An Alternative Voice
The second current of the working class opposition to the war began to form
in the second year around small groups of political workers in some of the
main manufacturing centres such as Bremen, Brunswick, Berlin and Hamburg.
The roots of the political outlook of these small groups lay both in their
experience and criticism of the role played by the trade union apparatus
in the mass strikes that erupted in Germany, as in all other industrialised
countries before the war and in the parallel political debate which took
place first within the Second International and then outside it. It was
first shown by the Left tendency within the Dutch Socialist Workers Party,
the SDAP, which split from the majority in 1909.
This left tendency included, Pannekoek, Gorter and Roland-Holst and was
known as the 'Tribunists' after the political journal in which their
contributions to this debate appeared, De Tribune.
The main spokesman of this tendency in the debate was Anton Pannekoek [1873
- 1960], and the leading issue was his rejection of Social Democratic
politics and parliamentarism as the means appropriate to the revolutionary
struggle of the working class.
Pre war opposition
In 1909 a clear cleavage of opinion appeared between Pannekoek and
Luxemburg on this split in Social Democracy.
Luxemburg declared that the Left's response in leaving their party had been
'sectarian' and that in her opinion 'the worst working class party is
better than none.' Her fundamental blind spot, her fatal loyalty to the
official movement, is revealed in her equation of the workers' movement
with Social Democracy.
She said, 'We cannot stand outside the organisation, outside contact with
the masses.'
[Letter to Roland-Holst of 11 August 1908. Quoted in 'Rosa Luxemburg'
Nettl. p. 405 Abridged Edition]
These pre war alignments must be borne in mind if we are to comprehend the
international point of origin of the coherence adopted by this second
current in Germany during the war, the close alignment of the Dutch and
German Left Communists, and in particular the short lived confidence that
was brought about among them in Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the early
period of the Third International.
After 1914 Lenin extended the terms of the already ten year old Bolshevik
critique of the Mensheviks within Russian Social Democracy to include the
criticisms of the Dutch Left from before the war. In 'State and Revolution'
of 1917 he observed,
'In this controversy [on the question of state power] it is not Kautsky,
but Pannekoek who represents Marxism, for it was Marx who taught that the
proletariat cannot simply win state power in the sense that the old state
apparatus passes into new hands, but must smash this apparatus, must break
it and replace it by a new one.'
[State and Revolution - p 358 Essential Works of Lenin - Bantam Books
October 1966]
The main difference in practical interpretation of this position between
Bolsheviks and Left Communists was only to become apparent in the period
immediately following the war.
Influence of Lenin and Bolshevism
No account however of the significance of the Left Communists within an
international movement in this period can be adequate without considering
the role of Lenin and the Bolshevik party within the international workers
movement. If we simply project our view of say the Kronstadt uprising of
1921, back onto the events of 1917, we will fail to acknowledge the fact
that the Russian revolution was lost every bit as much in Turin, Berlin or
Glasgow as it was in Petrograd or Moscow.
The international alignments amongst the 'opposition' can be most clearly
seen at the Zimmerwald conference in Switzerland in 1915 to rally the anti
war fragments of the shattered Second International.
The Zimmerwald 'Left' included the Bolsheviks, Tribunists and the German
Left Communists, while the 'Centre' would not commit itself to the 'Left'
policy of 'turn the imperialist war between states into a revolutionary
civil war.' This 'centre' unprepared in practice to break with Social
Democracy, included Trotsky and other Mensheviks, and the Spartakus group.
After this first international war time conference, the German Left
Communist groups from Bremen, Brunswick and Berlin who had attended formed
themselves into the German International Socialists [ISD]. Later in the war
they changed their name to the German International Communists [IKD]. In
March 1915 Otto Ruhle was the second Reichstag deputy after Liebknecht to
vote against war credits. After a brief membership of the Spartakus group,
he joined the tendency of groups in and around the ISD, becoming spokesman
for the Dresden area group.
Other leading figures in this tendency included Karl Radek in Brunswick,
later secretary of the Third International, Paul @Frolich in Bremen, later
KPD leader, and Laufenberg and Wolffheim in Hamburg, theorists of 'National
Bolshevism' in Germany after the war. These latter two were quite
unrepresentatively selected by Lenin in his 'Left wing Communism . . . . '
as typifying the politics of the 'ultra-left' in Germany, representing as
they did possibly the most unstable tendency within the IKD. Their
'National Bolshevik' policy was to be adopted by the KPD for a period
during the French invasion and occupation of the Ruhr after the war.
Perhaps the most striking and significant difference between the two main
currents - Spartakus and the 'Left' - [which were reflected
internationally] was the difference in the self conscious basis upon which
each of them developed. This was also revealed in their respective
practices. The Spartakists sought to give immediate expression to the forms
of class struggle that emerged during the war. They had an effective
political presence, despite their small numbers, around both the food riots
and strike movements that developed from 1915 onwards. However, during the
war the strike movements were dominated by the shop stewards, skilled
engineering workers whose wage militancy in opposition to their union
leaders had formed the basis for the parallel split of the USPD
[Independent Social Democrats] from the SPD in the early part of the war.
Just like their British class brothers they were labour aristocrats
threatened with eventual extinction by the new mass production techniques
which were to invade Europe as part of the invasion of American capital in
the 1920s and 1930s. Because of the demand for war production however they
were placed at a moment of great sectional power. They had to adopt a
policy towards the flood of 'dilutees' into the factories.
And just like their British contemporaries they fought a militant defensive
battle, initially around their own sectional; and short term economic
interests. However because this movement was broken up as a consequence
among other things of a German military defeat, there had to develop an
'unofficial' class movement that went way beyond the conceptions of the
skilled men after the war.
A comparable, but less developed extension of struggle took place in
Britain after 1917, but crucially nowhere in this country did it break the
bounds of trade unionism [official or otherwise]. The attitude of the
militants in Britain is best summed up by a resolution of the National
Conference of Shop Stewards and Workers Committee Movement in January 1920.
'. . . the attitude towards the existing unions is not one of antagonism,
rather does the SS & WCM desire to revolutionise the aim of trade unionism
and to remould its structure. The realisation of this revolutionary aim can
only be brought about by active propaganda inside the trade unions and by
fuller participation in the internal work of those organisations'
[Published in 'Solidarity' Journal of the SS & WCM - June 1920]
The Spartakists by contrast, had more influence on women and young people
who, often dominated by the more cautious USPD male skilled workers in the
factories, were often obliged to organise riots and demonstrations over
food shortages and other 'social' issues outside the factories. By the end
of the war the term 'Spartakist' in the eyes of the 'respectable' middle
and working classes, was virtually synonymous with the word 'hooligan'. The
Spartakists were undoubtedly credited with a presence at many scenes of
social unrest where almost certainly none of their membership was present.
Only in the last two years of the war did pressure from the working class
on the shopfloor begin to erode the 'from the top down' principle. This was
the basis of much of the German shop stewards influence and it in turn
reflected the intensely patriarchal relationship between labour and capital
in most of German industry before the war.
Before we turn to the events of the last year of the war, it is essential
to discuss the character and nature of this relationship, for this contains
much of the key to understanding this whole movement and also gives
insights into how a new and better movement might begin to express and form
itself today.
'Character' of the German Working Class
The traditional habits of industrial relations were transformed throughout
the pre war and war time period in Germany, as was the case in most
'advanced' capitalist countries.
There was a huge growth of massive new industrial centres with modern
technology and machinery located in the Berlin region, the Leipzig -
Dresden - Chemnitz triangle and in Wurtemburg, as well as around the ports
of Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen.
One consequence of this transformation was that the traditional industrial
leadership of the German working class of the Ruhr coal miners in the
strike waves before the war had been displaced to a great extent by the new
initiating role of the working class in the newer manufacturing centres.
Now in the post war strike wave, the lead passed to Berlin, followed by the
ports, then Saxony and finally the Ruhr
Whilst for the German working class the dominant political influence on its
revolutionary hopes [as was true in this period for the working class as a
whole] was the Russian revolution, with the appearance of Soviets and to a
lesser degree the Bolshevik party, the dominant influence on its
organisation as a class within capitalism, was that of the IWW. Daniel
DeLeon and the 'Wobblies' have been much misunderstood in the intervening
period. With their slogan of 'One Big Union', they have been written off as
syndicalists. This is unfair and masks a revolutionary understanding of
their role and outlook. The influence of the IWW increased throughout this
period as with the rise of the new manufacturing centres, often accompanied
by the introduction of advanced American technology and working methods,
the conditions of labour of German workers increasingly resembled those of
American workers. [The same influences were at work in Britain, see for
instance the Singer complex in Clydeside]
However in so far as the German working class did not get beyond its view
of itself as a 'producer' class for German capitalism and develop a
political outlook as a revolutionary 'class for itself', it is hard to make
a direct comparison of a model of revolutionary organisation they were
evolving, with the form of industrial unionism. In this essay we point out
that as far as international influences were concerned, the German working
class found itself 'sandwiched' between a political revolution in a
backward sector, what became the USSR, and an aggressive but anti-political
syndicalist type movement in the USA.
It is important to bear in mind this international location of the German
working class as it struggled to create a revolutionary expression for
itself. In the post war period this was to come out on several occasions in
the conflict between the KAPD and Comintern in 1920 and 1921; KAPD
delegates often referring to the industrial experience of the IWW and the
Shop Stewards movement in Britain, in defence of their own positions on
industrial struggle and the trade union question. After their expulsion
from the Third International, they were to align themselves much more
firmly with the other West European and American influences. This is
typified by a comment of Herman Gorter in 1923,
'Lenin and his colleagues have played a strange role. On the one hand they
have shown the world proletariat the way to communism, on the other they
have helped to establish world capitalism in Russia and Asia. . . . for
our part we shall always regard as more important the real communism
towards which the English, German and North American workers are striving.'
['World Communism' - reprinted as a series of articles in Workers
Dreadnought' February 1924]
The downside of the IWW influence on the Left Communists, and especially
the AAUD-E, was that the adaptation of the Wobbly form of politics and
organisation to German conditions [we will touch on this again] could only
bring out its inherent limitations. The American Wobbly was a member of the
most mobile class in the world, a class of international origins, a class
hardly dominated by sectional, craft or skilled interests. One day he would
be a factory worker, a farm hand the next, and after that a rail road
worker. He saw himself as part of a social class organised through the IWW
against capital as an international market. The Wobbly organiser moved
within the stream of the class [ the KAPD expression was as a 'yeast within
the masses'] from job to job and coast to coast. As such he never conceived
himself as having a specific relation to a particular factory or means of
production. The whole of industrial America was the 'factory' in which he
worked, and the whole of American society was his terrain of struggle. As a
consequence of this positive feature, which has been widely misunderstood,
we would argue that the practice of the IWW was far more 'unconsciously
communist' in its form of organisation and content than that of the
European working class.
[The reader will have to forgive us this contradictory notion, but we are
trying to understand how a communist movement arises out of the working
class's own struggle. This whole area of the relationship of the European
working class to the IWW in this period needs further study. Here as a
start we would refer the reader to an article by Sergio Bologna in Telos
No. 13 of 1972 entitled 'Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at
the Origins of the Workers Councils Movement', where this is discussed, and
some of the above points are gone into.]
This is not to say that the IWW outlook was more overtly political in a
conscious revolutionary sense. But to transfer an aggressive industrial
unionism to a relatively immobile proletariat such as in Germany, only
served to bring out the limitations of IWW 'syndicalism' and to feed the
tendency towards 'factoryism'.
Outbreak of Struggle 1918
In January 1918 the highest point of the wartime industrial struggles was
reached in the strike of almost half a million workers that broke out in
and around Berlin. During this strike the pressure of the shop floor
workers upon the shop steward structure was greater than in any previous
strike in wartime Germany. However the demands drawn up by the strikers
stopped short of any revolutionary socialist content.
They included a call for peace without annexations [one of Wilsons Nine
Points], release of political prisoners, suffrage reform, right to public
political meetings and improved food supplies. This strike which was
defeated, proved to be a dress rehearsal for the November revolution. The
SPD broke its long-standing practice of remaining outside direct
involvement in industrial disputes, to involve itself in the resolution
[that is defeat] of the strike.
As in the later November Revolution the more militant and revolutionary
shop stewards were outflanked by the acceptance by their more moderate
colleagues of the role of the SPD politicians in co-opting the struggle.
The main difference between the practice of the 'Left Communists' and that
of the Spartakists, lay in the fact that, although the Left were in close
contact with the larger working class movement in the areas where they were
mainly situated - that is the newer manufacturing areas, the groups around
the ISD were beginning a far more profound process of theoretical
elaboration. They wanted time to work out all the implications for the
working class of the new period of capitalist society brought about by the
war.
Part 4
This page hosted by
Get your own Free Home Page