought against Troelstra’s position on the question of education
policy, many people thought that my objections were exaggerated. They did not
think the danger was so serious. And now look at what has happened to that
party (the SDAP) and to the educational system of the Dutch proletariat!
10. Even
today, the editorial committee will not declare its principled opposition to
the Entente and the
The
foreign affairs editor, Van Ravensteyn, has yet to publish even one article in
the Tribune which opposes the two
leading capitalist powers.
11. See
also the article in the journal of the Third International: “Down with
the Peace of Versailles”. “Nieder mit dem Versailler Frieden. Aufruf
des Exekutivkomitees der Kommunistischen Internationale an die Werktätigen
der ganzen Welt”, in: Die
Kommunistische Internationale, Year One, No. 2, June 1919, p. 165, et seq. “Thesen uber die Politik
der Entente augenommen auf dem I. Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale
am 6 Marz 1919”, in: Der I. und II.
Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale. Dokumente der Kongresse und Reden,
W.
12. One
example among many will demonstrate the Tribune’s
lack of understanding of and its support for Entente imperialism: When the
Council Republic was proclaimed in
13. Even
if the Hohenzollerns return to power.
14. This
has changed somewhat, as I have said. In their position on the
15. Which
was naturally a failure, as can now be clearly seen.
16. The
same phenomenon, but on a larger scale, and not so petite-bourgeois, can be
seen in the Central Committee of the Communist Party in
17. A
few more words about my personal experiences in this struggle against the
leadership of the Communist Party:
After
having had to fight, as I have said, for nine months, until July 1918, to get
two articles published, during the latter half of 1918 I published eight or ten
more articles against the Entente and the policy of the Communist Party (the
two matters being inseparable).
But
the only reason those articles were published, was because I sent them to
comrade Pannekoek (he met me outside of
All
the methods customarily used by Troelstra, were used against me by the
editorial committee of the Tribune.
First
of all, absolute silence. The editorial committee has never undertaken an
in-depth analysis of the principle issue, Anglo-American imperialism. It
desired that the comrades remain ignorant of this issue.
They
tried to resort to some faithful friends to respond to my challenge, such as
V.L., “Opmerker”, etc. (V.L.=van Leuven, who published interesting
articles on economic questions in the Tribune,
a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in July-August
1920; Opmerker (“Observer”)=K. van Langeraad, a regular contributor
to the Tribune and the Nieuwe Tijd), who, in this case, took
pride in the selfsame myopia in defending the editorial committee.
They
tried to present the issue as if I had defined the two imperialisms as being
“equal for the proletariat”, when I had actually insisted precisely
on their differences. They spoke of “working with the philosopher’s
stone, of wanting to explain the inexplicable, a lack of evidence, illusionist,
doctrinaire, not seeing reality, fantasies”, etc.
Finally,
they even went so far as to invoke the opposition of those who really labor for
the party and those who are theoreticians.
All
of this was in response to my first two articles against the two imperialisms.
Wijnkoop and Van Ravensteyn also expressed their “absolute
disagreement” with my pamphlet, “The World Revolution”.
Foreign communists judged otherwise. Izvestia
and Pravda immediately published
the two articles, and the committee for prisoners of war in
Then
they gave the whole affair a personal dimension, exactly as Troelstra had done
before. I had offended the leadership (!!). In this manner they tried to divert
the comrades’ attention and to slander me in the comrades’ eyes. In
relation to which, I have only this to say: after he returned to
I
submitted this request four times. The first time was in a letter (already in
the summer of 1917) to the editorial committee of the Tribune. At that time I told them that, according to my standards,
their foreign policy was too nationalistic, and that was why I proposed that
they accept my collaboration. They did not accept my proposal. Later, in an
article in the Tribune in November, I
made the same proposal to the party, after having made every effort during the
previous year to get my views published regularly in the Tribune.
Once
more I submitted my request to the party, in a letter which was distributed at
the party congress in November 1918. Finally, my party local at Bussum
submitted the same motion at the June 1919 party congress, and the Enschede
local followed suit in 1920. In every case the answer was no.
Two
Congresses ago, Wijnkoop said that the motion should not be approved
“because Gorter is opposed to the editorial committee”. The
question was not asked, then, whether I had not been showing the Dutch
proletariat the road to follow, or whether I was probably correct on this
occasion, too, or whether my theory was correct, or whether it was of use to
the national and international proletariat, or whether reality had not proven
me right on the most important issue for the proletariat. He only said: Gorter
is opposed to the editorial committee, opposed to us. He only said: His
opposition is a hindrance (that is, a hindrance to the petty everyday business
of the party). Therefore: Expel him—as in the times of Troelstra. And the
very same “leaders” who have made it impossible for me to carry on
with my work, now accuse me of not working! In addition, Wijnkoop has stooped
so low as to try to put an end to my influence both here and abroad, having,
for example, personally told Lenin that I was a neurotic!
A
very significant example of Wijnkoop’s efforts against me took place
quite recently: I have been explaining to the workers that the German
revolution would most probably break out once again, and declared that it would
be the cornerstone for
Finally,
Wijnkoop and Van Ravensteyn have refused to participate with me on a commission
for international affairs established here by the Third International. They
first proposed that all decisions should be submitted to the presidency of the
Dutch party, and when this was rejected, they refused any and all collaboration
with me! They have thus achieved their goal: by rejecting my collaboration as a
staff member of the Tribune they
separated me from domestic activity, and by their refusal to collaborate with
me on the international affairs commission they are separating me from international
activity. Obviously, the Dutch workers movement still has not rid itself of
petty-bourgeois tyranny, which has burdened it since its origins. I would also
like to briefly relate the position of the editorial committee of the Nieuwe Tijd. Both Pannekoek and H.
Roland-Holst, in 1917, 1918 and again in 1919, refused to give me any support.
They were responsible for the fact that a hard-hitting article I wrote in
defense of Luteraan’s excellent exposition of his dissenting views was
not published in the Tribune. They
did not undertake any kind of direct struggle against opportunism in the
Communist Party. When, in June 1919, I wanted to publish an article decrying
the position of the party leadership on the Versailles Peace Treaty in the Nieuwe Tijd, I was prevented from doing
so. And immediately afterwards, a personal attack against me was published in
the same journal. I am only mentioning this here in order to warn the editorial
committee of the Nieuwe Tijd that the
only way to preserve revolutionary Marxist tactics in
18. This
has now taken place. The heroic German proletariat, which must overcome
infinitely more difficulties than the Russians, has once again risen. The
German revolution, as Marx said, will be profound.
19. English
troops have already intervened, in
the March 1920 general strike.
20. Some
notes were added later.
The National Conference of
the abstentionist communist fraction of the Socialist Party of Italy was held
in
After hearing the report of
the
the Conference declares that
the party, as a result of its current composition and activity, is not
qualified to lead the proletarian revolution, and that its numerous defects
have their origin in: 1) the presence of a reformist tendency within the party
which, in the decisive phase of the class struggle, will necessarily assume a
counterrevolutionary position; 2) the continued existence of traditional
language in political and economic activity;
the Conference unambiguously
declares that the PSI’s membership in the Third International cannot be
considered to be in conformance with the statutes of the International, since
the party tolerates the presence of precisely those elements who deny the
principles of the Communist International, and who publicly defame them, or,
even worse, demagogically speculate with them in order to obtain electoral
success;
and considering that the true
instrument of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is the class
political party, which is based on Marxist doctrine and the historical
experience of the communist revolutionary process, which is currently unfolding
throughout the world, and which is already victorious in Soviet Russia;
the Conference declares that it will devote all its efforts to creating a
communist party of Italy, as a section of the Third International, and that
the fraction will persevere, both within this party as well as within the
International itself, in emphasizing the
incompatibility of participation in elections to bourgeois representative
institutions with communist methods and principles, in the hope that other
purely communist elements in the socialist party will also place themselves
upon the basis of the new party, in the conviction that choice is only possible
after abandoning those methods of political activity which now practically
place them in the social democratic camp; the Central Committee is delegated
the following tasks:
1) preparing
the program and statutes of the new party, always keeping in mind the program
presented by the fraction at the Congress of Bologna, as well as the
orientation maintained by the fraction’s organ5 in the
discussion of the most important current problems of communist methods and
tactics;
2) expanding
international outreach in order to create a
fraction within the communist International which is opposed to electoral
participation, and defending the fraction’s mandate at the next
international congress, with the demand that action be taken to provide a
solution to the abnormal situation of the Socialist Party of Italy;
3) convoking,
immediately after the next international congress, the founding congress of the
communist party, and demanding that all those groups within or outside of the
PSI which lay claim to the communist program should join the party;
4) summarizing
the basic positions and tactics of the fraction in clear and effective
principles, and disseminating them as widely as possible in
The agreement to create an
effective antiparliamentary fraction within the Third International could very
well be of the utmost importance for the International itself. We can also see
how, as in the case of the creation of the Zimmerwald movement during the war,
when it was a matter of uniting all the forces which were faithful to
socialism,
The National Communist
Conference, with regard to the fraction’s continued membership in the
socialist party throughout the electoral period of the administrative
elections, declares its adherence to the following position:
The abstentionists will not
by any means or in any way participate in the elections, and, wherever
possible, will prevent a party electoral slate from being presented, and will
advocate abstention with all the means at their disposal.
After voting on some
organizational matters, and electing the comrades Amadeo Bordiga, Ludovico
Torsia, Rodolfo Gobert, Tommaso, Borraccetri, Antonio Pisacane and Antonio
Cecchi to the Central Committee, the conference adjourned.
1. We
include this short text of the Italian Left (extracted from Il Soviet and published by Kommunismus) in this collection because
it shows, in opposition to the legend maintained by Bordiga and the Bordigists,
that the entire Italian Left was actually more “leftist” than the
image they later tried to disseminate. This text reveals: 1) that, prior to the
crucial Second Congress of the Communist International, the Italian Left almost
made the issue of non-participation a question of principle; 2) that it had
intended to form, upon the foundation of this principle, a left opposition
within the International and that it had already judged that the latter
organization was infected with “opportunism”, and finally, above
all, 3) that it had the intention of calling, on its own initiative (and not
within the framework of a socialist party congress, as had occurred at
Livorno), and as soon as possible, a
founding congress of the communist party in Italy.
As
is known, “events” took a totally different turn. The Italian Left
unconditionally accepted the discipline of the Communist International and
never formed an international fraction within it; it set the parliamentary
question aside as a secondary matter, and, out of discipline, participated in
the elections; the party was not founded until January 1921, when the last wave
of the workers movement (summer 1920) had receded.
Once
the anathema was pronounced against Bordiga and the winners had concealed his
role, a vigorous reaction was launched to defend the opposite viewpoint.
Bordiga was indisputably the leader of the first communist party, this could
not be denied; does this imply, however, that he exactly expressed the most
profound and subversive tendencies of the abstentionist fraction? The fact is
that Bordiga and the other members of the Central Committee never carried out
the mandate with which they were charged by the fraction’s conference.
The fraction, after the Second Congress, still had confidence in Bordiga, because
it was incapable of creating another leadership. One can undoubtedly discern,
in Bordiga and the first leadership of the PCI, the tendency to adapt to
circumstances; something which once again took place in 1923 when Bordiga (for
the simple reason that Gramsci, although heavily outnumbered, would not agree
to sign the document) withdrew a manifesto of the party in which he called for
a debate concerning the opportunism of the Communist International and an
apparent break with party discipline (the draft of this manifesto is reproduced
in Revista Storica del Socialismo,
November-December 1964, and in French in Invariance,
No. 7); this attitude was also revealed when Bordiga suddenly forgot his doubts
about the revolutionary nature of the Communist International during the Fourth
Congress when the program was finally presented and adopted.
Except
for the degree of their isolation within their separate contexts, Bordiga
played the same role in the PCI left which Rosa Luxemburg played in the nascent
KPD; the difference being: 1) the distance between Bordiga and the rest of the
party was much less than that which separated Luxemburg from the revolutionary
members of the KPD; 2) Luxemburg was situated within left reformism; Bordiga
had illusions about the revolutionary power of the Communist International and
the good intentions of the Russian leadership; these positions contributed to
preventing the free development of the revolutionary tactics of the western
proletariat and neutralizing the new power represented by the PCI, a power
which was killed without its ever having been able to clearly assume an
authentically representative form.
Bordiga’s
defining characteristics (equally valid for the period after 1945) were the
following: trenchant in his theoretical works (although this facet often had
two faces) and lenient (not prone to take drastic action) in practical affairs.
(For
a leftist group on the PCI left, see the Communist
Awakening group, which appeared at the end of 1927 and was active until
1929. Although it held Bordiga in high esteem, it opposed his leniency towards
the Communist International; but a perusal of its journal shows that it could
by no means contend with the Bordigists for party leadership).
2. Read
by Amadeo Bordiga.
3. That
is, the leadership of the Socialist Party.
4. Ordine Nuovo, a leftist fraction
associated with the journal of the same name edited by Gramsci.
5. Il Soviet.
The Communist Left and the Resolutions of
the Second Congress of the Communist International1
H. Roland-Holst
The consequences of the
decisions reached in
Only one of the left groups,
the Austrian communist group, has immediately confirmed its appreciation for
the great value of such an association. Revoking its decision to boycott the
elections, which had been proclaimed shortly before the congress, in order to
participate in very unfavorable conditions in the electoral campaign, it has
provided an example of international discipline of a kind never seen in the old
movement.
In my view, it seems unjust
and inappropriate to joke about this act of the Austrian comrades by calling
them “Mamelukes”, as the Arbeiter-Zeitung2
has done. However anti-parliamentary one may be, one can and, according to my
criteria, one must appreciate the sacrifice such an act implies. The Austrian
comrades are not necessarily puppets of
An entirely different
question, however, is whether the negative experiences in respect to
participation in parliamentary elections, most recently suffered by the
Austrian communists, and last summer by the Germans, 3 do not cast
doubt upon the consequences of a discipline which obliges parties in the Third
International to act against their own better judgment and intuition. Does the
Austrian failure not prove that grudging obedience to a directive, without
enthusiastic conviction, not only fails to reinforce the revolution but
actually retards its progress? Is this failure not a sign that it is desirable
and necessary to give the member parties freedom of action in certain cases and
within certain limits, and precisely in those cases where the conscious and
active part of the working class either demands or rejects a particular course
of action?
In his pamphlet on left wing
infantilism, while addressing the issue of parliamentarism, Lenin has
brilliantly reminded us of the danger of lethargy, which inevitably arises
periodically in extreme left wing tendencies and constitutes their negative
aspect. He explained to all radicals that only by remaining in close and
continuous contact with the masses can this danger can be avoided, and in this
respect he has done all of us a great favor. And he has personally convinced us
that it is folly for the communists to refuse to participate in bourgeois
institutions or non-revolutionary workers organizations, out of fear of
weakness or corruption; the construction of the institutions of the new society
will not be possible without confronting similar and even more serious dangers.
Lenin has not presented any proofs, however—and neither he nor anyone
else can present such proofs—that the communists of
Based on what we have read in
certain declarations in the Workers
Dreadnought,5 the English anti-parliamentary left communists
will follow the example of the Austrian comrades, that is, they will place more
value on organizational unity at the national and international levels, than on
the defense of their opinions on particular issues. Now that the Labour Party
has refused to admit communist organizations, the most important bone of
contention separating the right and left wings of the English communist
movement has disappeared, and I think the Pankhurst group’s position is
tactically correct, which consists of advocating unification with the old BSP
(now the CP). It would be idiotic to preserve the current fragmentation of
forces, solely and exclusively because of the antiparliamentarism of a small
group: a party cannot have an essentially negative purpose for its existence,
without falling into lethargy and situating itself outside of the masses.
However, the task of Sylvia Pankhurst’s brave and dedicated group will be
far from finished, once formal organizational unity is established. Since it is
likely that the moderate wing of the English CP, with its strong predilection
for parliamentarism, will be predominant, it will be the task of
Pankhurst’s group to be the revolutionary conscience of the party and to
ceaselessly defend the new concepts concerning the role of the masses as the creative
element in the revolution. In this way it will also help preserve the spirit of
the Shop-Stewards Movement, and will help that movement grow stronger as well.
The relative and absolute small size of the communist groups in England, as
well as the lack of a strong apparatus of bureaucratic power and influential
leaders in the old BSP make it more probable that organizational unity for the
communists of this country is the best option, so as to provide the fresh,
young and radical elements who are least prejudiced by the old concepts with an
influence on the growth of the movement. The precondition for this—and
this is very important—is that they preserve their independence of
spirit, and do not allow themselves to be deprived of the right to criticize
both the national and international leaderships.
In contrast to what is taking
place in
The political isolation of
the extreme left implies great dangers for the latter, although, fortunately,
there are plenty of opportunities these days to prevent a loss of contact with
the masses. It is, furthermore, precisely its independence which allows the
KAPD to freely propagate its ideas and to transform them into reality, without
being paralyzed by the requirements of a dogmatic and authoritarian party
discipline. Whatever forms they assume, depending on the specific situation,
all the radical leftist groups everywhere represent essentially the same
tendencies. The idea that only the energy, the initiative, the heroism and the
dedication of the masses can make the revolution a reality, has not only been
theoretically understood by these groups; they want to transform this idea into
the soul of all organization and all action, they want to bring this idea to
the consciousness of the working class masses.
This idea, of course, is not
always a steady and luminous beacon held aloft by the left radicals. Their
beacon is often overshadowed by multiple errors; the groups which are attracted
to this beacon are often searching, looking for direction, making mistakes, and
faltering, because they abandoned the old well-traveled roads. To this we must
also add that extremes normally attract adventurers of the spirit: undesired
episodes frequently result.
The KAPD has persistently
sought theoretical understanding, i.e., the truth concerning the question of
which road to follow for the liberation of the proletariat. It has had to expel
dubious and confused elements from its ranks, and is undergoing a continuous
process of maturation and increasing awareness. It has made mistakes, but its
errors were never the result of the indecisiveness of a party bureaucracy still
in thrall to antiquated concepts. It did not vacillate during the days of the
“Kapp Putsch”; nor did it vacillate when it seemed for a moment
that the soviet armies were only a few days from the gates of Warsaw, it did
not hesitate when paralyzing the transport of arms and munitions to eastern
Europe became a matter of the utmost importance for the Russian and
international revolutions. Because of its faith in the mission of the masses,
and the masses’ power to fulfill that mission, the KAPD now represents
the future. The KAPD acknowledges the necessity of party centralization, as
long as this is understood to mean unity founded on basic principles, and on
the will to translate these principles, regardless of the circumstances, into
guidelines for action, rather than on the absolutism of a handful of leaders.
It recognizes the great value of the party in the revolutionary struggle, and
the task it must fulfill, which is to be the political center of the will and
the thought of the working class. It rejects with equal fervor, however, both
the idea of the dictatorship of the party over the masses, and the idea of the
dictatorship of the party’s leaders over its militants. The KAPD has
undergone various changes, it has overcome enough false and erroneous concepts,
and most of the truths which it has discovered are proven and authentic,
precisely because it has discovered them by means of its own efforts, and has
not accepted them as a result of a ruling passed down from above. This gives it
a power which few parties outside of
The
Our general conclusion is as
follows:
As long as the objective and
subjective conditions for revolution in the various countries continue to be as
divergent as they are today, international discipline and centralization, as
sought by
In our western world, where
bourgeois ideology, the idea of bourgeois freedom, has affected all classes, it
is of the utmost importance to learn to renounce personal desires, aspirations,
habits, and concepts which are contrary to common activity and common struggle.
An education following the Russian example is therefore necessary for all
western communists.
But while that is true, it is
also true that the more highly developed individuality of the western
proletarians, their greater need for intellectual independence and the personal
and collective self-determination of their destinies, could be a corrective
against the excessive inclination to accept the country, the people, the past,
the experiences and actions of the Russians as models for the international
movement. History never repeats itself, life’s current never flows
backwards, and its power continually creates new and distinct forms. The
conditions amidst which the Russian revolution began and then triumphed will
never exist again in the same way in other countries, in the entire world
outside of
The example, the authority
and the leadership of a brave, conscious, committed and selfless vanguard in
the epoch of transition from capitalism to communism are indispensable for a
successful conclusion to the proletarian struggle against its external enemies
and, perhaps to an even greater extent, against the enemy within, that is, its
own defects, greed and egoism. The penultimate achievement of revolutionary
development will be the disappearance of the distinction between leaders and
followers. While this division still exists, the masses will not have attained
self-determination and self-government, they will continue to be more the
object than the subject of history.
We do not wish to delve into
the question of whether the disappearance of this division between leaders and
followers can take place in the manner foreseen by the
1. This
is the last section of a long article by H. Roland-Holst: Die Aufgaben der Kommunistischen Partei in der proletarischen
Revolution (The Tasks of the
Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution), published in Kommunismus, Vol. II, Nos. 1-2, 3-4, 5-6
and 7-8 (January-March, 1921). The text had been submitted to the
journal’s editorial committee in November of 1920. In the pages preceding
the extract presented above, Roland-Holst discussed, among other topics, the 21
Conditions for Admission to the Communist International, which were adopted by
the Second Congress and were vigorously opposed by the KAPD.
2. KAPD
newspaper.
3. The
legislative elections in which the KPD obtained 380,000 votes.
4. This
was actually true of the most radical part of the proletariat, not just certain
intellectuals.
5. The
journal of S. Pankhurst’s group in
Dear Comrade Lenin:
When we last parted in
November of 1920, your last words on our quite divergent ideas concerning
revolutionary tactics in
We were in complete agreement
on that.
Now, reality has unfolded and
we possess more than one experience. You will undoubtedly allow me to show you,
from my point of view, the lessons we should learn.
You will recall that, at the
Moscow Congress, you yourself, along with the Executive Committee of the Third
International, declared your support for parliamentarism, for infiltrating the
trade unions and for participating in the legal industrial councils in
The Communist Workers Party
of Germany (KAPD) and the Dutch Marxists responded by maintaining that your
tactics would lead to an extreme enervation of the revolution, to chaos among
the proletariat, to discouragement among the communists, and thus to the most
disastrous defeats. On the other hand, antiparliamentarism, factory
organizations, workers unions and their revolutionary action committees would
lead, in Germany and in Western Europe, to the strengthening of the revolution
and finally to the unification of the proletariat.
You—and with you, the
Executive Committee of the Third International—intend to unite the masses
under your political and trade union leadership regardless of whether or not
they are truly communist. This is what you did at
We want to destroy the old
organizations and to build others of a new kind, from the bottom up, which are
animated by a new mentality. We do not want anyone but true communists to join
us in this endeavor.
You wanted to export Russian
tactics to
We took account of the fact
that, in
You want the dictatorship of
the party, that is, of a few leaders. We want a class dictatorship.
You practice a leadership
politics. And we practice a class politics.
Your tactics are basically a
continuation of the tactics of the Second International. Nothing has changed
but the external façade, the names, and the slogans. Essentially, you
still belong (in
The German
proletariat’s 1921 March Action has proven which side is right: you,
comrade Lenin, and the Executive Committee of the Third International; or the
KAPD and the Dutch Marxists who supported the KAPD. The March Action has
provided an answer and has demonstrated that the leftists were correct.
There were two parties in
(Is it not always necessary,
especially in the present case, that tactics, principles and theory find their
justification in action?)
The Communist Party, through
its parliamentary activity which only voiced the masses’ disappointment
with a bankrupt capitalism, diverted the proletariat away from revolutionary
action. It managed to unite hundreds of thousands of non-communists, and became
a mass party. With its infiltration tactics it has become a bulwark of the
trade unions and with its participation in the legal industrial councils it has
betrayed the revolutionaries and weakened the revolution. By doing all these
things, Comrade Lenin, the Communist Party has only been following your advice,
your tactics, and the tactics of the Executive Committee of the Third
International. And when, as a consequence of these policies, it repeatedly
collapsed into inactivity (during the Warsaw offensive, for example), or into
treason when faced with the prospect of action (the Kapp Putsch), when by means
of simulated actions and a raucous publicity it becomes reformist, constantly passing
the buck whenever it can when faced with the struggle which the capitalists
wish to force upon the workers (for example: the electrical workers strike in
Hamburg, the strikes at Ambi and Leuna, etc.), in short, when the German
revolution was on the decline into regression and enfeeblement, the best
elements in the KPD began to demand, with increasing ardor, to be led into
action—then, all at once, the Communist Party of Germany decided upon a
great undertaking with the intention of conquering political power.
Here is what this plan
consisted of: in the face of provocation by Horsing and the Sipo, the KPD decided upon a gradual,
superficial, hierarchically-ordered action, without the spontaneous impulse of
the masses; in other words, it adopted the tactic of the putsch.
The Executive Committee and
its representatives in
This putschist tactic is the
inevitable obverse of parliamentarism and infiltration, of the recruitment of
non-communist elements, of the replacement of mass or class tactics by
leadership tactics. Such politics, weak and internally rotten, must inevitably
lead to putsches.
How could the
KPD—corrupted by parliamentarism, internally weakened by the dead weight
of non-communists, its strength sapped by discord between at least six
tendencies and put at the service of a leadership tactic, as opposed to a mass
tactic—have led a revolutionary action?
Where could the KPD have
found the power it needed to confront an enemy as formidable as German
reaction, armed to the teeth? Or to confront
At the time of the Horsing
provocation on the part of the government, when a generalized and tenacious
resistance became necessary, and when the masses themselves began to rise in
central
When the rout began, Levi,
your former protégé and standard-bearer—the man who,
together with Radek, yourself, and the Executive Committee, is most responsible
for the introduction of these debilitating tactics into Germany and Western
Europe, of this tactic of the putsch—this same Levi attacked the KPD
fighters from the rear, those who, despite the party’s mistaken tactics,
had proven to be its most revolutionary elements. As thousands of them were
being arraigned before the courts, he denounced them, as well as their leaders.
Not only does Levi, with his tactics, bear ample responsibility for the putsch,
but also for the terrible punishments inflicted by the repression. And it is
precisely with Levi that Däumig, Geyer, Clara Zetkin and, together with
them—a fact of great significance—the whole parliamentary fraction
of the party concur.
The Communist Party of
Germany thus suffered a devastating blow. And with it, the whole proletariat of
This party, comrade, has been
constructed according to your principles, in a country where economic
conditions are ripe for revolution. And when it strikes its first blow, it
collapses. While its bravest militants are dying, being gunned down and filling
the prisons, they are betrayed by their own leaders. This is the example set by
the KPD and your tactics.
We will now proceed to the
other example and the other tactic, those of the KAPD.
The KAPD, which does not want
to have anything to do with parliamentarism or the old trade unions, but wants
factory organizations, never needed a putschist tactic, which is always a
consequence of a lack of internal cohesion. The KAPD does not have to suffer
from this lack of internal cohesion, because it only admits communists as
members; because, for the KAPD, it is quality that counts; because it does not
have a leadership politics, but a class politics; because it does not want a
party dictatorship, but a class dictatorship. This is why the question of a
putsch cannot even be posed within the KAPD. The KAPD did not pursue a
putschist tactic in the March Action. Its tactic is based upon the fact that
neither a party nor a party’s leadership can make the decision to start a
revolution or a major insurrectionary movement, but that only the historical
situation itself, that is, the masses’ will to fight, must constitute the
basis for such decisions. The KAPD’s tactic is meant to strengthen the
proletariat by developing its consciousness and extending its revolutionary
power while constructing effective combat organizations. This, of course, can
only be done within the struggle itself, without ever shirking the fight
imposed by the enemy or spontaneously arising from the masses.
This is how the KAPD has
always acted, unlike the social democratic, independent and communist parties
of
In the March Action, the KAPD
only entered the fray after the government attack.
And now, would you like to
compare the KAPD with the KPD, both during and after the Action? The Communist
Workers Party showed itself to be so firm in its resolve and its tactics that
during the Action it suffered from no discord whatsoever, and even after the
defeat, the most complete unity prevailed at its delegates’ assembly.
Despite the defeat, its power was enhanced, as was that of the Workers Union
(AAU).
This is the balance sheet of
your tactics, those of the Third International, and those of the KAPD.
Comrade Lenin, it is not mere
intellectual curiosity which makes me want to probe more deeply into these issues.
It is because the tactics of the revolution in
You want parliamentarism. You
want to play a role in the theater, behind whose stage the
We are anti-parliamentary. We
do not want the fictitious struggle, but the real one. That is why the KAPD
remains unanimous and unshakeable.
You want the legal industrial
councils. You have advocated them to the workers; you have convinced the
workers to recognize these legal councils as organs of the revolution. What
role did these legal councils play during the March Action? They abandoned and
betrayed the revolutionary action.
We want revolutionary action
committees. While the industrial councils remained inactive and practiced their
treachery during the March Action, revolutionary action committees
spontaneously arose among the masses and drove the movement forward.
You want to influence the
trade unions through communist cells. What have these cells accomplished? Have
they radicalized the trade unions? There has been no news of their doing
anything. They have accomplished nothing. No matter how many times they have
infiltrated part of the trade union bureaucracy.
We want factory organizations
and the unity of these organizations within the General Workers Union (AAU),
because the revolutionary struggle can only be carried out on the terrain of
industry and upon the basis of industry. And what has the March Action taught
us? It was fought in the industries and by industries. It was fought by the
factory organizations. The factory organizations, not the trade unions,
constituted the focal points of the revolution. The March Action has therefore
supplied the proof that factory organizations are indispensable for the
revolution.
The KPD, despite the heroism
of a significant number of its combatants, has paralyzed the revolution with
its tactics (which are your tactics), with its parliamentarism, its
infiltration of other organizations and its legal industrial councils.
The KAPD, the Workers Union
and the factory organizations have shown themselves in the eyes of the entire
world to be the leaders of the German revolution, that is, of the revolution in
You want organization, you
get chaos.
You want unity, you get
schism.
You want leaders, you get
traitors.
You want masses, you get
sects.
(It is thus necessary to add
yet one more observation: you, comrade Lenin, you, Zinoviev and Radek and so many
others in the Third International, you said that the tactics of the KAPD would
only produce sects.)
We see what actually
happened.
Your KPD embraces, according
to its own figures, 500,000 members. But the KPD also admitted (at its last
congress), and everyone knows quite well, that the majority are not communists.
Let us assume, however, that half of them are communists. In that case, your
tactics and those of the Third International have attracted, out of the nine
million trade unionists in
But how many communists are
there in the Workers Union (AAU), which was founded on the basis of the
principles of the KAPD? A ballpark figure: 250,000. Judged by the numbers, our
tactics have therefore been just as successful as yours.
But it is not only in terms
of numbers that our tactics reveal their superiority. There is also this
difference: first of all, the KPD and its cells have been created by countless
millions of marks spent on newspapers, organization and propaganda—the
KAPD and the AAU have not cost even one penny. Secondly, the KPD and its cells
have collapsed in your hands, while the KAPD and the AAU are solid and
flourishing. The KPD and its cells are worm-eaten with internal treachery. The
KAPD and the AAU are growing in strength and unity.
Reality has provided us with
the following elements of experience: as the March Action of the German
proletariat has clearly demonstrated, so we hope that the entire International
will recognize that your tactics, those of the Executive Committee and the
Comintern, lead to collapse and defeat, while the tactics of the left generate
unity and strength.
The Third Congress of the International must therefore
modify its tactics.
Comrade Lenin, we admit the
adequacy of your tactics for Russia, and personally wish to tell you that the
judgment of history, as I see it, concerning your revolutionary efforts as a
whole, will proclaim that you have done great work, the best possible. In my
view, you are, after Marx and Engels, our most eminent guide. This does not
obviate the fact, however, that you are mistaken in respect to the tactics to
be employed in
And now, we turn to the
German proletariat, and say: “if it is true that you are convinced in
your hearts and minds that the left wing is correct, if you are ready to fight
in accordance with its methods, then abandon the KPD and all the old
parliamentary parties; get out of the trade unions, and join the General
Workers Union and the Communist Workers Party”.
And we call upon the whole
proletariat of
1. Published
in French in L’Ouvrier Communiste,
monthly journal of the Communist Workers Groups, Paris, No. 9/10, May 1930.
At the meeting of the KAPD
Central Committee on
Comrades!
The KAPD delegation arrived
in Moscow before the Congress in order to become acquainted with all the
problems relating to Russia and the international workers movement as a whole;
to get an accurate idea of the current situation by means of an exchange of
viewpoints with the other delegations as they were arriving, so as to rectify
the attacks and distortions to which the KAPD has been subjected, and to
clearly set forth our point of view to the other delegates during the course of
individual discussions. All of these tasks have been impossible within the
confines of the Third International; it was necessary to make the most of the
occasion. In fact, even after we arrived in
We devoted our greatest
efforts to the second task mentioned above (establishing an opposition). In the
course of our discussions with the delegations from
After the Bulgarian comrades,
it was the Spanish comrades whose
positions were closest to ours. They understood us perfectly. There is just one
problem: the concept of the need for a political organization has yet to be
generally accepted in
The comrades from
The Glasgow Group agrees with us on the theoretical level, but their
organization is not very cohesive. The Belgian
representatives, during the course of our first discussions with them,
proved to be in complete agreement with our principles and tactics; they
stated, however, that our methods of struggle were not yet applicable in their
country.
The IWW was vehemently
opposed to the positions of the Third International. It has a rather
syndicalist character, but its delegates have admitted that a political
organization is necessary for leading class struggles; they intend to study our
experiences and draw the appropriate lessons. They asked us for political
material. We also held interviews with comrade Roland-Holst, of the Dutch
minority faction; and with some members of the Austrian delegation, with whom
we were able to establish some points of agreement.
After these separate
discussions with each delegation, we held an open forum. It was then that we
came to clearly understand that the idea of forming an opposition within the
Third International was an illusion, even though the delegates, considered
separately, were in theoretical accord with our views. As it became clear to
them that our discussions were meant to lead to the representation of a point
of view in emphatic opposition to the Third International, they became
frightened and balked. We then tried to create a framework for opposition on
the basis of three themes: parliamentarism, trade unions and ultra-centralism.
This did not succeed either. Finally, we attempted to obtain a homogeneous
position on the part of all the opposition groups on just one of these themes.
The most promising one in this respect was the question of parliamentarism. But
this attempt failed as well. Everyone was afraid of being excluded from the
Third International. It was then that, more clearly than ever, we realized how
right we were to break with the Spartacus League. Within the Third
International, if the Theses of the Second Congress are accepted, it is
impossible to express an opinion other than that of the Russian Communist
Party.
All of which leads us to just
one conclusion: we, the KAPD, stand alone. We
must therefore abandon our mission to found an opposition. But we should not
conclude that the KAPD’s representation at the Congress was unjustified,
or that we should have behaved like Rühle did at the Second Congress. We
simply understand that we can only rely upon ourselves, and that our task has
become much more difficult, but also much more necessary. It was necessary to
force the Third International to clearly reveal its opportunism, to show by
means of its exclusion of the KAPD, the impossibility of an independent
revolutionary organization remaining within the Third International.
Since we had foreseen that we
would only be allowed to speak for the minimum allotted time period, we used
other means to make the delegates aware of the principles and methods of action
of the KAPD. To this end, we composed outline presentations of all the
important problems, theses and principle guidelines of the KAPD (see Volume No.
7 of Proletarier, the theoretical
journal of the KAPD) as well as a report on the Communist Workers Party (the
KAPD). These works were translated into English and French and were printed in
large numbers and were distributed to many delegates.
Prior to the opening of the
Congress, the Executive Committee held many meetings, in which all the members
of our delegation participated. The line which the Congress would adopt could
be seen at these meetings. Before we left
After overcoming incredible
difficulties, we managed to obtain an interview with Lenin prior to the opening
day of the Congress. During the course of
this interview, Lenin declared that Levi was basically totally correct in his
position against the March Action; and that he had only violated party
discipline and thus committed an act which could not go unpunished.
This constituted an important
sign for us, since Lenin’s authority is unquestioned within the Russian
Communist Party.
This state of affairs was
further illustrated by the attitude of the Russian representatives on the Executive
Committee. The comrades of the French Youth group and certain elements of the
French party, for example, criticized the party’s leadership: it had
remained inactive at the moment of class mobilization in 1919. The delegates
from
We proposed to the Executive
Committee that we should be permitted to present supplementary summaries on
certain issues. We were told that we had to do this in the committees. But the
committees, once formed, never actually functioned (except for the committee on
the economic situation).
The first session of the
Executive Committee took place in the Bolshoi Theater. It was an entire day of
opening ceremonies; Zinoviev opened the Congress by delivering a speech
summarizing the history of the Third International. The various delegates
presented reports on the situations in their respective countries. The session
ended with a performance by
On the second day, Trotsky
presented a three-and-one-quarter-hour report on the world economic situation. Among the particular points, whether
outstanding or not, of his speech, its central point eventually clearly
emerged: the proletariat must come to
terms with the fact that the revolution would be long-delayed and that,
consequently, it must adopt a tactic of long-term preparation due to the
fact that capitalism had recovered its strength and overcome its difficulties.
As proof of the superficiality of Trotsky’s analysis (which
underestimates the new international alliance of world capital), we quote the
following passage of his speech, in which he prophesies, with the precision of
a railroad timetable, the outbreak of the Anglo-American War:
“In 1924, the tonnage
of the American fleet, according to its own program, will be significantly
greater than that of the English and Japanese fleets combined.
“Before the war, we had
an armed peace. People said: there are two trains heading towards each other on
the same rails, they will crash into each other. But it was not observed that,
between their respective positions, there was a station. The time was not
indicated on the timetable. On this occasion, we have it on paper or on world
history’s calendar. This should take place in 1923 or 1924. Either
Our report on the same topic
was not accepted. Since speaking time was limited to ten minutes per person, we
applied the following tactic: we split up our report and had several comrades
share the task of reading our report; thus, two comrades from the KAPD spoke
(the speeches of comrades Sachs and Seeman are published in Kampfruf, 4 issues Nos. 14
and 155).
Our delegation had already
presented a critique of Trotsky’s theses on the world economic situation
during the committee’s proceedings (this critique is published in No. 218
of this journal). They were subjected to many criticisms, but Trotsky continued
to assert that his theses must be adopted in
principle. They could not be subjected to corrections, except in matters of
style or wording. Even though Frölich, of the VKPD, expressed his
opposition, the theses were immediately adopted in principle, in accordance
with Trotsky’s proposal. At the moment this question came up for a vote,
a rupture emerged in the VKPD delegation.
Meanwhile, the credentials committee presented its
report. Radek’s explanation of the problem involving the admission of the
Bulgarian “leftists” is quite characteristic of this
committee’s work: “The group of the alleged Bulgarian
‘leftists’ cannot mention any activity of their own, and we have
considered it to be totally inappropriate to reward people who have carried out
a project of disorganization by giving them a consultative voice in the Congress.”
The admission of the Bulgarian “leftists” was rejected; it was the
Communist Party of Bulgaria, of a purely social democratic character, which
would constitute the official section of the Third International.
Afterwards, the report of the
Executive Committee was presented. Zinoviev reported on the Executive
Committee’s activities over the last few years, defending the Executive
Committee’s point of view on strict compliance with the 21 Conditions,
making special reference to the Italian party, the “March Action”
and the KAPD. Later, the Executive Committee’s position throughout the
year received its critique in the practical form of the offer that the Italian
Socialist Party would be readmitted to the Third International upon the
condition that it should sacrifice Serrati. Just
as the Executive Committee’s harsh attacks against Levi and his cohorts
were skillfully replaced by the accusation of having “violated
discipline”. It treated them gently and even soon thereafter came to
fully approve of Levist opportunism. After this report, he read the
now-famous Memorial to the German
Proletariat, concerning the Max Hölz affair. This Memorial describes Max Hölz as a valiant rebel against
capitalist society, whose actions, while corresponding to his love for the
proletariat and his hatred for the bourgeoisie, are not appropriate. The CI
opposes his use of terror. The KAPD protested against this Memorial; it showed that this Memorial
turns its back on the acts of Max Hölz and that in the KAPD’s eyes
it was nothing but an insult. Radek bridled at this “disruption”,
saying, among other things, that the KAPD had even gone so far as to fight in
defense of the tomb of the fallen.
Then the debates on the
Executive Committee’s report began. It was the KAPD’s delegation
which fired the first shot. The KAPD, responding to Zinoviev who had attacked
the party in his report, found it amusing that it should be included in the
same bag with Dittmann and his ilk, and made the following declaration to
conclude its interventions:
“We protest, with the
greatest firmness, against the attempts to put us into the same bag with the
Dittmanns and the Serratis, by the use of a few quotations taken out of
context. We do not forget, for even one moment, the difficulties encountered by
soviet power due to the ebb of the world revolutionary wave, but we are at the
same time aware of the danger that all of these difficulties may lead to a
contradiction between the interests of the world revolutionary proletariat and
the momentary interests of soviet Russia—a real or an apparent
contradiction.”
“At a session of this
committee, it was declared that the Third International must not be considered
as an instrument of soviet power, but that the latter was merely the strongest
bastion of the Third International. We also think that is how it should be. But
we think that when contradictions arise between the vital interests of soviet
power and those of the Third International, it is our duty to openly and
fraternally examine these contradictions within the Third International.”
“As far as practical
solidarity with soviet
“We shall continue to
pursue such policies, but we shall, everywhere and at all times, oppose with
the most steadfast resistance any instance where the policies of soviet
The well-known attack on the
KAPD took place on the second day of the debate on the Executive
Committee’s report. Number 214 of our journal provides the complete text.
In response to the vote on
the ultimatum6 directed at the KAPD, we nonetheless presented the
following motion:
“1. The
21 Conditions of the Second Congress are now even less capable than they were
previously of providing any kind of security against reformist putrefaction in
the future.
2. After
the creation and admission of the large mass parties, the Third International
needs, now more than ever, the presence of a purely proletarian revolutionary
opposition.
3. Such
an opposition cannot be effective unless it is not overwhelmed by the apparatus
and the number of votes of a party that wants (as a matter of principle), at
whatever cost, to unify the masses behind it and thus can only be and must be
reformist.
4. The
Unified Communist Party (VKPD), in particular, remains to this very day, in
relation to its tactical principles, within the camp of Paul Levi. Its own left
wing is usually the prisoner of a fatal self-deception.
5. In
conclusion, currents related to the KAPD are now forming in every party in the
Comintern. But they cannot continue to grow in the interest of the proletarian
revolution and the International, unless the KAPD can continue to subsist as an
independent party within the CI.
For
all of the above reasons, we propose that the KAPD should remain in the CI as a sympathizing organization.”
Radek delivered the speech
summarizing the question of tactics.
We proposed a supplementary summary, but our entire delegation was granted only
one hour to speak. We presented our point of view (rejection of trade union and
parliamentary methods) and called for the application of the methods of
struggle of the Communist Workers Party and the General Workers Union.
At one moment during the
debate, the VKPD defended the offensive launched during the “March
Action”. Soon, however, the following
typical incident took place: after Clara Zetkin had spoken and after everyone
had their turn speaking, after Lenin and Trotsky said she was right and
condemned Levi merely for a breach of discipline, the “leftist”
whims of the VKPD’s delegation evaporated. Radek reproached the Rote Fahne7 for having too
suddenly and precipitously begun the “March Action”. The
VKPD’s Friedland admitted that this was true.
The theses on this question
were sent back to the committee for re-elaboration.8 Before the conclusion
of the Congress a vote was taken on the appropriate tactical orientation for
the International. Confronted with this vote, we prepared the following
declaration:
“The theses presented
for the vote of the Third Congress are the consistent and even intensified
continuation of the basic line adopted by the Second Congress and of the
policies which have been pursued until now by the EC. The theses grant an
unlimited field of activity to the traitorous intelligentsia of the
opportunists and reformists of every country for their work of mystification,
especially when they are considered in the context of the world economic
situation. Any clear dividing line separating them from the Hilferdings is
erased; all organic relations to the reality of the modern class struggle are
abandoned.”
“The supposed left wing
of the Congress9, pushed forward by the revolutionary workers who
support it, began to make feeble attempts to correct these tactical theses.
Their efforts were rebuffed in conformance with the wishes of the right wing,
by the majority. Nor did we lend them any support. They did, of course, testify
to their good faith desire to augment revolutionary activity, but they did not
reckon with the concrete conditions of the struggle; they did not attack the
bourgeois-parliamentary basis of the 21 Conditions, nor did they attack the
general tendency implied by that basis; for this reason, their efforts were
transformed into an obstacle to any further clarification.”
“The preparation for
the victory of the proletarian revolution in the capitalist countries can only
be carried out within the struggles themselves. These struggles are necessarily
born from the fact of capital’s economic and political attacks. The
communist party can neither unleash such struggles by itself, nor can it refuse
to enter the fray, without sabotaging the preparations for victory. During the
course of those struggles which do erupt, it cannot gain their leadership
unless it opposes to all the illusions of the masses the complete clarity of
the final goal and the methods of struggle. This is how it can become, by means
of a dialectical process, the nucleus for the crystallization of the
revolutionary fighters who, during the course of the struggle, gain the
confidence of the masses.”
“With this declaration,
we set ourselves in opposition in every possible way to the adoption of the
theses on tactics, and we refer to the theses we have presented on the role of
the party in the proletarian revolution.”
Lenin presented the report on the tactics of the
Russian Communist Party. He unveiled
the Russian government’s new line on the policy of concessions, free
trade, etc., and he defended it.
Then Radek gave his speech. After him, comrade Kollontai, of the Russian
Workers Opposition, spoke. Her intervention was an event of the highest
importance, which would have the most far-reaching consequences. Until then, no
one had dared to publicly intervene in opposition to the current policies of
the Bolsheviks and the soviet government. The comrade declared that she was
obliged to put revolutionary discipline
above party discipline. She directed her attack particularly against the
Bolshevik policy “which is preparing the return to capitalism”
and then she attacked the attitude of the soviet government “which
rejects those workers who are ready to construct the soviet system.”
Trotsky immediately took the
floor and attempted, by means of very long explanations, to subject comrade
Kollontai to ridicule. He could not, however, refute her arguments. The KAPD
delegation then addressed this issue. We placed particular emphasis on the fact
that, although we had never meddled in the domestic affairs of the Russian
Party, now that we had become aware of comrade Kollontai’s arguments, we
were obliged to adopt an even more critical position in respect to the soviet
government.
At that moment, comrade
Roland-Holst, from the Dutch minority faction, felt obliged to defend the RCP
against our attacks, declaring that the RCP was of the left and always had
been.
On the trade union question, Zinoviev and Heckert from the VKPD presented their report amidst the total
indifference of the Congress assembly. Once again, our entire delegation was
condemned to only one hour to present our views. At that moment, the Congress
feigned an attack of deafness. Our theses on the trade union question were
referred to the committee, where they were rejected as possible bases for
discussion, with the allegation that “the Congress had, in its every
position, rejected the conceptions of the KAPD”. We proposed, prior to
the vote on the theses submitted by the central bureau of the EC, that we
should once again explain our theses in a brief concluding intervention. This
request was denied.
The Youth question: Münzenberg’s report.
Women’s rights. The Eastern question: none of these presentations aroused the least interest in the
Congress.
After having vainly attempted, despite all the attacks
and distortions to which we were subjected, despite all the maneuvers to reduce
us to silence, to prevent the Third International from being utterly submerged
in opportunism, we drew up a balance sheet of the Congress. Faced with the ultimatum of the Congress demanding
that the KAPD yield to the discipline of the International, we responded as
follows:
“The KAPD delegation
has submitted the results of the Congress to a new examination, both as regards
the decision which it must announce in response to the motion of the Congress
which demands, in the form of an ultimatum, the dissolution of the KAPD into
the VKPD, as well as in respect to our relations with the Third International.
Fully acknowledging the gravity of the responsibilities it assumes, the
delegation unanimously draws the following conclusions:”
“The tactical struggle
against the KAPD throughout the Congress was from the beginning carried out like
a fight against an adversary whose arguments must not be taken into
consideration, insofar as its basis, and its very existence as a political
factor, must be annihilated on the pretext of discipline.”
“This is confirmed by
the following facts:
1. For
several weeks, the Congress participants have been given a completely false
image of the KAPD, through articles which misrepresent our party in the Russian
press, in the Communist International10
and in the Congress newspaper. Meanwhile, our in-depth reports and our
rectifications have not been printed.
2. The
way the Congress was structured constantly obliged us to fragment the
expression of our positions. That this tactic had been pre-arranged becomes
especially clear due to the fact that we were not even granted the opportunity
to prepare a report or even a supplementary report on an issue which directly
concerns us, the issue of the KAPD. We were thus obliged to refuse to speak at
all so as to not become accomplices in a farce.
3. The
basis for the ultimatum directed against us was an alleged EC resolution
brought to the attention of the Congress participants despite the fact that the
EC never addressed the matter in any of its sessions, and despite the fact that
none of its sessions ever heard, and therefore had all the less opportunity to
have arrived at, any decision on this problem.
4. This
question, which had for a whole week remained one of the last points on the
Congress’s agenda, as an issue which was to be treated separately, was
never even separately discussed with us in preparation for the EC report.
(Point Number Two of the day’s agenda). It was arranged by
“decree”. In this manner, the result which was expected in advance
was achieved: the Congress’s judgment was settled in advance, before it
could have dared to become aware of our positions during the course of a debate
on questions of principle.
This formal procedure is
strictly connected to the political orientation along which the Third
International has been evolving, under the determinant influence of the Russian
comrades. The outcome of the Congress has proven this: the political line of
Paul Levi has been victorious in the Congress; the formal recognition of the
March Action has been revealed as the freedom of revolution.”
“The Czechoslovakian
party was admitted as a section with full rights, without any real guarantees
at all and on the basis of empty promises. Out of fear, its opportunist leader
Sméral was treated with great tact. As for the Italian Socialist Party,
which has just signed a pact with the fascists, it was treated with the utmost
indulgence amidst a welter of concern for details. The principle of
participating in bourgeois parliaments was preserved, despite the sorrowful
experiences of
“All of this is
testimony to continued adherence to the path laid out by the Second Congress,
and to the same detour: from revolution to reformism; from the sphere of
struggle to the tactics of diplomacy, to intrigues and the illusory
whitewashing of contradictions. All of these examples justify the protest (against
the adoption of the theses on tactics) which we have published in the summary
reports.”
“These are the facts
which must be taken into account (in considering the resolution demanding our
dissolution into the VKPD) in order to conclude that the ultimatum is totally
unacceptable to the KAPD. Such a reunification would mean our subordination to
the discipline of a party in decomposition, in which reformism has snuck in the
back door under the influence of the Congress. We would be muzzled by an organizational
apparatus (press-finances-cliques-leaders) which is set up against us. Any
faint hope of having a salutary influence within such a party lacks the least
basis in reality. The delegation has dispensed with all such hopes on its own
accord, even without a special order from the party:”
“The delegation
unanimously rejects the ultimatum to join the VKPD.”
“We do not declare the
KAPD’s break with the Third International, although we do have the power
to act in the name of our party. Our comrades will address this matter. They
will provide their response to the attempt to force them to join with others on
the road of reformism and opportunism. The international proletariat will await
their response.”
“Our decision was made
in the full awareness of its very serious nature. We are fully aware of our
responsibility to the German workers, to soviet
Signed,
The KAPD Delegation
We decided to read this
declaration at the end of the Congress, in order to make our opinion completely
known to all the delegates. But this was not authorized by the Presidium; we
were merely allowed to include our declaration in the published summary
reports.
We understood why the
Presidium did this:
The entire Congress was
overcome by a condition of blind enthusiasm. The applause was endless, the
cameras were flashing, and the movie cameras whirred. At that moment, our
delegation constituted an accusation; it was a warning, like the warning given
of old to
But the directors of the
Bolshoi Theater would not get away so easily. During the course of the meeting of the Executive Committee
which took place on the following day and which was attended by the
representatives of every country, our declaration was nevertheless read by our
delegation and convincingly and loudly proclaimed to more than one
representative of the revolutionary proletariat that a hangover would
necessarily follow the binge of resolutions adopted amidst all the hoopla and
indecent publicity stunts.
We must also mention that our
delegation was only admitted to the final session of the Executive Committee
for the sole purpose of reading our declaration and that we had to immediately
evacuate the premises afterwards. It was in our absence that the Executive
Committee debated the question of the KAPD and approved a resolution which was
later communicated to our delegation. This resolution stated:
“Despite the
declaration of the KAPD which amounts to a declaration of war on the Communist
International, the recently-elected Executive Committee has decided:
1. To immediately
publish a detailed open letter to the members of the KAPD and to demand that
the KAPD arrive at a decision within the next two months.
2. To send a delegation
to the next congress of the KAPD.
3. The delegation of
the KAPD is, pursuant to the terms of the resolution of the Congress,
authorized to provisionally participate in the Executive in a consultative
role, but without a vote.”
The members of the KAPD are
capable of providing the response which this declaration of the Executive
Committee deserves. We know how it was arrived at, we know the text. The balance sheet of the Congress is this:
the Levi tendency, in general, has won. The “March Action” has been
renounced. The “theory of the revolutionary offensive” has been
registered among the infantile disorders. The KAPD has been excluded from the
Third International.
Comrades! We have done all we
could. We acted as the members of the party had demanded. Without any
compromise, and without any concessions to the tapestry of illusions known as
the Third International, we have followed our own road at the Third World
Congress.
The KAPD faces gigantic tasks. In its thought, its
decisions and its action, it will have to make its way rapidly and decisively
so that the world proletarian revolution will be victorious!
Report presented at the
session of the Central Committee of
Report of the Session of the Central
Committee of the KAPD
(
On the third point of the
agenda: the policy of the
From one era to another,
history follows a logical course and not even
After debate, during the
course of which some representatives expressed the idea that the soviet
government—despite the radical reversal of its economic policy—might
still be the representative of the Russian revolutionary proletariat, the
Central Committee put forward its conceptions in the following declaration,
which was adopted against the negative votes of Hanover and East Saxony, with
Berlin abstaining:
1. The Central
Committee believes that the course of events at the Third World Congress has
brought about, in principle, a rupture
within the
The
Central Committee, taking into account the
need for international class struggle, intends to construct a communist
workers international for the accomplishment of the most urgent tasks of the
world proletarian revolution.
The
Central Committee believes, furthermore, that the fundamentals, the tactics and
the organizational form of this communist
workers international must be adapted to the conditions
of the proletarian revolution.
2. The Central
Committee declares that our policy towards the soviet government must at all
times be dictated by that government’s positions. If the soviet government
were to act as a factor in the struggle of the proletarian revolution, then the
KAPD must support it with active solidarity. Should that government abandon our
camp and assume the role of police chief for the bourgeois revolution, then the
KAPD must fight it in a resolute manner.
1. This text has been
translated and published in issue No. 7 of Invariance,
pp. 81-93.
2. The Czechoslovakian
CP was formed as a result of a split in the socialist party and the socialist party’s center faction went
over to the CP as well. In 1922, it had
170,000 members (cf. Carr, The Bolshevik
Revolution, 1917-23, Vol. 3, p. 447). Along with the PCF and the KPD, it is
one of the rare “mass”
communist parties in
3. “A
reminder of death”.
4. Official
journal of the AAUD.
5. Cf.
The German Left. Texts. . . . , which
reproduces the principle interventions of the KAPD delegates at the Congress.
6. The
decree of the Executive Committee demanding the fusion of the KAPD into the
VKPD.
7. Official
newspaper of the VKPD.
8. I.e.,
the question of tactics.
9. Essentially,
the VKPD left wing (cf. Chapter 13).
10. Leading
newspaper and official organ of the CI.
Program of the AAUD
Adopted at the Third National Conference
of the AAUD in
(
Translated by Denis Authier
(La Gauche
allemande. Textes. . .)
Introduction
Its welter of initials and
its confused relations with revolutionary syndicalism should not mislead us into
thinking that the AAUD was just another group. The AAUD was part of a tendency
that shot into prominence at the turn of the century with mass strikes which
combined “politics” and “economics”, as well as the
huge, at times anti-trade union strikes in northern
In April-May 1919, the first
important union, the General Miners
Union, was formed by previously unorganized workers together with almost all
the trade union members in that economic sector, before being dismantled by the
police. The former members of this union would
join the revolutionary syndicalists (who were then backpedaling in respect to
the rest of the movement) or the AAUD; others would return to their old trade
unions. The Port and Shipyard Workers Union of Hamburg, founded in August 1919,
combined a defense of immediate interests with the advocacy of certain
political perspectives: arming the workers, a critique of the Spartacist
leadership of the KPD, and active solidarity with the Russian Revolution. The
AAU of the
The founding congress of the
AAUD took place in February 1920. The first spokesmen of unionism, who were at
that time already deeply involved in their national-bolshevism (which attracted
a small minority within the AAUD), were sidelined. One debate dominated the
congress: must the party-form be abandoned as soon as possible (the position
defended by Roche, of
The KAPD would be tempted to
treat the unionen as its working
class base. Pannekoek criticized the practice which transformed them into
“factory groups” instead of “workers groups”. Since the
future, he said, lies in the neighborhood and city soviets, in the councils
which embrace and transcend the workplace, what good is a union which is nothing but an extended version of the party?1
His criticism was justified, but in its essentials, from the time of its
founding, the AAUD was not a branch of the KAPD. In the winter of 1920-1921 the
AAUD alone had some 150,000 members (while the KAPD had about 40,000). It was
the most active union. It regularly
published a dozen weeklies and its numerous pamphlets occasionally had print
runs of up to 120,000 copies. It would lose almost all of its members after
1923.
Note
1. “Letter to the
KAPD”, quoted in The Dutch Left. .
.
Program of the AAUD
1. The AAUD fights for
the class unity of the proletariat.
2. Its goal is a
classless society, the first phase of which is the dictatorship of the
proletariat, thatis, the will of the proletariat alone determining the political
and economic organization of society in its entirety, thanks to the
organization of the councils.
3. The progressive
realization of the council idea is the road which the growth of the
self-consciousness of the proletarian class is taking. The dictators, properly
speaking, are the delegates of the councils; these delegates must carry out the
decisions of the councils. The councils1 can be recalled at any time
by the rank and file which bestowed their mandates. There is no place for
so-called leaders except as advisors.
4. The AAUD rejects all
reformist and opportunist methods of struggle.
5. The AAUD is against
any participation in parliamentarism, since that would mean sabotage of the
council idea.
6. Likewise, the AAUD
rejects all participation in the legal enterprise councils as dangerous class
collaboration with the employers.
7. The AAUD is opposed
to trade unionism because the latter is opposed to the council idea.
8. But the AAUD is
particularly opposed in the most violent possible manner to the trade unions
because they are the principal obstacles to the continuation of the proletarian
revolution in
9. The goal of the AAUD
is unitary organization. All of its efforts will be directed towards the
attainment of this goal. Without admitting the justification for the existence
of political parties (since historical development impels towards their
dissolution), the AAUD does not fight against the political organization of the
KAPD, whose goals and methods of struggle are also those of the AAUD, and
strives to move forward alongside the KAPD in the revolutionary struggle.
10. The mission of the AAUD is to
carry out the revolution in the workplace. It takes the political and economic
education of the workers seriously.
11. During the phase of the conquest
of political power, the Factory Organization becomes a link in the proletarian
dictatorship exercised in the workplace by the factory councils, which is
founded upon the Factory Organization. The purpose of the Factory Organization
is to assure that political power is always and exclusively exercised by the
executive council.
(Extract from “The General Workers
Union—Revolutionary Factory Organization”, published by the
Economic District of Greater Berlin, 1921, p. 48.)
Note
1. The council was, then, an
elected committee. The whole personnel of the factory united for revolutionary
actions comprised what was called the Factory Organization.
Extracts from the Guidelines of the AAUD
(December 1920)
What Is Organization?
To organize means to arrange
and give form to something. Parties, trade unions, the army, the Church, the
State and the
What, basically, is an
organization? Have they always existed in their current forms? The whole world
knows the answer is no. Among nomadic peoples they were different from those of
the Middle Ages, centuries later, with that era’s feudal guilds and serfs.
The Old Organization
The State
At present, the modern State represents the most
advanced and most powerful expression of the capitalist system. Will it, or
will it not, achieve its principal goal, that is, a world economic syndicate
and the
For the proletariat, the
capitalist State is the representative of the ruling class. It protects the private
economy and private property. It is the executioner of the exploited. Its
justice is class justice. Its organization and administration (trusts, trade
unions, bureaucracy, militarism, parliamentarism, education via school
textbooks, etc.) inhibit and repress the proletariat. They allow a restricted
number of “guarantors”, assisted by their intellectual slaves, to govern an immense majority of subjects. They reduce the proletarians
to the status of cogs in a machine. On top: leaders, blessed by the gods and
untouchable, then the administrators who depend entirely upon them, and at the
bottom, below all, the masses, dispossessed of rights, to whom some crumbs are
thrown or who are fitted with the bridle and the bit: whether they receive
crumbs or the bridle depends upon the ease with which it is thought that the
“beast” can be pacified.
The Parties
The parliament is a link in
the chain of the organization, and one of the forms of expression, of the
capitalist State. Parliamentarism is
one of the most typical forms of activity in the capitalist world, that is, a
world of exploited and exploiters, a world of political-economic inequality, a
world of class struggle. Parliamentarism designates not just the occupations to
which the “official” representative institution is devoted, which
today is no more than a business office for capitalism, a façade behind which the real business is conducted
and a safety-valve of capitalism, but it is above all a symbol of capitalism.
It is the expression of the being, the structure, the basic constitution of
capital, of its tactics and its methods in the current period.
The form assumed by political
parties is bound to parliamentarism. So much so that the parties have precisely
the character of capitalist organizations and are therefore constructed
according to the following principle: leader and masses; as the leader over the
masses, the organization goes from the top down. The leader commands, the
masses obey. Above, a leader or a group of rulers; below, an army of the ruled,
a few foxes and millions of donkeys. It is the “Simon Says”
principle. The masses constitute the object
of politics, an object which the “leaders” manipulate in accordance
with their needs. The instrument of such a party is tactics, or more precisely,
the tactics of the capitalist businessman,
pure fraud. The leader is the businessman, the party is his property. The neighboring businessman is
his competitor. These tactics, the ever-more-refined ways and means of
capitalist business practice, make for success. They stop at nothing. To be a
party man means: to enforce spiritual narrow-mindedness, to practice
charlatanry, to stifle what is human in man.
The unequal development of
capitalism in the various countries, the competition between nations, even between
racial and cultural communities, and, since the second half of the 19th
century, the organized combat,
defensive and offensive, becoming more noticeable every day, of the oppressed
proletarian class, temporarily prevent capitalism, as a political-economic
system, from attaining its ultimate possibility of expression, i.e., centralized rule over the world
thanks to a capitalist world economic syndicate.1 This era, the
second half of the 19th century, in which the proletariat acquired
consciousness of itself as a class by comprehending the capitalist process and
in which, on the other hand, instinctive consciousness led to its comprehension
of, that is, to an understanding of the necessity of, the class struggle, of proletarian solidarity,
and of international bonds, whose goal is a classless
society--this era is the one in which modern communism was born.
But since capitalism was not
yet exhausted and the proletariat had not yet formed a mass conscious of belonging to the same class,
and both continued to develop within one and the same process, it is clear that
proletarian organization could not be born all at once, and especially prior to
the political victory of the hitherto oppressed class, an organization which
would have—unlike capitalist organization—a primarily proletarian
class character and which could utilize proletarian methods of struggle derived
from that character. Attempts towards this end were made, of which traces can
be found in the confrontation between Marx and Bakunin. But these attempts were
naturally weak, or accomplished nothing, or were distorted. Proletarian class
consciousness developed very slowly (the mere number of members of the socialist organizations is of no
significance) and the characteristic trait of the transitional period bridging that epoch and ours is the flood of a
multitude of the exploited into the ranks of the social democratic parties and
trade unions. The struggle of these organizations, as they were being carried
out on capitalism’s own terrain, obviously did not require the
“advocacy” of a goal, but advice concerning the road to follow and
how to most advantageously utilize all the bourgeois strongholds. The trade
unions’ fight for wage increases and the parliamentary struggle were political
necessities in an epoch when a slogan like the unhindered right to vote could
awaken and provoke revolutionary energies. But in the course of this fight, the
next goal, which was “the development of proletarian class
consciousness”, was lost sight of completely. The point of view according
to which “the emancipation of the working class will be the task of the
workers themselves”, and which made the development of the workers class consciousness the principal task
which should not be forgotten for even one moment, was increasingly
disregarded. The more time passed, the more the socialist organizations assumed
the character and the methods of capitalist organizations. They became
“organizations of leaders”, private property in the hands of those
who pulled the strings and who were still under the spell of bourgeois
capitalist conceptions. They became ends
in themselves.
The “leadership”
of the class struggle was in the
hands of a few individuals who were cut
off from the needs of the proletariat. It was the victory of
parliamentarism which necessarily led to the paralysis of the revolutionary
activity of the masses. The class struggle and the revolution became the
concern of a group of high-level managers.
This trend has not yet come
to an end. The “socialist” parties, or, more properly, the rabble
of the parties, only attained their most repugnant display after the revolution
of 1918. From this point of view, the old social democracy is related in a
direct line of descent to the “Unified Communist Party” (VKPD) and
the degree of abjectness only increases as we get closer to the VKPD.
The Trade Unions
Even more clearly than the
parties, the trade unions became organizations of a perfectly capitalist
nature. Born in an epoch of small-scale war against employers who were not yet
powerfully organized in cartels, they were originally the adequate form for
proletarian combat against capitalism’s tendencies towards pauperization.
“It was by combating
capital, combating its tendencies to absolute impoverishment, setting limits to
the latter and thus making the existence of the working class possible, that
the trade union movement fulfilled its role in capitalism, and this made it a
limb of capitalist society itself. . . .”
“Just as parliamentary
activity incarnates the leaders’ psychological hold over the working
masses, so the trade union movement incarnates
their material authority. . . . In developed capitalism, and even more in the
epoch of imperialism, the trade unions have become enormous confederations
which manifest the same developmental tendencies as the bourgeois state in an
earlier period. There has grown up within them a class of officials, a
bureaucracy, which controls all the organization’s resources—funds,
press, the appointment of officials; often they have even more far-reaching
powers, so that they have changed from being the servants of the collectivity
to being its masters, and have identified themselves with the organization. And
the trade unions also resemble the state and its bureaucracy in that,
democratic forms notwithstanding, the will of the members is unable to prevail
against the bureaucracy. . . . [T]he workers do not control their trade union,
but . . . it stands over them as an external force against which they can
rebel, although they themselves are the source of its strength—once again
like the state itself” (Pannekoek).2
In the final accounting, the
trade unions form a bureaucratic organization on the margins of the world of
the private economy, to which, however, its leaders are connected, as veritable
permanent employees, for good and for ill. Since their existence depends upon
the existence of the trade unions, they unavoidably find themselves under the
pressure of circumstances; and their decision-making power is thus increased,
while they are more and more hesitant to use it even in the best cases.
The trade unions are
organized by trades. They have increasingly deviated from the rigorous and
implacable idea of the class struggle and instead content themselves with
demands for better wages and working conditions for the various job categories.
They have separated the employed workers from the unemployed, the young from
the old, men from women. The employers, united in ever more powerful trusts,
put them on the defensive, despite their decline into an increasingly more
pronounced reformism. They have,
whenever possible, prevented important strikes. The general strike and the mass
strike were preventatively denigrated as general nonsense. In effect, such
strikes would annihilate the trade unions, as well as the existence of their
bureaucratic leadership.
Council Organization as Proletarian
Organization
The decline which has
overtaken the capitalist period also affects its forms of organization. Our
descriptions of the party and the trade union clearly show us that their
organizational forms are, or have become, capitalistic. These organizational
forms are economically based upon the
profit economy and tend to assume a form developed within the private economy:
State capitalism. These forms, from the ideological point of view (that is, as
a spiritual reflection of their economic foundations), are the origins of the
cults of personality, the “leader” and authority, and the growth of
individualism and egoism.
The formation and growth of
the proletarian class naturally brings about forms of organization and
expression which accord with the development of that class. This outcome is
obviously not produced unless the proletarians have a perfectly-developed consciousness of forming a class whose
own interests are opposed to those of capitalism. These forms of organization
and expression are not created overnight and are not perfectly pure a priori constructions; they evolve
thanks to the progress of intellectual understanding and the influx of
increasingly crucial masses of people. They will
not attain complete maturity unless the proletarian base exists, hence
until after the disappearance of the private economy and the profit economy,
which will have been replaced by a communitarian
proletarian economy adapted to need.
It is easy to understand that
there will be an organization unlike capitalist organization when the
proletariat will have become a society, a total collective owner of all the
means of production (mines, factories, etc.), of everything which had
previously been “property”, when everything belongs to everyone in
common. But before reaching that point, the proletariat creates—and does
so all the more effectively the more conscious it is of its forming a
class—forms of expression, organs,
which incarnate class consciousness,
social consciousness, the consciousness of mutual solidarity. When this form of
organization becomes a revolutionary process, it is called council organization.
This organization develops by
way of an uninterrupted struggle against capitalist forms. It disrupts them,
smashes them to pieces, it causes them to explode. In this new organization,
leaders and masses will relate to one another differently. The current will not
flow from above downwards, but first of
all from below upwards. Then one will be able to witness the living
interpenetration of the united whole.
The organization of the councils
will be the mortal enemy of all bureaucratism, of all parliamentarism, of all
partnerships with capital. It will be totally based on the masses who are
conscious of constituting a class.
The organization of the
councils will therefore—as long as the workers fight for it—permit
liberation from the capitalist yoke, and particularly from the yoke of the
bourgeois ideological sphere. In its future is incarnated the progressive evolution of the
self-consciousness of the proletariat, the will to transplant the class
consciousness of the proletarians into reality and to give it a real
expression. The intensity of the fight for this organization of councils allows
one to exactly measure to what extent the proletariat conceives of itself as a
class and how determined it is to impose its will.
It is equally obvious that
the workers councils are not just empty words but are completely the expression
of the new proletarian organization. It could happen that, while developing,
authentic councils are corrupted and crystallize into a new bureaucracy. It
will then be necessary to combat them as vigorously as the capitalist
organizations. But the course of development will not halt, and the proletariat
will not stop, until it has given the new organization—the council
system—its historically attainable expression in the classless society
which lies beyond the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
The Factory Organization
The Factory Organization is
the preliminary step towards the formation of the specifically proletarian
organization, or organization in councils. The outlines of such an organization
have already been created on various occasions. But only the revolution clearly left its mark upon
the Factory Organizations which then could be considered to be the real
offspring of the most lucid proletarian class consciousness. They were born
because they were the class weapons of the workers combat. The old
organizations, especially the trade unions, could not and did not want to play
that role.
The Factory Organizations are
not, then, artificial. Nor or they the products of confusion. The class
consciousness of the proletariat breaks out in them with all its power due to
the economic relations and the clear understanding of specific conditions. They
are new institutions which grow from the bottom up, expand, shatter all that is
old, destroy and uproot it, and convert social
life and thought into realities.
No one can deny that we are
living in an epoch where the capitalist world is on its last legs. Communist
production is the only possible way out. Now is the time to find the way by
which the revolution can be most rapidly and successfully brought to a
conclusion. It is not enough to take political power (the proletarians took
political power in 1918)—one must hold
on to it. The most urgent task facing the proletarians—who are still
largely imbued with capitalist ideology—is to discover, against the power
of capital in Western Europe, against the power of its organization (State,
militarism, parliamentarism, management, bureaucracy, schooling, hierarchy),
the possible ways to definitively destroy these old forms. But one does not
build by satisfying oneself with destruction. That which is content to
criticize, to reject, without being able to offer positive proposals, finally
finds a place within the bourgeois world. The bourgeois intellectuals also make
a harsh critique of their world. But scorn, jokes and derision alone are not
enough to allow the growth of proletarian class consciousness. The struggle
against centralism and blind obedience, against leaders and trade union bonzes, cannot succeed, that is, it will
not allow the proletarian revolution
to move forward, if it is content to fight them to the death and to smash them
to pieces; it is necessary that purely proletarian forms should arise (as a
prelude to the organization of the councils) and that these new forms should uproot the old. The Factory Organization
is the expression of this demand.
If the workers desire their
definitive liberation as a class and
not just advantages for a few cliques and social strata, it is necessary for them to create forms which are completely the
work of their own class rather than the products of a few
“leaders”. They must create forms in which autonomous thought and
action are not just words, but realities.
Such forms, having issued from their deepest being, that is, having been born
from their proletarian class will, shall stand totally opposed to all forms
which are dependent on capitalism, to a greater or lesser degree. While they
cannot be absolutely “pure”, because we are living in a period of
transition, their orientation must be
absolute and always clear: their
corollary must be proletarian solidarity,
which for this same reason becomes an imperious necessity.
The Factory Organizations are
above all organizations of class
struggle.
United in the AAUD (General
Workers Union), they comprise neither a
political party nor a trade union. These two terms are employed in
accordance with the meanings they have had up until now, that is, referring to
institutions whose nature we can all understand with reference to today’s
parties and trade unions.
Within these organizations
the proletariat begins to consciously organize itself for the complete
demolition of the old society and for its unification as a class. In the
Factory Organizations the masses will be united by the consciousness of their
class solidarity, of their proletarian
class solidarity: they constitute the location where the unification of the
proletariat is organically prepared (that is, like a natural process, in
accordance with the circumstances). The Factory Organization is the beginning
of the communist future and, as the backbone of the factory councils, will
become the basis of the future communist society, of the classless society.
Classless society means communitarian economy and all-encompassing forms of
social expression. It means the total unification of the economic base.
At first, everyone will
receive as much as possible. Later, according to their needs. Everyone will
have to work as much as is necessary for any given situation.
The formation of such Factory
Organizations as organizations of class struggle can only take place in the
workplace. There, where each is the class brother of the other, all are obliged
to be equals, and to have the same rights. There, the masses find themselves
within the engine of production; they incessantly struggle to understand and to
control it. There, the spiritual battle takes place, the revolutionary
transformation of consciousness, in an incessant electric current passing from
man to man, and from masses to masses. Everything is oriented towards the
supreme class interest rather than the mania of forming organizations. The
interest of each trade is reduced to its proportionate share. At a more
advanced level of development, the Factory Organization will become an
instrument of class struggle in perpetual motion, an institution which is
always bubbling with new blood thanks to the permanent possibility of new
elections, recall, etc.3
The Unity of the Factory Organizations
within the AAUD
The Factory Organizations, in
a profusion of living elements, are grouped together in the General Workers
Union (AAUD). This association is not an arbitrary amalgam of different groups,
each separate from the other and existing independently, but responds to an
internal need. As the council idea develops as an expression of the class will
of the proletarians, the various Factory Organizations must grow along with the
latter. In effect, born in pieces, they only find their culmination in the vast
current of the general evolution which leads to the proletarian form of
organization. Just as streams end up forming a river, they will necessarily
unite. Such an association, in conformance with the council idea, emerging from
the rank and file, is wanted and needed by the proletarian class. To fight as
an exploited class unites, creates
and provides a form for the social bond,
for proletarian solidarity, and for class
solidarity, which is not expressed in words but in deeds.
As an organization of the
whole, as a beginning of the organization of the councils, the AAUD, naturally,
is never complete. New Factory Organizations will flow into it, and more than
once mud and silt will spread through it, instead of clear water. It is a
natural process. It will be obliged to ceaselessly fight for its purity.
Centralism and Federalism
The fight which the AAUD must
lead is the class struggle in its purest form. It is already carrying on part
of this fight by constituting its own organization in accordance with the
proletarian idea of the councils, in opposition to capitalist forms of
organization. It strives ceaselessly and in every way within the production
process to realize this idea in an ever clearer and purer form. Its very
existence alone is already a threat to all the capitalist forces. It provides
an example of the progressive development and crystallization of proletarian
class consciousness, and therefore compels the whole proletariat to take a stand.
The organization’s development in this direction will increasingly demote
to a secondary level the conflict between what are known as centralism and federalism. From the AAUD’s point of view, the polemic over
these two principles, these two forms of organization, will become a dispute of
empty words. Obviously, these two terms must be understood according to the
meanings they have possessed until now, and not according to a new meaning
foisted upon them.
By centralism we understand the form which, through the will of a
minority, bridles and enslaves the masses. For the AAUD, it is a demon which
must be extirpated. It is antisocial.
Federalism
is the opponent of centralism, but an opponent operating on the basis of the
same economic system. It is the sovereignty, the stubborn obstinacy of the
individual (or the workshop, or the region, or the nation) understood on its
own terms. It is equally antisocial and must be fought just as vigorously.
These two forms progressively
evolved over centuries past. Federalism was victorious in the Middle Ages,
while centralism prevailed during the period of advanced capitalism.
Sympathy for federalism is
based simply on the fact that, by seeing it as the negation of centralism, one
assumes that it will bring freedom and paradise. This desire for federalism
leads to a caricature of autonomy
(the right to self-determination). So it is thought that when one attributes
autonomy in all domains to each region, to each place (one might also say, to each
person), one is acting in a social and a proletarian way. In fact, this
accomplishes nothing except to abolish the empire so as to replace it with a
number of small principalities. Petty kinglets (local bosses) arise everywhere
who themselves assume rule over a fraction of the membership in a centralized
manner, as if it was their own private property: from this, fragmentation and
general collapse ensues.
Centralism and federalism are
both bourgeois forms of expression.
Centralism is more typically big bourgeois, while federalism is more
petit-bourgeois. Both are anti-proletarian and stand in the way of the
purification of the class struggle. The proletariat knows that it cannot defeat
capital unless it closes ranks. The more the consolidation of the council
system advances, the greater will be the gains registered by the
proletariat’s unity in both intensity and scope. Within this unity, with
its control from below, with its unleashing of all proletarian forces and
potentials, with its strong bonds connecting the leaders to the masses, all
conflict will then be absorbed, the development of class consciousness and the
development of absolute social affinity will become realities. First
spiritually, and then later in the communitarian economy.
It will be easily understood
that all of this is yet in the process of becoming and that the road which the
AAUD must follow before reaching its goal is still a long one, and that many
errors will yet be committed (in particular, the meddling interference of certain
groups or individuals--which is quite understandable as a result of the
disorder caused by the confusion of secondary tasks); this will provide the
“centralists” and the “federalists”, who are for the
most part good fighters, although with confused ideas, with the continually
renewed occasion for protesting against dictatorship or to demand more
dictatorship. But this must not prevent us from following the correct road;
which is to say that the proletariat, as an international
class, seeks and finds, by building the council system, its increasingly more
compact unity, a unity which it realizes in order to definitively vanquish
capitalism and the spirit of capitalism, a unity which will later issue into
its conclusion as the classless society.
Masses and Leaders
The very structure of the
AAUD, as clearly manifested in the organization’s statutes, itself
engenders between masses and leaders
relations unlike those prevailing in organizations of the capitalist type. If,
in the latter, the proletarians are the playthings of all variety of
politicians, in the AAUD they will increasingly become the masters of their own
fates, of the fate of their class. The theory according to which the real
emancipation of the laboring class can only be accomplished by the workers
themselves becomes a material force.
The concept of
“masses” acquires a different meaning than it has in the capitalist
system. In the minds of the supporters of the private economy, the word
“masses” is always synonymous with corpse, with an object which is
manipulated at will. It is considered as the “property” of certain
men, offices and cliques. In proletarian
thought, on the other hand, the masses do not constitute an incoherent
collection of confused egos, but instead denotes the proletariat to the extent
that its class consciousness allows it to indissolubly unite social thought and
will.
Such masses can only arise
through their own increasing activity and ceaseless organizational efforts, first
in the fight against capital, building their own organization; then, in their
constant collaboration in the production process.
What we have just said
expresses the current understanding of the word “leader” from the
proletarian point of view. This leader must be intimately connected to the
class-conscious masses. He will represent and organize the life and thought of
the masses, who will in turn transmit their own enthusiasm to him. He must not
fight like a businessman does, for his property, for his people, for his
nation, but as an integral part of the vast proletarian masses who feel, who
think, and who desire, and who exist throughout the entire world. He must not
fight while saying, “I want to transform the proletarian movement into my movement, the revolution is my affair, it is me whom you must
follow”; all of these sentiments correspond to private capitalism, they
comprise part of bourgeois ideology.
As long as it has to fight,
the AAUD will therefore not reject leaders a
priori, which would be equivalent to rejecting all intelligence, all
ability, all resolute will. If it did so it would no longer be a socialist
organization but a military and bourgeois prison in which, fatally leveled, the
human being would be mistaken for the product of a machine. It would also be
utopian, since the struggle has just begun. This position, however, will burden
the proletarian leaders with the greatest responsibility. The only requirement
of the organization and the system will be that all its officers are subjected
to the strictest control. The council
organization is to be understood in this sense.
It carries out a merciless battle against one-man dictatorship, against ruling
cliques and organized power centers which have separated from the needs and
living conditions of the proletarian masses and which use the methods of
capitalist social climbers. It most violently takes its stand against the intellectuals, that is, against those
persons who use their higher education to transform the proletariat into a plaything
of their own conceptions and interests.
The AAUD is the inveterate
enemy of the capitalist bourgeoisie from both the internal and external points
of view. It thus naturally finds itself on the terrain of the “dictatorship of the
proletariat”. Its subsequent goal will be to fight for the
realization of this dictatorship. Such a dictatorship means that in the struggle for the communist and
classless society there is no compromise of any kind between exploiters and
exploited, between capital and labor. To attain this goal, it is absolutely
necessary for the proletariat to have all decision-making power over all of
society’s political and economic institutions, via the council
organization.
The dictatorship will last
until the old powers have disappeared. The AAUD stigmatizes as much as it can
the imposture of bourgeois democracy, which takes for granted an a priori economic inequality.
It would be a waste of time
to dilate upon the nature of that kind of democracy (of the ballot-box) to
proletarians who have had to endure its indelible effects since August 1914.
Every democracy of that kind is a dictatorship of the owners. At a time when
all of the preconditions for the proletarian seizure of power are present, that
is, when capitalism’s survival is no longer possible except by way of an
unprecedented increase of exploitation, leading to the deaths of millions upon
millions of proletarians, the exploited, in ever-increasing numbers, are
carrying out a revolutionary struggle
against “democracy” and will not rest until capital lies prostrate
at their feet. One cannot expect a voluntary abdication, except perhaps one
which is only for appearance’s sake (as in
But the AAUD’s clear
profession of faith in favor of the “dictatorship of the
proletariat” consists equally of the fundamental rejection of any kind of
collaboration with capital. It is the profession of faith in favor of the
proletarian struggle relying on its own methods.
The politics, or, to put it
another way, the struggle of such an organization, has an a priori proletarian class character. This means above all
rejecting any form of parliamentarism regardless of its type. It should also be
said, expressed negatively, that all parliamentarism leads to the sabotage of
the proletarian revolution as soon as such Factory Organizations come into
existence.
Furthermore, the AAUD’s battle is entirely
international. The proletariat, as a class,
acts resolutely only as a result of its international, unified character. The
internationalist point of view stands in the forefront. The AAUD’s goal
is the international communitarian
economy and, finally, humanity as a
classless society. The form taken by its struggle is naturally linked to a
certain extent to the conditions in each country. It will, from the very start,
incessantly strive to create links between and to unite the revolutionary
councils of the various countries.
Notes
1. Prior to and during
the war, revolutionaries were debating whether a single world capitalist State
was in the offing. The majority arrived at the conclusion (correctly, in our
view) that this was impossible: competition, even monopolistic competition, is
the very soul of capital. Applied on the scale of a single country, this
“super-imperialism” hypothesis evolved to become the theory of
“State capitalism”, later elaborated by Bruno Rizzi (L’URRS, collectivisme bureaucratique,
Part 1, 1939; Champ Libre, 1976. For an English translation, see The Bureaucratization of the World;
2. Quoted from World Revolution and Communist Tactics.
3. This passage is
taken from the Program of the KAPD.
Guidelines of the AAU-E1
(June 1921)
Introduction
Unionism was the result and
the agent of a revolutionary dynamic which was unstable and precarious in 1919,
and faltering in 1920. When the only possible kind of activity was reformist,
the (obviously antagonistic) coexistence of capital and labor, and therefore
also the trade union organization with its separation of trades and factories,
of employed and unemployed, made a comeback. No longer the instrument of a
struggle which had since come to an end, the AAU was reduced to the status of
an appendage of the KAPD, which for its part soon broke up into groupuscules.
After Rühle’s
exclusion (October 1920), the
Despite its proletarian base,
the AAU-E, rich in tendencies and conflicts, did not enroll workers alone.
Intellectuals and artists enthusiastically participated in its activities, and Die Aktion was, in fact, its most
important journal. Rühle left the AAU-E in 1925, judging that the weight
of reaction was too powerful for militant activity to have any meaning.
Although Pannekoek was not an active member of any group after 1920, the AAU-E
could legitimately lay claim to embodying his positions to a significant
extent.
The KAUD (the Communist
Workers Union of Germany) would be founded upon the principle of the unitary
organization in 1931, regrouping the vestiges of the German communist left.
Note
1. These theses
comprised one of two projects proposed by the opposition within the AAUD. They
were presented by the East Saxony and Hamburg districts at the Fourth
Conference of the AAUD (June 1920), were adopted as definitive
“guidelines” by the first autonomous conference of the opposition
in October, and were published in Die
Aktion No. 41/21, 1921.
Guidelines of the AAU-E
1. The AAUD is the
unitary political and economic organization of the revolutionary proletariat.
2. The AAUD fights for
communism, for the socialization of the production of raw materials, the means
of production, and the forces of production, as well as of the consumption
goods which are the products of those forces. The AAUD wants to establish
production and distribution according to a plan, which would do away with the
current capitalist mode of production and distribution.
3. The final goal of
the AAUD is a society where all power will be abolished, and the road to this
society passes by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the
exclusive determination of the political and economic organization of communist
society by the will of the workers, thanks to the council organization.
4. The most urgent
tasks of the AAUD are: a) the destruction of the trade unions and the political
parties, the principle obstacles standing in the way of the unification of the
proletarian class and the further progress of the social revolution, which can
be the affair of neither the party nor the trade unions; b) achieving the unity
of the revolutionary proletariat in the factories, the cells of production and the
foundations of the society of the future. The form assumed by this unity is the
Factory Organization; c) the development of the self-consciousness and the
solidarity of the workers; d) the preparation of all measures which will be
needed for the work of political and economic construction.
5. The AAUD rejects all
reformist and opportunist methods of struggle, and is opposed to any
participation in parliamentarism and the local enterprise councils; such
participation would be tantamount to sabotage of the council idea.
6. The AAUD
fundamentally rejects all professional leaders. Its only relation with official
leadership will take an advisory form.
7. All positions in the
AAUD are unpaid.
8. The AAUD does not
consider the proletariat’s struggle for freedom to be a national, but an
international affair. For this reason the AAUD strives for the unity of the
entire world proletariat in a council International.
Lenin’s Infantile Disorder. . .
and
the Third International
(
Franz Pfempfert
Introduction
In April 1920, when Lenin was
putting the finishing touches to his Left-Wing
Communism: An Infantile Disorder, he was as yet unaware of the founding of
the KAPD, which would reinforce his determination to liquidate a political
tendency which seemed to him to be a denial of reality. In order not to lose
touch with the masses, one must go wherever they are to be found. This is the
axis around which all of the arguments in Lenin’s book revolve, making
the book a theory of manipulation: we shall take advantage of the discord in
the enemy’s ranks, we shall unmask the leaders of the Labour Party before
the eyes of their membership by making proposals which they cannot fulfill, we
shall use the space provided to us by bourgeois democracy against that democracy.
. . .
The KAPD, through the pen of
Gorter, who published his Open Letter to
Comrade Lenin in July, still attempted to open up a dialogue. Gorter
stressed the point that, unlike the situation in
The Open Letter was an attempt to prove to the Bolsheviks that they
were mistaken in their efforts to get the communists to imitate them
everywhere. Gorter argued as if the KAPD had a clearer awareness of the real
interests of the International and the
Political stabilization,
which was being ever more distinctly established after 1920, deprived the
“self-initiative” advocated by Gorter and Pfempfert of its
practical scope. To cite just one example, contrary to the hopes of the
supporters of an electoral boycott, abstention was of little account. In this
confused and turbulent period, the masses were far from demonstrating their
loathing for the ballot box, especially on the occasion of the elections to the
Constituent Assembly which would decide upon the political regime to succeed
the Empire (January 26, 1919). They voted in droves: two-and-a-half times more
voters than in 1912, two-thirds of them entering the voting booth for the first
time.
Gorter’s Open Letter to Comrade Lenin was left without
any public refutation. It would be ten years before its first French edition
saw the light of day, published by the Groups of Communist Workers (among whose
members was André Prudhommeaux), and thirty-nine more years before the
second French edition was published.
Lenin’s Infantile Disorder. . .
and
the Third International
I
The Third International
should be the association of the revolutionary proletariat of all countries in
the fight against the dictatorship of capitalism, against the bourgeois State,
for the power of toiling humanity, for communism. Having originated in a
country where the workers have already, by great efforts, conquered this power,
has helped the Third International to win the sympathies of the world
proletariat. Enthusiasm for this new worldwide association of the exploited
goes hand-in-hand with enthusiasm for Soviet Russia and for the incomparable
heroic combat of the Russian proletariat. But the new structure of the Third
International has as of yet had neither the time nor the opportunity to achieve
moral results as an organization.
The Third International can
and will be a moral force if it represents the expression of the will of the
world’s revolutionary proletariat, and then it will be indestructible and
irreplaceable as the International of the fighting proletarian class. But the
Third International would be an impossibility and a vacuous phrase should it
want to be the propaganda instrument of one or more parties.
If the Third International
were really the association of the world’s revolutionary proletariat, the
latter would then have the feeling of belonging to it, regardless of formal
membership. But if the Third International presents itself as the instrument of
the central power of a particular country, then it will bear within itself the
seed of death and it will be an obstacle
to the world revolution.
The revolution is an affair
of the proletariat as a class; the
social revolution is not a party
matter.
We must be yet more precise:
Soviet
Is this so hard to
understand? Is it folly, comrade Lenin, for us to shout at you: it is not we
who need the Third International at this time, but the Third International
which needs us?
II
Lenin thinks that is indeed
folly. In his work, Left-Wing Communism:
An Infantile Disorder, which he has just launched against the revolutionary
proletariat, Lenin thinks that the Third International must abide by the
statutes of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) and that the revolutionary
proletariat of all countries must submit to the authority of the “Third
International” and, therefore, to the tactics of the Bolsheviks. The
Bolsheviks should determine what arms the fighting proletariat of the rest of
the world should use. And only those proletarians who unconditionally obey will
be chosen to belong to this world association. In the Principles of the Second
Congress of the Third International, Lenin has formulated this postulate in a
yet clearer way: not only has he given general instructions, but all of the
details of tactics, of organization, and he has even prescribed
the name which should be assumed by
the parties in all countries. And the finishing touch:
“All the decisions of the
congresses of the Communist International, as well as of its Executive
Committee, are binding on all parties affiliated with the Communist
International.”
Even if this is methodical,
it is still madness!
In a country as small as
Germany, we have repeated experience, most recently in March of 1920, of the
fact that a tactic which leads to victory, for example, in the Ruhr, was
impossible elsewhere; that the general strike of the industrial workers in
central Germany was a joke for the Vogtland, where the proletariat has been
condemned to unemployment since November 1918. And should
What draws us towards the
Third International is the shared goal of the world revolution: the dictatorship
of the proletariat, communism. The Third International must stand alongside the
fighting proletarians of all countries, instructing them concerning the various
situations and types of revolutionary civil war. The combatants would be asses
instead of combatants were they to want to have nothing to do with the task of
examining the weapons used by the comrades fighting here and elsewhere. But
they would be sheep were they to fail to stop dragging themselves down roads
which they had long since recognized to be impractical for them and which they
consequently abandoned.
Lenin’s attack against
us is, in its tendency and in its details, simply monstrous. His text is
superficial. It does not conform to the facts. It is unjust. Only in its
phraseology does it display any hardness. Of the rigor of the thinker Lenin,
which was ordinarily manifested in his polemics most of all, not a trace is to
be found.
What does Lenin want? He
wants to tell the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) and the revolutionary
proletariat of all the other countries, that they are imbeciles, idiots, and,
worse yet, that they are not docilely knuckling under to the wisdom of the bonzes, since they are not allowing
themselves to be led in an extremely centralized way by Moscow (through its
intermediaries, Radek and Levi). When Germany’s revolutionary vanguard
rejected participation in bourgeois parliaments, when this vanguard began to
demolish the reactionary trade union institutions, when it turned its back on
the political parties of leaders, in accordance with the watchword, the emancipation of the workers can only be
the task of the workers themselves, then this vanguard was composed of
imbeciles, then it committed “leftist infantilisms”, then it
necessarily had to be denied the right to join the Third International (this
was the result of Lenin’s pamphlet)! Only when the workers of the KAPD
return, like repentant sinners, to the Spartacus League, the sole bringer of
salvation, will they be allowed to join the Third International. So, this is
how it stands: Back to parliamentarism! Enter Legien’s trade unions! Join
the KPD, that party of leaders in its death throes! This is what Lenin is
shouting at the conscious German proletariat!
As I said above: a monstrous
book! I must also call attention to the futility of the arguments which Lenin
dusts off from the 1880s to persuade the German leftists that he knows how to
employ quotation marks against them.1 All his explanations
concerning centralism and parliamentarism are on the level of the USPD. And
what Lenin writes in favor of working in the trade unions is so amazingly
opportunist that the trade union bonzes
have set themselves no more urgent task than to reproduce and distribute this
section of Lenin’s work as a leaflet!
The polemic which Lenin
directs at the KAPD is scandalously superficial and inexcusably inept. In one
passage, for example, he says:
“In the first place,
contrary to the opinion of such outstanding political leaders as Rosa Luxemburg
and Karl Liebknecht, the German ‘Leftists’, as we know, considered
parliamentarism to be ‘politically obsolete’ even in January 1919.
It is clear that the ‘Leftists’ were mistaken. This fact alone
utterly destroys, at a single stroke, the proposition that parliamentarism is
‘politically obsolete’.”
This is what the logician
Lenin writes! In what way, please tell me, is it “clear” that we
were mistaken? Perhaps in the fact that, in the national Constituent Assembly,
Levi and Zetkin did not sit next to Crispien’s people?2
Perhaps in the fact that this communist duo is now seated in the Reichstag? How
can Lenin, so thoughtlessly and without offering even the shadow of proof,
write that our “error” is clear and then add the assertion that
“this alone destroys the proposition,” etc.? Monstrous! Also
monstrous is the way Lenin responds in the affirmative to the question,
“Must we participate in bourgeois parliaments?”:
“Criticism—the keenest, most
ruthless and uncompromising criticism—must be directed, not against
parliamentarism or parliamentary activities, but against those leaders who are
unable—and still more against those who are unwilling—to utilize parliamentary elections and the
parliamentary tribune in a revolutionary, communist manner.”
It is Lenin who writes this!
Lenin suddenly wants “to utilize democracy”, a method with which he
had settled accounts by referring to it as “the demand of
renegades” (in The State and
Revolution, in The Renegade Kautsky.
. ., and in Bourgeois Democracy and
Proletarian Dictatorship)!
The revolutionary proletariat
of
And now Lenin comes along and
tries to make us forget the bitter lessons of the German revolution as well as
the lessons he has himself taught? Is he trying to make us forget that Marx
taught that it is not individuals who are responsible? And that it is parliamentarism which must be fought and
not the individual parliamentarians!
Several months have passed
since “communists” first took their seats in the Reichstag. Read
the minutes of the parliamentary sessions, now that Levi-Zetkin “have
utilized” this tribune “in a revolutionary, communist manner”
(actually, no more than meaningless journalistic verbiage)! You have read the
minutes, comrade Lenin. Where is your “keenest, most ruthless and
uncompromising criticism”? Are you satisfied with them? . . . .
It is easy to prove: the KAPD
has most effectively utilized the “electoral struggle” in the sense
of carrying out revolutionary agitation, and it has been able to utilize it more
effectively than the parliamentary communists precisely because it has no
“candidates” running after electoral victory. The KAPD has unmasked
the parliamentary scam and has brought the ideas of the councils to the
remotest villages. But the vote-hunters have confirmed, during the few months
of their activity in parliament, that we were right to be anti-parliamentary.
Comrade Lenin, has the idea never occurred to you, a Leninist idea, that in a
country with 40 years of social democracy’s parliamentary foolishness
behind it (that party also wanted, in the beginning, to “utilize”
that tribune solely for propaganda!), it is a totally reactionary act to enter
parliament? Do you not understand that in a country characterized by
parliamentary cretinism, parliamentarism can
only be stigmatized by means of the boycott? There is no stigmatization
more violent, none which penetrates more deeply into the consciousness of the
workers! A parliament unmasked by a boycott carried out by proletarians would
never be able to deceive and trick the proletarians. But a correct
“programmatic” speech, which Clara Zetkin delivers with the
approval of the bourgeois and social democratic newspapers, and from which the
press takes what seems suitable, such a speech engenders respect in the
bourgeois parliament! Had the bosses of the USPD not gone to the Constituent
Assembly, the consciousness of the German proletarians would be much more
developed today.
III
Lenin favors “the
strictest centralization” and “iron discipline”. He wants the
Third International to endorse his views and to eject all those who, like the
KAPD, are critically opposed to omnipotent leadership.
Lenin wants military-style
authority to prevail in the parties of every country.
The instructions of the First
Congress of the Third International had a somewhat different flavor! In those
instructions, directed against the Independents whose fighting spirit was
uncertain, it recommended:
“. . . separate the
revolutionary elements from the ‘Center’, something which can only
be achieved by means of resolute and merciless criticism of the
‘Center’s’ leaders.”
They also said:
“It is in addition
necessary to form an alliance with those elements of the revolutionary workers
movement who, although not previously members of the socialist party, now stand
completely on the terrain of the proletarian dictatorship in its soviet form,
that is, first of all with the syndicalist elements of the workers
movement.”
But now a different tactic
prevails. Instead, the slogan is: Down with the syndicalists! Down with the
“idiots” who do not submit to the bonzes! The Executive Committee is in command, and its orders are
the law.
Lenin thought he could quote
Karl Liebknecht against the “Leftists”. I shall quote Karl
Liebknecht against Lenin:
“The vicious circle in
which the big centralized organizations operate, provided with functionaries
who collect their salaries and who are quite well-paid considering their social
background, consists not only in the fact that these organizations are creating,
in this professional bureaucracy, a social layer directly hostile to the
revolutionary interests of the proletariat, but also in the fact that they
confer power upon a leader, who easily becomes a tyrant and is chosen from
among those who have a violent interest in opposing the revolutionary politics
of the proletariat, while the independence, the will, the initiative and the
moral and intellectual autonomous action of the masses are repressed or
completely eliminated. The paid parliamentarians also belong to this
bureaucracy.”
“There is but one
remedy, on the organizational plane, for this evil: suppression of the paid
bureaucracy or else its exclusion from all decision-making, and the limitation
of its activity to technical administrative work. Prohibition of the
re-election of all functionaries after a certain term of office, which shall be
established in accordance with the availability of proletarians who have in the
meantime become experts in technical administration; the possibility of revoking
their mandates at any time; limitation of the purview of the various offices;
decentralization; the consultation of all members in regard to important
questions (veto or referendum). In the election of functionaries the greatest
importance should attach to the proofs they offer concerning their
determination and readiness in revolutionary action, of their revolutionary
fighting spirit, of their spirit of boundless sacrifice in the active
commitment of their existence. The education of the masses and of each
individual in intellectual and moral autonomy, in their capacity to question
authority, in their own resolute self-initiative, in the unrestrained readiness
and capacity for action, in general constitute the only basis to guarantee the
development of a workers movement equal to its historical tasks, and also
comprise the essential conditions for extirpating the dangers of
bureaucracy.”
“Every form of
organization which obstructs the education in an international revolutionary
spirit, the autonomous capacity for action and the initiative of the
revolutionary masses must be rejected. . . . No obstacle to free initiative.
The educational task most urgently needed in Germany, a country of blind,
passive, mass obedience, is to favor this initiative among the masses; and this
problem must be resolved even at the risk of being exposed to the danger that,
momentarily, all ‘discipline’ and all the ‘solid
organizations’ might all go down the drain (!). The individual must be
given a margin of freedom much larger than he has been attributed with until
the present by tradition in
IV
I know that Lenin has not
become a “renegade” or a social democrat, although Left-Wing Communism. . . has a purely
social democratic effect (the German leaders were saying almost exactly the
same things in 1878). How, then, can the publication of this text against the
world revolution be explained?
The monarchists have the
custom, in order to excuse the stupidities (or the crimes) of their monarchs,
of always alleging that their majesties were “misinformed”.
Revolutionaries cannot (they do not
have the right to) make such an excuse. We are well aware, of course, that Karl
Radek and the Spartacus League, in order to divert Lenin’s attention from
the causes of their political failure, have purposefully
told him lies about the situation and the revolutionary proletariat in
It is true that Lenin has
been shamelessly lied to about the affairs of the Spartacus League and the
KAPD, but he should have nonetheless said that it is a serious error to
identify the German situation with the Russian situation. Lenin was perfectly
capable, despite Radek, of seeing the difference between the German trade
unions, which have always led a
counterrevolutionary existence, and the Russian trade unions. Lenin knew
perfectly well that the Russian revolutionaries did not have to fight against
parliamentary cretinism because parliament had neither a tradition nor any
credit among the Russian proletariat. Lenin knew (or should have known) that in
Germany the leaders of the party and the trade unions necessarily brought on the 4th of August 1914 by
“utilizing” parliament! That the authoritarian and militaristic
character of the party, accompanied by blind obedience, has stifled the revolutionary
forces in the German workers movement for decades. Lenin should have considered
all of these things before undertaking his battle against the
“Leftists”. Had he done so, a sense of responsibility would have
prevented Lenin from writing this unforgivable pamphlet.
V
To convince the world
proletariat that Left-Wing Communism. . .
indicates the right road to the revolution for every country, Lenin presents the road which the Bolsheviks followed
and which led to their victory, because it was (and is) the right road.
Here as well, Lenin finds
himself in a completely untenable position. When he cites the victory of the
Bolsheviks as proof that his party had worked “correctly” during
the fifteen years of its existence, he is hallucinating! The victory of the Bolsheviks in November 1917 was not due solely to
the revolutionary strength of the party! The Bolsheviks took power and achieved
victory thanks to the bourgeois-pacifist slogan of “Peace”!
Only this slogan defeated the national-Mensheviks, and allowed the Bolsheviks
to win over the army to their side!
Thus, it is not their victory
in and of itself which can convince us that the Bolsheviks worked
“correctly” in the sense of maintaining the firmness of their
principles. It is instead the fact that they know how to defend this victory
now, after almost three years!
But—and this is a
question posed by the “Leftists”—have the Bolsheviks always
run their party dictatorship in the way that Lenin demands, in Left-Wing Communism. . ., that the
revolutionary proletariat of Germany should run their party? Or has the
situation of the Bolsheviks been such that they did not need to abide by
Lenin’s “condition”, who demands that the revolutionary party
“be able to mix with, to fraternize with and, if it so desires,
to a certain extent to unite with the
broadest masses of the workers,
primarily with the proletarian masses, but also
with the non-proletarian
masses” (Left-Wing Communism. . .).
Until now, the Bolsheviks
have been capable of putting into practice, and have only succeeded in putting
into practice, one thing: the strict military discipline of the party, the
“iron” dictatorship of party centralism. Have they been able to
“mix with, fraternize with, and, if [they] so [desire], to a certain
extent to unite with” the “broadest masses” of which Lenin
speaks?
VI
The tactics employed by the
Russian comrades are their business. We protested, and had to treat Mr. Kautsky
as a counterrevolutionary, when he allowed himself to slander the tactics of
the Bolsheviks. We must defer to the Russian comrades in the matter of their
choice of weapons. But we do know one thing: in Germany, a party dictatorship is impossible; in Germany, only a class dictatorship, the dictatorship of
the revolutionary workers councils, is
capable of victory (and it will be victorious!), and (what is most
important) will be able to defend its
victory.
I could now write, following
Lenin’s recipe in Left-Wing
Communism. . ., that this “is clear”, and then change the
subject. But we do not need to evade the question.
The German proletariat is
organized in different political parties which are parties of leaders with
distinctly authoritarian characteristics. The reactionary trade unions,
controlled by the trade union bureaucracy due to the strictly centralized
nature of their structures, are in favor of “democracy” and the
recovery of the capitalist world, without which they could not exist. A party dictatorship in this
It is incontestable that all
the workers (including the workers at the beck and call of Legien and
Scheidemann!4) must be supporters of the new communist order, providing
their internal divisions do not render the repression of the bourgeoisie
impossible. Are we to await the last judgment, when all the proletarians, or
even only a few million of them, are members of the KPD (which is today
composed of no more than a handful of employees and a small number of people of
good faith)? Perhaps the Third International will be the inducement that will
oblige the revolutionary workers to enter the KPD (as Karl Radek and Mr. Levi
have imagined)? Can the egoism of its leaders remain ignorant of the fact that,
at this very moment, the majority of
the industrial workers and the rural proletariat is mature and ready to be won over to a class dictatorship?
We need a slogan for
summoning the German proletariat to unite.
We possess it: “All power to the workers councils!”. We need a
place for recruitment where all the class-conscious workers can meet without
the interference of party bonzes. We
have such a place: it is the workplace.
The workplace, the reproductive cell of the new community, is also the base for
recruitment. For the victorious realization of the proletarian revolution in
The Communist Workers Party
is not, therefore, a party in the bad sense of the word, because it is not an
end in itself! It makes propaganda for the dictatorship in its sense of the
word, because this dictatorship is not an
end in itself! It makes propaganda for the dictatorship of the proletariat,
for communism. It trains its combatants in the Factory Organizations, where all
the forces that will abolish capitalism, establish the power of the councils
and permit the construction of the new communist economy are concentrated. The
Factory Organizations are brought together in the
The Communist Workers Party of
Germany has had
to endure Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism. . ., Radek’s
maledictions, and the calumnies of the Spartacus League and all the parties of
leaders, because it is fighting for the class rule of the proletariat, because
it shares Karl Liebknecht’s views concerning centralism. The KAPD will
quite well survive Left-Wing Communism. .
. and everything else. And, whether or not Karl Radek understands this, and
whether or not Lenin writes a pamphlet against us (and against himself): the
proletarian revolution in
(Die Aktion)
Notes
1. He is undoubtedly
speaking of the antiparliamentary opposition in the SPD, especially in
2. Clara Zetkin
(1857-1933), member of the SPD Left, later a Spartacist, supported Levi.
Crispien
(1875-1946), left the SPD to join the USPD right wing. Attended the Second
Congress of the Communist International, but was opposed to joining it and
later returned to the SPD.
3. Noske (1868-1946),
SPD Minister of War in December 1918, organized collaboration between the
socialists and the Freikorps. Architect and symbol of the ensuing bloody repression.
4. Legien (1865-1939),
government socialist, Minister in November 1918, Chancellor of the Republic in
1919, one of the architects, together with Noske and Ebert, of the
anti-Spartacist repression.
Leading Principles of the KAI
(The Communist Workers International)
(Extracts)
(1922)
Introduction
When Rühle envisaged a
Fourth International in Moscow and Us
(September 1920), the political current of “council communism” had
several hundred thousand adherents in
The construction of a
Communist Workers International (KAI, its German acronym) is explicitly
referred to in the declaration of the KAPD central committee (July 1921) which
officially acknowledged the party’s break with
Basically, the so-called
“
The so-called Essen Tendency
immediately made the formation of the KAI its principal activity. Its
supporters thought it was vain and even dangerous to try to radicalize
reformist struggles against a capitalism in its “death crisis”,
which would lead to imprisoning the workers on an exclusively reform-oriented
terrain. For this reason it no longer assigned the AAUD, or at least that part
of the AAUD which remained under its influence, any other role than spreading
revolutionary propaganda, the effects of which were to prove to be
insignificant. Opposed to purely wage-oriented struggles, the Essen Tendency
would provoke the appearance of various anti-leadership, anti-organization,
anti-intellectualist and sometimes even anti-intellectual theories.
The KAI would hold several
conferences, and one of their few consistent attendees would be the Bulgarian
left communists. After 1924 it would exist only as an idea episodically
propagandized by a small office staff.
What sense was there in
creating an International when it had already been pointed out, by Gorter in
1923, for example, and not without some basis in reality, that “the world
proletariat as a whole has until now proved to be hostile to communism”?
This absurdity has a logic of
its own, based upon the expectation that, as capitalist attacks against the
proletarians increased (and this view would persist after 1919, during the
1920s, after 1933, etc.), the proletarians would be increasingly driven to rise
against capitalism. It was therefore thought necessary to construct the
organization which, though minuscule today, would not fail to grow tomorrow. .
. .
The historical conditions did
not permit the KAPD to be anything but a detachment of “shock
troops”, in Franz Jung’s formulation. And its attempts to
compensate for this weakness by intervening in the international arena were to
be in vain.
Note
1. We shall not pursue
the further history of the communist left after 1921. See The Dutch Left, chapter V, and our The Communist Left in
The Leading Principles of the KAI
(Extracts)
(1922)
The Third International1
1. The Third
International is a Russian creation, a creation of the Russian Communist Party.
It was created as a support for the Russian revolution, that is, for a
revolution which was partly proletarian, partly bourgeois.
2. Due to the dual
nature of the Russian revolution, insofar as the Third International had to
come to the aid of both the Russian proletarian revolution as well as the
Russian bourgeois revolution, and thus as a result of the dual nature of its
purpose as well, the Third International was transformed into an organization
which was partly proletarian and partly capitalist.
3. Insofar as it called
for revolution and the expropriation of the capitalists, it was a proletarian
organization oriented towards the suppression of capitalism; insofar as it
preserved parliamentarism, the trade unions, and the dictatorship of the party
and of its leaders, it was a bourgeois organization, created to conserve and to
reconstruct capitalism: parliamentarism, the trade unions, and the dictatorship
of the party or its leaders do not lead to communism, but to the preservation
of capitalism.
4. The Third
International was thus, from its very inception, a partially
counterrevolutionary organization.
5. In the European
countries, this organization led not to victory, but to the defeat of the
proletariat.
6. Now that, after the
spring of 1921, the Bolshevik Party which exercises its dictatorship in
7. Since Russian
capitalism must be reconstructed, and since this capitalism cannot be reconstructed
without the repair and reconstruction of European capitalism, the Third
International was forced to abandon the revolution and to turn to reformism,
that is, to propose the reconstruction of capitalism as its goal.
8. And in order to
reconstruct capitalism, the Third International—just as the Russian
Bolshevik Party, now capitalist, forges links with European capitalist
governments and with European capitalism in order to reconstruct Russian
capitalism—now forges links with the Second International, and with the
Two-and-a-Half International,2 for the reconstruction of European
capitalism.
9. The purpose of the
Second International, of the Two-and-a-Half International, and of the Third International, is the same as that of the
capitalist States and their governments. The united front of these three
Internationals is a united front with capitalism.
10. When capitalism is in the midst
of a death crisis and no longer sees any way out, the Soviet government and the
Third International offer to save it.
11. This is why the Third
International, like the Russian Bolshevik Party, has become a completely
counterrevolutionary organization, an organization which is betraying the proletariat.
It must be put into the same bag with the Second International and the
Two-and-a-Half International.
12. Just as the proletariat in all
countries is a tool in the hands of the social democratic, bourgeois and
reactionary parties for preserving capitalism, for rebuilding it and spreading
it throughout the world, delivering government power to these parties and their
leaders, so the proletariat is now, in turn, becoming an instrument in the
hands of the Third International, and for the same objective. The goal of the
Third International is not revolution and the liberation of the proletariat,
but personal power in the bourgeois State and the enslavement of the
proletariat.
The Communist Workers International
1. To the degree that
the situation of the whole international proletariat, within a world capitalism
which is undergoing its death crisis, requires the proletarian revolution as
the realization of its current practical task, to that same degree the
intellectual groundwork and organizational relations of the world working class
fail to measure up to the occasion of this historical challenge. The
overwhelming majority of the world proletariat is a prisoner of the ways of
thought of bourgeois private property and the forms of international class
collaboration between capitalism and the proletariat, forms which, each playing
its part within a unified process, are supported with every available means by
all the existing organizations of the proletariat; this places before the
revolutionary proletarians of every country the historically inevitable
consequence of founding a new proletarian International.
2. This new proletarian
International, the Communist Workers
International (KAI), represents the pure proletarian class struggle, and
has the practical task of abolishing bourgeois-capitalist private property and
transforming it into proletarian-socialist property in common. Beyond this
goal, it carries out a
basic struggle for the realization of the communist society.
3. Recognizing that the
objective preconditions for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the rule of
the proletariat currently exist, it places at the forefront of its activity the
principle of the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat,
that is, it wants to help the proletariat recognize that it is historically
necessary to immediately do away with capitalism; for that same reason it wants
to awaken within the proletariat the effective will to carry out the
proletarian revolution.
4. The achievement of
these goals requires as a precondition the openly anti-capitalist character
(from the perspective of content as well as form) of its organization and the
leadership of all its struggles. Its highest point of reference is not the
particular interest of national associations of workers considered in isolation
from one another, but the common interest of the entire world proletariat: the
world proletarian revolution.
5. As a first step on
the road to its goal, it strives to make the proclamation of the class
dictatorship of the proletariat understood as the destruction of capitalist
State powers and the installation of proletarian State administrative bodies
(Council States). It rejects all methods of reformist struggle and it fights
with the anti-parliamentary and anti-trade union weapons of the revolutionary
proletarian class for the creation of revolutionary workers councils and
revolutionary Factory Organizations (Workers Unions).
6. It especially
directs its battle against the existing international organizations of the
proletariat (the London, Vienna and Moscow Internationals) which, as
accomplices of the bourgeoisie in their mutual efforts to reconstruct world
capitalism, are trying to forge a united front of the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat against the world proletarian revolution and consequently represent
the most dangerous obstacles standing in the way of the liberation of the
proletariat.
Notes
1. Published in the Kommunistische Arbeiter Zeitung (Essener
Richtung) (
2. The name humorously
given to the Vienna Bureau, led by Otto Bauer, Bernstein, Kautsky, the Russian
Mensheviks . . . , which, from 1921 to 1923, was a group bringing together what
remained of the centrist parties after the core of their rank and file had
joined (for the most part, temporarily) the Third International. Almost all of
these individuals and groups would later return to the social democracy.
“The future will show which of us is
right”
--Lenin to Gorter, during their discussion in
Epilogue
The Workers Revolution and Beyond
The publication of an
anthology is a sign that a movement no longer exists. Publishing another
anthology thirty years later is a confession that a new movement has not arisen.
Leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions from the texts and the facts
assembled here, we would only like to set forth the perspective which informed
the production of this work.
There can be no doubt that
there have never been so many history books sold, but the “duty to
record” evidently does not apply to revolutions. Of the three great
attempts at emancipation which marked the first half of the 20th
century, two are known well-enough despite the layers of hagiography and
calumny with which they are covered:
Such is not the case for the
third attempt: the German revolution, which, without any doubt, had too much
power and meaning for the world to accept looking at it face-to-face. It
remains the only revolution to have broken out in a “modern”
country, that is, one which was highly industrialized and enjoyed a
(relatively) democratic political life, and thus the one which was most similar
to the revolutionary uprisings we may live to see.
To the slight extent that
they show any interest in it, historians retain, first of all, one name, that
of Rosa Luxemburg, sometimes in association with that of Karl Liebknecht. The
bourgeoisie likes dead revolutionaries. In the 1970s, the same
Even the basic history of the
period 1917-1921 (without focusing on the “leftists”) in
The avatars of the little
world of publishing reflect, in their own way, the tectonic shifts of
“real” history. After decades of oblivion, it required the social
disturbances of the sixties and a renascence of workers self-organization and
the critique of bureaucracy to reawaken interest in council communism (reflected
in the Situationist International) and to create the need to once again take up
the thread of time.
Towards the Unitary Organization
The fact that, at the
beginning of the 21st century, the basic accusations hurled at the
world in 1919 are still current is nothing to be proud of: it means that the
world has not changed basically since 1919. Far from it: the rule of capital is
more deeply entrenched and has assumed a planetary scale. Even when the outward
appearance has changed, the structures of capitalist society, such as the
State, parliament, and the trade unions, have remained and preserve their
essential functions. The great practical and theoretical merit of the German
revolutionaries was that they counted parliament and the trade unions among their
adversaries, at a time when these institutions had until then been the very
structure of the workers movement in the advanced capitalist countries.
The repudiation of the trade
unions in 1919 in
“
Unionism was the tendency to
break down all trade barriers: when workers abandoned their trade unions, they
did so by entire factories, rather than by this or that trade. It also
signified the will to organize beyond the boundaries of each industry: the
unions operated on the scale of whole economic regions.
In a negative sense, unionism
is a reaction against the institutions which accepted the war, collaborated
with the Sacred Union in order to increase production, and then broke the
wartime strikes. In a positive sense, it was solidarity, a community of action.
Workerism? The criterion for membership in the AAUD was to declare that one is
favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A worker in favor of sectional
struggles by trade category would not have been admitted. Unionism does not
reduce the proletarian to a producer.
In practice, and especially
in
Antiparliamentarism
Here, too, we are not
confronted by a merely theoretical position, but by the systematization of
concrete experience. In 1919, the electoral mechanism, in the Constituent
Assembly as well as in the official councils dominated by the social democracy,
was revealed to be an obstacle to the revolutionary dynamic. If in 1916
Pannekoek did not exclude the subversive use of parliament,4 events
would later clarify democracy’s function: “Universal suffrage has
been . . . a sign that the bourgeoisie has defeated the working class”,
Johann Knief maintained in January 1919.5
At its founding congress
(December 30, 1918 to January 1, 1919), the KPD voted 62 to 23 against
participation in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. To Rosa Luxemburg,
advocate of utilizing a tribune even though she rejected it, those who would
still comprise the party majority for a few more months retorted: elections and
electoral institutions are some of the most effective ways to detour
revolutionary energy, and to drown the radical minority under the opinions of
proletarians who are still under social democratic influence. The only way to
free them from that influence is action in the factory and the streets, not the
utilization of an institution which is alien to the revolutionaries and in
which they will always be sure to end up losing, no matter how many delegates
they elect.
The problem became more
complicated when parliamentarism ceased to operate solely in a visibly
“bourgeois” arena, but also within the forms which the social
movement against the war assumed. In the same article cited above, J. Knief
asserts: “The soldiers councils, which were originally class institutions
of the proletariat, have become institutions of bourgeois democracy. . . . The
same thing is happening to the workers councils.”
In fact, in December 1918,
the communists were a tiny minority at the Reich Congress of Workers and
Soldiers Councils, and neither Liebknecht nor Luxemburg was allowed to be
listed as a candidate . . . because they were not registered with an economic
enterprise! Dozens, hundreds of salaried bureaucrats took their seats as workers in an assembly from which
incontestable representatives and defenders of labor were excluded. This was
neither the first nor the last time workerism was used for an anti-working class
purpose.
We must point out that many
people at that time, including some on the communist left, still conceived of
anti-parliamentarism as a tactical and non-essential position. In 1919,
Pannekoek thought that although parliament could no longer be the instrument of
either revolution or the administration of the future society, it was not out
of the question that it could be used in a pre-revolutionary period.6
In 1919, however,
participation in the elections was rejected by a considerable number of those
who would later become well-known figures in the KPD, such as Paul Frölich
and W. Münzenberg, who were at that time “Leftists”, at least
in regard to this essential point.
It was not the parliamentary
road to socialism that was in question, since all the KPD’s militants of
that period saw the soviets or councils, and not parliament, as the political
form of the revolution. In 1919-1920 the debate revolved around the possible
use of bourgeois democracy before the
revolution. In the years prior to 1914, the left wing within the Second
International attacked Nur-Parlementarismus
(“Parliament Alone”), the idea, and its practical application,
according to which the bourgeois electoral mechanism would be sufficient for
the socialist transformation. For the left, what were also required (above all)
were the strike and mass mobilizations in the streets, without rejecting the
established representative institutions in principle. This was just what the
left communists rejected in 1919: the tactical use, even for propaganda, even
as a tribune, of bourgeois democracy.
Bordiga, for his part,
declared that he was always opposed to systematic abstentionism, which was of
anarchist inspiration, according to him. Nonetheless, the future founders of
the Communist Party of Italy proclaimed “the incompatibility of communist
principles and methods with participation in elections to bourgeois
representative bodies.”7 His abstentionism was therefore not
only bound to the circumstances of 1919, and was indeed very close to a rejection
“in principle”. By calling themselves the “Abstentionist
Fraction”, they clearly demonstrated the essential importance which they
granted to this question.8
As it turned out, post-1918
Germany deprived the distinction between “tactical” and
“principled” anti-parliamentarism of any meaning: endemic
rebellion, assassinations, pro- and anti-revolutionary armed gangs, reactionary
conspiracies, preparations for coups
d’État (from the Kapp Putsch in 1920 to the 1923 Munich coup
attempt in which Hitler participated), etc. Even disregarding the
assassinations of many revolutionary militants and cadres, crime became a part
of political life: the assassinations of Haase, the USPD leader (1919), of
Erzberger, leader of the Zentrum, the
moderate Catholic party, and Foreign Minister (1921), of Rathenau, a leading
liberal industrialist, and also Foreign Minister (1922). All of these
assassinations constituted efforts to eliminate the center, which comprises the
pivot of every democracy. Fighting for revolution in such circumstances rules
out having any illusions about or participating in a parliamentary democracy
which functioned in such a defective manner. From a broader perspective,
however, those individuals were rare who, like Otto Rühle, looking forward
beyond those turbulent years, proclaimed the definitive end of an era, and
declared parliamentarism, whether feasible or not, as well as trade unionism,
whether effective or not, to be henceforth inherent characteristics of the
functioning of capitalist society.
In his critique of the Dutch
Communist Party (written in the summer of 1919), Gorter showed how democracy
strengthens capital.9 While it is true that council communism
enthusiastically contrasts “workers” democracy to the
“bourgeois” variety, it is also clear that it fully grasped the
role of the latter, as would be further demonstrated ten years later, after
Mussolini had come to power and the Nazis were mobilizing huge crowds. We offer
two quotations from among the dozens available:
“Democracy is being fascistized,
it is calmly making alliances with the dictatorships; and the dictatorships are
covering themselves with a democratic cloak.” (1931)
“Fascism is not opposed
to bourgeois democracy; to the contrary, it is its continuation by other
means.” (1932)10
For the council communists,
the social democrats and the Stalinists helped the Nazis take power not by
refusing to unite, but by uniting against the revolution. In 1933, Hitler only completed
the counterrevolution begun by the SPD in 1919 and acquiesced in by the KPD
over the following years, due to the social democracy of its origins and its
unconditional defense of the
The Workers Revolution
The addition of the word
“workers” in the KAPD’s name (Kommunistische Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands) signaled the intention
to found a party upon the basis of its rank and file, and was an appeal to
self-organization.
It was an affirmation of class: the workers versus the rest of
society. As Gorter emphasized, the workers stand alone. Not only must the
factory workers prevail over the other classes, but “the obligation to
work must be implacably enforced” (Program of the KAPD, Section II.8),
which, under the prevailing conditions of that era, would have amounted to the
widest possible extension of blue-collar type work.
Such insistence may seem
surprising. Let us consider the situation of a schoolteacher who is disgusted
by the butchery of 1914-1918, aware of the death of ideals in the trenches, of
the collapse of political structures, and who is looking for solutions. How
could he follow the revolutionaries, whose program appeared to imply sending
his son, and perhaps even his wife, into the factory? This is what communism
promised him: a proletarian fate, which appeared to him to be the least
enviable of all possible fates. In short, instead of proclaiming the need to
supersede the proletarian condition, the KAPD program sought to generalize it.
Is this not an excellent way to turn the petit-bourgeoisie against the workers,
and to push them into the arms of the parties of order, if not into the arms of
the Freikorps. . .?
Posing the question in this
manner is anachronistic. By doing so, one overlooks the fear and the scorn, if
not the class hatred, for the factory workers which were then characteristic of
tradesmen, shopkeepers, officials and members of the liberal professions. The workers revolution was then presented as
the only historically possible kind of revolution. Only with the benefit of
being able to look back at history are we now capable of understanding how
Gorter and the KAPD went so far theorizing a state of affairs which in no way
depended upon them, and therefore reinforced, contrary to their own intentions,
the obstacles to the revolution they were trying to bring about. The class
hatred of the petit-bourgeoisie grew more acute as they contemplated their
“demotion” to the status of manual workers.
Hence the insistence on
“the worker”:
“The worker is a
proletarian in the Marxist sense only in production, in his role as a wage
worker.” Outside the factory, “he lives, acts, and feels like a
petit-bourgeois,” wrote Rühle.
And Gorter wrote, in 1921:
“In the factories, the proletarian means something. There he is a fighter
because he is a worker. There he can exist as a free man. . . . There, since
the revolution comes from the factories, he can fight . . . with weapons in
hand.”11
It is true that other texts called
for an infinitely more expansive notion of emancipation. The communist left was
not closed to the multifarious aspirations which coursed through Germany prior
to 1914, which were reinforced by the social collapse provoked by the war:
rejection of mechanical and commercial civilization, flight from the cities,
the beginnings of a non-antagonistic relation to nature, the search for another
way of living, of eating, of loving, for a poetry “made by all”. .
. . The activities and personalities of the diverse range of people who opted
for council communism testify to this surpassing of the domain of the worker.
The same Rühle whom we
have just seen theorizing workerism, posed the need to go beyond all cultural
values and practices. Against the social democracy (which was soon to be
imitated in this respect by Stalinism), which presented itself as the
continuator of the “good” conquests of bourgeois civilization, he
said:
“The bourgeoisie has
bequeathed an evil legacy to the ascendant social class, the proletariat. In
the domain of culture, the proletariat faces an essential task. It must have
the courage to reject all bourgeois concepts relating to culture, morality,
ethics and esthetics.”12
Schwab, a former Wandervögel (“migratory
bird”; one who embraces a back-to-nature lifestyle), would later devote
himself to architecture. In
In 1920, the German group
known as the Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council put the following demands in
the first lines of its program: the end of property, the suppression of labor
by mechanization, a new urbanism, and the fusion of art and life. The Manifesto of Proletarian Art declared:
“The proletariat is a
condition which must be overcome. The bourgeoisie is a condition which must be
overcome.”
We shall add this precocious
note of lucidity seldom encountered at that time:
“The bourgeoisie is
using the communist apparatus, which is not an invention of the proletariat but
of the bourgeoisie, to help renovate its decomposing culture (
Such claims, however,
remained implicit and occupied the margins of the movement “which
transforms the conditions of existence”, that is, of the masses in their
struggle in the factories and the streets. For the revolutionary organizations,
even the artists who had joined the proletariat were still a little too
“artistic”, and their esthetic too advanced. And in the eyes of the
vanguard artists, the most radical of the workers were still a little
“bourgeois” in their esthetic preferences. If Gorter was a poet, he
was a poet outside of his theoretical
texts, in which there is little evidence of poetic creation. (It is in Otto
Rühle where theory attempts a new kind of writing, as in The Revolution is Not a Party Matter.)
Separation reigns. Everything which is presented as positive, everything
positive which is done, finally revolves around work. The aspiration for other
ways of life transmitted a subterranean impulse to the movement, but could not
assert itself in that movement, and did not transcend the “workers”
character of the movement’s activities and program.
It was certainly true that,
on occasion, it was thought that the Council would go beyond workerism,
integrating “all those who must be considered as proletarians, the street
vendor or the teacher as well as the artist or the white collar
employee”. (K. Schröder, On
the Future of the New Society, 1920).
By enrolling these
categories, Schröder explains, the General Workers Unions will unite them
with the factory workers. This position is all the more significant in that it
comes from the principal leader of the KAPD. But this perspective thereby
universalizes a proletarian condition which it does not suppress, and is
limited to the sphere of labor: society is a society of production, and the
proletarians are producers. The critique of work as a separate activity (which
presupposes an entirely different vision of society and of human life) does not
emerge as a specific point, and even less as an essential one.
This “class against
class” position does not perceive that the social classes and, first of
all, the two fundamental ones, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, are
complementary moments, forms and functions of the reproduction of capital, and
that the mere fact of having based a mode of activity, and of having theorized
the most radical activities of the time based upon these categories, indicates
the limit of this perspective: one remains within capitalism if one clings to
the class struggle without going any further.
The German communist left was
the left current which best understood the nature of the mediations standing between the proletarians and their
emancipation, mediations which go by the names of parliament, trade union, and
political party, and it fought them. But here we come upon the paradox. Gorter,
undoubtedly the most “workerist” German left communist, quite
correctly included the reformism of the worker
himself among the enemies of communism. Not illogically, in 1923 he would
count among the enemies of communism . . . almost all the world’s
workers.16 In fact, at the end of 1918, the workers who were most
firmly rooted in the world of labor, the revolutionary shop stewards
(especially among Berlin’s metal workers) refused to join the newborn
Communist Party, preferring to remain instead within the “centrist”
party, the USPD, which emerged from a split within the SPD in 1917. They would
later join the Unified Communist Party (VKPD), without ever connecting with the
council communists.
In addition, it was among
those workers rather than among the communist left where the dream of self-management appears to have
been most deeply-rooted, embraced by the workers in the skilled trades who
still fulfilled an indispensable function in the organization of production
during those pre-Fordist times, workers who were conscious of their specialist
skills, and who possessed a highly-developed sense of their value and their
role in the enterprise, a role played along with the technicians and engineers,
but in rivalry with the latter.
The strength of the USPD, the
amalgamation of the Kautskyist old guard and authentic working-class cadres,
resided in the fact that it represented a certain kind of labor autonomy within
the parliamentary republic born in November 1918. Its implicit program involved
transforming the institutionalized workers councils into counter-powers capable
of improving the living conditions of the workers by gaining a preponderant
influence within bourgeois democracy, even (in the most extreme conception)
going so far as to convert the bourgeois democracy into a labor democracy. The
fact that this aspiration was quickly shown to be groundless by the ensuing
events is evident. In 1917-1921, however, this did not prevent these ideas from
holding sway over a significant part of the German working class.
The KAPD therefore situated
the revolutionary wellspring (and the guarantee against possible deviations) in
a profound working-class nature whose emblematic figure (the metal worker)
slipped from their grasp. Gorter came close to an understanding of this
paradox, but did not succeed in doing so. One cannot fight except on the basis
of one’s own situation, but when one’s struggle rests solely on one’s situation, one
furthers its development without surpassing it. The KAPD delegates to the Third
Congress of the International emphasized the power of capital, which was not
only capable of absorbing what the proletarians create (trade unions) and
utilize (elections) but was also capable of absorbing their demands (reforms).
After 1921, during the phase of reflux, some KAPists would question the
pertinence of all wage struggles, calling upon the unionen, soon to be drained of most of their members, to restrict
their activities to revolutionary action.17
The National-Bolshevik Aberration and
its Meaning
It is most unfortunate that
the only people who tried to find social means to go beyond workerism did so
from a national basis.
In 1915, in Democracy and Organization, Laufenberg
and Wolffheim explained that the bourgeois State could be neither national nor
democratic: only the proletariat would create a “pan-German”
republic, that is, it would unite the various German-speaking countries (the
voluntary merger of
But the labor which they
wanted to incorporate into the councils was by no means the same labor intended
by Gorter: beyond the walls of the factory, it included all the trades and
professions which take part in the production of wealth and, ultimately, almost
the entire population, the body of which forms what they called the people.
The anticapitalism of
Wolffheim and Laufenberg was soon (at least as of 1915) set upon a national
foundation. Their classless society is the national totality. The fact that, after
the war, they formed alliances with reactionaries was a logical, although not
inevitable, consequence of this view. To want to create a classless society
before the end of classes is, necessarily, to organize this society from above by smothering the class contradictions
within it.18
Wolffheim and Laufenberg are
of course to be numbered among the promoters of the councils, but in their view
the councils were a means to organize a fusion of classes led by the
proletariat in alliance with social groups which are allegedly anti-bourgeois
due to their pre-capitalist characteristics, especially the in the army. In
this manner they invented a non-revolutionary
councilism.
Unlike the communist left,
but fully within the social democratic tradition, Wolffheim and Laufenberg
renounced the critique and destruction of the State. The State, Laufenberg
wrote, has two functions: one of exploitation, the other being the framework
necessary for the life of the community, and what needs to be done is to make
the second role prevail over the first. Bernstein and revisionism had been
saying the same thing.
Wolffheim and Laufenberg
advocate a peaceful road to a socialism that would be national.
Nor were they the first to
want to rouse the nation against a supposedly weakened and discredited
bourgeoisie that was ready to sell its population to international capitalism.
From then on their goal was to forge a popular alliance, which would in turn
join an alliance with Russia in a revolutionary war against France, England and
the United States, countries which had been equated with the real heart of
world capitalism, that is, the banks, whose representative within world
communism was Paul Levi (former Spartacist, leader of the Communist Party and
the incarnation of anti-leftism), “agent of international Jewish
finance”. All their uses of anti-semitism (even though it was not a
central issue for them as it was for the Nazis) and all their contacts with
reactionaries (which the two Hamburg militants were soon to make) were enough
to drive them far from the proletarian movement and even into the arms of their
declared adversaries. The enemies of our enemies are not our friends.
Nonetheless, we may observe that the strategy of Laufenberg and Wolffheim
prefigured those strategies which would later launch numerous anti-imperialist
national fronts in the
National Bolshevism never
“took root” in the KAPD as a whole: its audience remained
restricted to
It would fall to the Nazis to
reap the fruits of this perspective, in a very different way. The community of
proletarian labor solidarity advocated by the KAPD had failed. The
National-Bolshevik popular community of the producers was stillborn. A
racial-national community would prevail after 1933.
* * *
Our selection of texts begins
with the description of the prosaic activities of a workers council and
concludes with the founding of a new International doomed to failure. The full
range of the movement’s activities is embraced in this selection. The
revolutionaries do not need to be glorified.
On the other hand, nothing
would be more false than to reduce the movement featured in this book to
“Revolution or Nothing!” Precisely because, in 1919-1920, Pannekoek
perceived the revolutionary process, despite all appearances, to be a long-term
undertaking—and today we know that he was not mistaken—only
activity faithful to a minimum of principles was capable in his eyes of
contributing to that movement. For this reason in particular he mistrusted the
faith in a small party which was to radicalize the masses.
There is no lack of
contradictions among the texts we publish here, and it is tempting to pin
labels on them, which would in some cases be deserved: “activism”,
“workerism”, “anti-parliamentarism” . . . so many real
tendencies whose vigorous emergence was not the result so much of a current of
ideas as they were brought about by two or three crucial years of the century.
The German communist left did not practice “politics” and did not seek
a mass “base” by making demands on its behalf. It is undoubtedly
for this reason that it has been forgotten by official history and, though only
later, became a collection of groupuscules. Its supersession presupposes
nothing less than another course of history. Its continuation therefore remains
to be imagined and lived. . . .
Gilles Dauvé
(February 2004)
“A dead conviction leaves the worst aftertaste
of disappointment. . . . Today, as much as yesterday, I permit no excuses for
those who have abandoned their convictions.”
--Franz Jung
Le
Scarabée-Torpille, 1961.
Notes
1. Obsolete Communism, the Left-Wing Alternative appeared in
2. The situation is
different in
3. The Communist Left in
4. Imperialism and the Tasks Facing the Proletariat (1916), in (Dis)Continuité, No. 3, 1998.
5. From the Collapse of German Imperialism to the Beginning of the
Revolution, Invariance, Texts of the Revolutionary
Workers Movement, No. 4, 1996.
6. Social Democracy and Communism, op.
cit. (Invariance No. 4, 1996).
7. Resolution of the Conference of the Abstentionist Fraction of the
Italian Socialist Party, May 1920, reproduced above.
8. Every reader of Left-Wing Communism knows that Lenin
gave the German Left a good hiding and treated the “Italian” Left
with kid gloves. Forty years later, in “The
Infantile Disorder”, a Condemnation of Future Renegades (available
from the International Communist Party), Amadeo Bordiga would take pains not to
see what he had in common with the German Left, and how he differed from Lenin.
Here, for instance, is how his journal, Il
Soviet (Naples), announced its publication in 1920 of Pannekoek’s
text The World Revolution and Communist
Tactics (see Pannekoek and
Gorter’s Marxism, ed. and tr. by D. A. Smart, Pluto Press, London,
1978, for an English translation which includes
Pannekoek’s April 1920 “Afterword”):
“As
is known, comrade Lenin, in his admirable activity, has finally found time to
devote himself, in a special pamphlet
written on the eve of the Moscow Congress, to the radical movement within
international communism, defining it as an infantile disorder of communism. In
this pamphlet our infantilism, along with our journal, are the objects of
particular attention and we have resigned ourselves, after having endured
father’s whip, to patiently bear the gibes of our dear brothers at home,
which shall not fail to be heard.”
“But
just as impertinent children who have been punished never lack a protective
uncle who consoles them with some candy, we also have received some candy in
the form of a long article—which shall in turn be published as a
pamphlet—published under the title given below, by comrade Pannekoek, in
No. 28-29 of Kommunismus.”
“We
think it is fitting to recall that in 1912 Pannekoek, before Lenin, clearly
asserted what has since become the touchstone of international communism: the
destruction of the parliamentary-democratic State as the first task of the
proletarian revolution. We also recall that a competent and unimpeachable
witness, Karl Radek, has defined Pannekoek as the most perceptive mind of international socialism.” (Quoted
in (Dis)Continuité, No. 7,
1999, p. 46).
9. Opportunism in the Dutch Communist Party.
10. Quoted from The Dutch Communist Left (P. Bourrinet), International Communist
Current, 1990, p. 173. The publication of the complete version in English of this
important study has been undertaken by Brill Publishers (The Netherlands).
11. Rühle, quoted in “The
KAPD and the Proletarian Movement”, Invariance,
Second Series, No. 1, 1971. Gorter, quoted in The Dutch Communist Left, p. 115.
12. Die Aktion,
13. Traven, Dans l’Etat le plus libre du monde, L’Insomniaque,
1994.
14. Quoted by M. Dachy, Dada & les dadaïsmes,
Gallimard, 1994. In 1966, after Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), one of the most
prominent figures of Dadaism and one of the editors of Die Aktion, translated
the article “Captive Words” (I.S. No. 10) into German, Guy Debord
wrote to him on April 25, 1966:
“We
are of course aware of your role in German dadaism; so that no approval of our
theses on this central issue could be as precious to us as yours. After such
organized forgetting, the current acknowledgement does not seem to us to be
anything but a moment of a foreseeable process, a moment which arrives with the
reduction to rubble of the culture and the ideologies which have reigned over
forty years of generalized reaction. The next revolutionary crisis, which could
spell the judgment day of the world which you then (and later) confronted, will
vindicate the entire truth of dadaism.” (Debord, Correspondance, Fayard, Vol. III, 2003. See also Vol. II, pp.
203-205).
15. Invariance, Textes du mouvement ouvrier revolutionaire, No. 4, 1996.
16. L’Internationale Communiste ouvriére, in Invariance, Second Series, No. 5, 1974.
17. The Dutch Communist Left, p. 145.
18. “The national idea has
ceased to be a means in the hands of the bourgeoisie and has turned against it.
. . . The great dialectic of History has made the national idea a means of
power for the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.” Ibid., p. 114. The Stalinists would later give this great
dialectic, dreamed up on the coast of the
Some Websites of Interest
In English
AK Press
Antagonism (left communism)
www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/
Aufheben (
Break Their Haughty Power
(Loren Goldner)
home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/
Class Against Class
(communist archive)
Collective Action Notes (very
large council communist archive)
The Commoner (autonomist)
Eclipse and Re-Emergence of
the Communist Movement (website for this text by Dauvé and Martin,
originally published in the 1970s)
For Communism (extensive
communist archive)
Fundamental Principles of
Communist Production and Distribution (website hosting the translation of this
classic text of council communism originally published in 1930)
www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6579/
Infantile Disorder (Left
Communist site with material in many languages)
International Communist
Current
Internationalist Perspective
(split from ICC)
Kurasje (council communist
archive)
Libcom.org (libertarian news
and communist archive)
Marxist Internet Archive
No War But the Class War
Practical History
(autonomist)
Prole-position (communist
struggle news)
Prole.info (communist theory)
Red and Black Notes (Canadian
council communist/anarchist project)
Situationist International
Online
Spunk Press (anarchist
archive)
Subversion (archive; group
defunct)
www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8195
Tarantula Distribution
(libertarian and communist distribution out of
Wage Slave X’s
Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Homepage (former Internationalist
Perspectives)
XPDNC Political Links
www.xpdnc.com/links/politics.html
Other Languages
Ab Irato (French communist
site)
Almaty Libertaria (
Antorcha: Biblioteca
libertaria (eclectic anarchist and left communist archive; Spanish)
Archivo Situacionista
(Spanish language situationist archive)
Biblioteca Virtual
Revolucionária (Brazilian communist site with archive)
www.geocities.com/autonomiabvr/index.html
EXIT! (German split from Krisis—large
archive of Portuguese and other translations of Robert Kurz and other former
members of the Krisis Group)
Frihetlig.org (Norwegian
libertarian site)
Grupo de Comunistas de
Conselhos da Galiza (Galician and Castillian Spanish; communist theory and
translations)
Kavoshgar.org (Persian
translation project for communist texts)
Kolinko (German communist
site)
www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/
Komonist-e-emrooz (Iranian
communist site)
Krisis (German Marxist
project)
Liberter (Turkish anarchist
communist site)
Marxist Labour Party (Russian
Left Communists)
Mondialisme.org
Mouvement Communiste (French)
n + 1 (Italian left
communists)
Plus Loin (texts in French)
Riff-Raff (Swedish communist
theoretical journal)
Sinistre.net (Italian Left)
Solidarita (Czech libertarian
site)
Theorie Communiste (French
communist journal)
Troploin (French communist
website)
Wildcat (German revolutionary
site)