Lessons for Today
Our intention here is to stress those features relevant for a study of this
movement and its lessons for us today. Foremost amongst these features was
the attempt by the German Left Communists to construct a communist
political practice based on the new period that they recognised and
diagnosed and in direct opposition to this, the role of the Third
International and the leadership of the KPD.
And just to show how this has a bearing on politics today this
counter-revolutionary role has been justified and asserted by tendencies
associated with both the Third and Fourth International throughout the
world up to the present day.
The early period of the war shifted the focus of the class struggle from
the pre war industrial area to the area of bourgeois politics. The workers
struggle had to break out of the stranglehold of the 'Sacred Union' - the
Arbeitsgemeinschaft, the name given to the wartime class collaboration in
the 'National Interest' which sought to tie the working class to the goals
of the imperialist conflict. This was done by a combination of
mystification and coercion. By the end of the war the industrial struggle
was beginning to re-emerge as the focus and the war time leadership of the
skilled craft sections was giving way to a more class political and less
sectional upsurge from below in the factories. Effectively this was a
return to a more politicised wave of mass strikes like the ones that
occurred before the war. This previous wave especially in Belgium and
Germany sparked off a fierce debate within the Second International to
which Rosa Luxemburg contributed in her famous pamphlet on the 'Mass
Strike' in 1906.
The Workers 'Union'
The most significant feature of this renewed industrial activity,
expressing lessons drawn from the pre war and early war time industrial
struggles, was its outright rejection of the role of the trade unions in
mediating and policing the struggle between the working class and capital
on the shop floor. The slogan 'Get out of the Unions' was first heard in
the middle of the war and was then taken up as a central part of the
platform of the Left Communist current.
After the war, in the period of the Councils, when demobilisation took
place and unemployment soared, the popularity of this slogan spread and in
the main industrial centres hundreds of thousands of workers left the
unions. Often they dissolved their local branches, seized branch funds and
redistributed them as unemployment relief. Many of these workers, skilled
and unskilled alike, regrouped themselves during the course of 1919 into
single factory organisations within their own plant, often as a result of
the strikes of the time. These factory organisations were to be the basic
organs of the Worker Unions into which they were grouped at regional and
national level.
[In this context the German word 'Union' has nothing whatsoever to do with
trade union which is called 'Gewerkschaft' in German. The 'Union' therefore
fought the trade unions. - Publishers Note]
At first many of these workers joined the recently formed
Anarcho-Syndicalist FAUD, following the first period of the Councils and
the downturn of the German Revolution in May 1919. The FAUD, whose
forerunner the FVDG had wielded considerable influence in the pre war
industrial struggles, had been banned for the duration of the war. It
proved however not to have gone beyond a militant anti-political democratic
syndicalism of the pre war period. This was not enough for a generation
that had just gone through the political experience of the war, and the
small Marxist opposition within the FAUD soon left along with many others
and helped to found the General Workers Union of Germany, the AAUD at the
start of the following year. The formation of the AAUD from factory
organisations [Betriebsorganisationen] and workers unions organised at
plant and regional level was parallelled by the 'democratic' expulsion of
the Left Communist tendency from the KPD in December 1919.
Political Organisation
This tendency formed itself into the Communist Workers Party of Germany,
the KAPD, in April 1920. Their expulsion from the KPD was part of the
strategy supported from Moscow by the newly formed Third International and
was engineered by the KPD Zentrale [Central Committee] under the leadership
of old Spartakists led by Paul Levi.
Moscow and the old leadership were determined to return the German movement
to both a parliamentary practice and activity within the old trade unions.
The Left Communists were not willing to respond in kind to this
Social-Democratic style of political manoeuvring to which they were victim,
although some of their number briefly advocated healing this rift. This was
no minor split, the expelled Left Communist current [who remember 'won' the
vote on parliamentary activity] represented about half the current
membership of the KPD, and certainly the bulk of its membership in the main
industrial areas.
The KPD then completed its transformation into a mass membership social
democratic type organisation in the following year - a party of
'supporters' rather than active members with a developed political outlook
- by merging itself with the 'left-wing' of the USPD and renaming itself
the United Communist Party of Germany, the VKPD. The VKPD thus represents
the continuity of the first current we have identified. This was the end
product of the failure of the Spartakusbund to break decisively with Social
Democracy. It now commenced an electoral strategy, combined with a policy
of 'revolutionising the unions' from within - a strategy which proved
singularly ineffective.
So the KAPD and the AAUD distinguished themselves both from the
parliamentarism and the trade unionism of the KPD and from the rejection of
political struggle and the need for proletarian dictatorship of the FAUD.
KAPD - A Different Kind of Party
In its programme drawn up in May 1920, the KAPD clearly based its
perspectives upon the overall nature of the period as that of the entry of
capitalism into its decline.
' It becomes ever clearer that the opposition between exploiters and
exploited, which is daily increasing; that the contradiction between
capital and labour, of which even the most indifferent layers of the
working class are now becoming increasingly conscious, cannot be resolved.
Capitalism has experienced its ultimate fiasco. It has found itself
historically reduced to wiping itself out in a war of imperialist robbery.
It has created the chaos, whose intolerable continuation puts the working
class in front of a historical alternative, descent into barbarism or the
construction of a socialist world.'
[Programme of the KAPD - La Gauche Allemande p 4, La @Vielle Taupe, Paris
1973. In French - Translated by the Publishers]
The idea behind the relationship of the KAPD to the AAUD was that the
factory organisations, operating as workers councils for the social [re]
organisation of production following the revolution, were to form the basis
of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However they could only fulfil this function in so far as those
participating in them had a revolutionary and political conception of their
tasks and functions - a communist consciousness.
In so far as this was not the case - the KAPD was conceived of as the
separate organisation of conscious communists, whose role was to promote
communist perspectives and goals, through its own independent activity and
influence within the factory organisations. The precise interpretation of
this perspective, and thus the need for a separate political organisation,
was the basis of a disagreement within the KAPD between the tendency led by
Otto Ruhle and the rest of the organisation.
The KAPD's conception of the relationship between Party and Workers'
Councils was set out in the 1921 KAPD document, 'Theses on the Role of the
Party in the Proletarian Revolution', in the following terms,
'In as much as the masses, after the political victory of the revolution,
are ready in their class organisations [Unions] to introduce the basis of
the dictatorship of the proletariat in the council system, they will
increase in importance in relation to the party. . . . . . in as much as
the masses finally change their dictatorship into a communist economy, the
party ceases to exist.'
Given that the KAPD and the AAUD had a large common membership, with the
AAUD being by far the larger organisation, the practical role of communists
within the factory organisations was defined as being to consistently raise
communist positions and perspectives within any struggle. They were to
play a leading role as communists within the struggle and through this to
win the development of the industrial struggle to communist perspectives.
The AAUD membership were not to take the lead in any struggle for factory
reforms or wage increases, any struggle in which a communist direction
could not be taken. They were to express forms of practical solidarity with
such struggles, whilst refusing to accept their terms of reference. So it
can be seen that the viability of their perspective was inseparable from
the implicitly revolutionary potential of struggles of this period. This
was reflected in the active membership of these organisations.
At its founding the KAPD was for the most part made up of young workers and
unemployed who shared with most of the party spokesmen a
semi-insurrectionary perspective. Different interpretations of these
perspectives, which we will outline, were to create a split within the KAPD
and AAUD within a year of their formation.
Decline of the Movement
So far in our exposition we have been overwhelmingly sympathetic to this
Left Communist current - but it is not possible to keep this sympathy in
the period of the movements' decline and collapse under the weight of the
counter revolution. Some of the best elements of both organisations
reformed themselves into a small communist propaganda group in the late
1920s, the German Communist Workers Group - KAUD. One of the few available
accounts of the KAUD's conception of its political role shows that in the
meantime it had drawn some of the lessons of its past, and especially the
danger of permanent class [unitary] organisation, except in a period of
permanent revolutionary class upsurge:
'The KAUD united all workers who were declared communists, but it did not
claim that it united all the workers any longer. The organisation was no
longer a general organisation of the workers as the AAUD had been. No
longer was the organised class struggle to depend on an organisation formed
previous to the struggle [and] these organisations were no longer to be
considered as organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . . the
task of the new KAUD would amount to communist propaganda, clarifying the
objectives of the struggle and urging the working class to struggle
principally by means of the unofficial strike.'
[Origins of the Movement for Workers Councils in Germany 1918 - 29 p **]
The divisions created in a movement that is in the process of clarifying
and sharpening a communist perspective and practice are different from
those divisions forced upon groups desperately trying to push back the
weight of a growing counter-revolution. So once again we must distinguish
what for us are the positive and negative features of each side of this
split.
KAPD versus the 'Einheitlern'
The two main tendencies in this final split were represented respectively
by the Berlin group within the KAPD, which included amongst others Gorter,
Reichenbach and Schwab, and the group based upon East Saxony whose
principal spokesman was Otto Ruhle.
The latter current left the KAPD and AAUD to form a single organisation,
the General Workers Union of Germany - United Organisation, the AAUD-E or
Einheitlern. The main basis of the split was over the principle of
'unitary' organisation to which we have already referred. The 'Einheitlern'
held that the factory organisations were the sole basis for the
revolutionary organisation of the working class. They were to combine
within them all the political and economic functions and tasks of preparing
and exercising the workers dictatorship.
What brought about the emergence of the Einheitlern as a distinct grouping
was the political question raised by the relationship of the German Left
Communists to the Third International, to which we must now turn.
Basis for a 'Third International'
Before her assassination Rosa Luxemburg - in keeping with her 'principled
substitutionism' - had voiced her opposition to the consequences of a new
International being created prematurely by the Bolsheviks. In her opinion
an effective International could only emerge with the widespread support of
the working class movement in more than one country. She considered the
German workers' movement insufficiently politically developed as a result
of its war time experiences to play a part in founding a new International.
The KPD delegate, Eberlein was instructed along these lines before he left
early in 1919 for the Moscow conference, where the Bolsheviks proposed to
form such an International. In our view Luxemburg's understanding was
incorrect because her conception was of an International composed of an
amalgam of socialist leaderships which obtained its viability from the
quantitative working class support in each country, that each national
leadership represented.
Luxemburg's idea was to make good the failures of the Second International
- to 'weld closer together' the leadership and the masses. The 'masses' of
course were 'betrayed' by the leadership in 1914. In this respect her
position was closer to that of the Bolsheviks than either of them were to
the German Left Communists, since the conditions of participation she felt
to be lacking in Germany were present for the Bolsheviks, given that they
did not have her 'democratic' scruples, through 'their seizure of power'.
But the Bolsheviks idea of the nature of the International remained
dominated by the number of votes represented in their respective countries
by the other participating parties in relation to their acceptance of the
Bolsheviks own political positions, which they put over within the
International by the use of 'parliamentary' tactics and procedures.
In this respect the Bolsheviks conception of the International was that of
a permanent organisation designed to replace the Second International.
In contrast the Left Communists took part on the basis of the revolutionary
content of the policies debated and agreed upon. So it was therefore that
they were to leave or be expelled once such debate was forbidden or
curtailed by the procedural tactics of the Russian party. For the first
year however the quality and content of the Bolshevik's internationalism
was masked by the fact that the Russian's own need for international
solidarity made it particularly difficult to distinguish between the
'national' and 'international' aspects.
To the working class internationalism of the German Left Communists,
'Russian Internationalism' was - until its counter-revolutionary nature
became clear - more preferable to the backward political basis of
Luxemburg's desire for the KPD not to participate in the Third
International.
So the International initially at least was an organ to bring together and
represent the most conscious revolutionary layers of each 'national'
working class. As it turned out Eberlein's objections were overcome in
Moscow, though not for the reasons outlined above, by the Bolsheviks who
knew full well that without German support they would be unable to launch a
new International. Thus the Third International was founded in March 1919.
That the Russian working class was dependent on the international working
class to save the October 1917 Revolution from defeat and isolation was
admitted by both the Bolshevik and Western European revolutionaries. In
Germany Rosa Luxemburg had repeatedly stressed this view and the special
role of the German working class. She noted that the German workers were
failing to play this role, existing as they did in an advanced
industrialised sector of capitalism close to the industrially shattered and
militarily besieged Russian subcontinent.
'Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an
inevitable chain of causes and effects, of which the starting and finishing
point are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of
Russia by German imperialism.'
['The Russian Revolution' New York 1940 edition p 54]
[The signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty on 3 March 1918 gave up whole
areas of 'European Russia', including the Polish working class to the
'tender mercies' of German imperialism.]
In line with this internationalist perspective, the KPD and the KAPD both
attempted to give practical support to the Russian working class in the
period after the war.
The KAPD in particular played a leading role in the summer of 1920 in
disrupting munitions production by sabotaging munitions trains crossing
Germany [by now of course Germany was part of the 'Allied' intervention in
Russia] en route for Poland where the Russo-Polish war was raging at the
time. [So the Brest-Litovsk 'peace' actually lasted less than 12 months]
Nevertheless this same internationalist perspective of the KAPD pushed it
into seeking affiliation to the Third International on its regroupment as a
separate organisation from the KPD.
Since they arose out of the same international re-alignment and under the
impact of the 1917 revolution, the German Left Communists undoubtedly saw
themselves as being politically closer to the Bolsheviks than to the
Social-Democratically inclined 'old' Spartakists of the KPD- Zentrale,
right up until the infamous Second Congress of the Third International in
July 1920. By contrast the Bolsheviks undoubtedly saw themselves as
politically closer to the KPD-Zentrale than to the German Left. Obviously
this triangle of cross purposes between the two German tendencies and the
Russian Party within the International was shortly to be resolved at the
expense of the German Left.
>From the outset the Bolshevik conception of the role of the International
was consistently determined at root by the premises of the old Second
International - to the point where they convened the founding conference at
the same time as the British Labour Party had called for the resurrection
of the Second International. This was simply to prevent the
Social-Democratic Left from being re-absorbed into the Second
International. [That this was a waste of time and that the
Social-Democratic 'left', for example the BSP in Britain was umbilically
connected to the Labour Party and the Second International and could not be
broken from it, was ignored by the Bolsheviks]
It took the best part of a year for this perspective to work its way
through the Third International in political and organisational terms.
During this time the possibility of genuine international debate on working
class perspectives and tactics was potentially possible within it.
Even as late as January 1920 a West European Bureau of the International
was set up in Amsterdam to co-ordinate information and activity amongst
member organisations. However the autonomy of this body was quickly put to
an end once it became apparent. The appearance of an article advocating
anti-parliamentary positions in the only issue of the Amsterdam Bureau's
own journal showed it might serve as a focus for non-Bolshevik communist
perspectives within the International.
Part 6
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