From The Archives Of The Spartacist Journal-
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and poltical questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
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Rearming Bolshevism-A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and poltical questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
*****************
Spartacist English edition No. 56
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Spring 2001
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Rearming Bolshevism-A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern
“Without a party, apart from a party,
over the head of a party,
or with a substitute for a party,
the proletarian revolution
cannot conquer.”
over the head of a party,
or with a substitute for a party,
the proletarian revolution
cannot conquer.”
—Leon Trotsky, Lessons of October
The aborted German Revolution of 1923 marked a decisive point in
the history of the workers movement internationally following the Russian
October Revolution of 1917 and the end of the First World War. Though
proletarian unrest and upheavals had swept Europe in the aftermath of the war,
proletarian state power remained confined to the old tsarist empire (minus
Finland, the Baltic states and Poland). The modern industry created by foreign
investment in the prewar period in Russia had been devastated by World War I and
the bloody civil war which followed; the world’s first workers state found
itself suspended above a largely rural, peasant economy.
Founding the Third (Communist) International (Comintern, or CI) in
1919 as the necessary instrumentality to achieve world socialist revolution, the
Bolsheviks fought with all possible means and determination to spread the
revolution to the advanced industrial countries of Europe. In August 1920,
having beaten back an invasion by the Polish army under the nationalist Jozef
Pilsudski, the Red Army followed the retreating Poles across the border in a
bold move to achieve a common border with Germany. Soviet Russia’s defeat on the
outskirts of Warsaw marked the farthest westward march of Bolshevism.
Germany, with its large, pro-socialist proletariat, appeared to
offer the best opportunity to spread the revolution. From the founding of the
German Communist Party (KPD), the Bolshevik leadership, beginning with Lenin
himself, intervened heavily into the KPD. Lenin was only too aware that the
young KPD had broken very late from the Social Democracy and had only partially
assimilated Bolshevik politics.
Defeated in the first interimperialist war, Germany was in a state
of ongoing political and economic crisis. Beginning with the working-class
upheaval that led to the overthrow of Kaiser Wilhelm II in November 1918, the
country was continually racked by protests, strikes and semi-insurrectionary
risings. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Scheidemann, Ebert and Noske,
which supported Germany during the imperialist slaughter, went on to become the
crucial bulwark of the Weimar Republic that replaced the monarchy. The SPD
politically disarmed and demobilized the revolutionary proletariat, then aided
and abetted the bourgeois counterrevolution in bloody repression.
Providing a crucial left cover for the outright treachery of the
SPD was the centrist and highly heterogeneous Independent Socialist Party
(USPD), which split from the SPD in April 1917 and initially included the
Spartacist group of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The USPD’s right wing,
which included Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding and Eduard Bernstein, were
social-pacifists during the war. Kautsky, in particular, was quite skilled in
using Marxist rhetoric to mask their firm commitment to reforming
the bourgeois order. The Spartacists split from the USPD only in December 1918.
The USPD split again in October 1920 as two-thirds of its active membership
voted to join the Communist International, giving the KPD for the first time a
real mass base in the proletariat. But later history would show how incomplete
was the KPD’s split with Kautsky’s centrism on the level of program and
theory.
The French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 provoked a
political and economic crisis in which the potential for proletarian revolution
was manifest. A clear indication of this was that the SPD—though strengthened by
its reunification with Kautsky’s rump USPD in 1922—lost control over the mass of
the German working class. The principal mechanism through which the Social
Democracy chained the proletariat to the bourgeois order was its leadership of
the trade unions. Amid the severe economic dislocation and hyperinflation of
1923, the unions were unable to function; they became paralyzed. The workers
deserted them as well as the SPD itself in droves. But the KPD leadership failed
the test of revolution. Having reined in the revolutionary strivings of the
working masses earlier in 1923, it climbed down without a fight on the eve of a
planned insurrection in October.
Instead of organizing the struggle for proletarian power, the KPD
leadership under Heinrich Brandler operated on the false view that the party’s
influence would increase in linear fashion. In a revolutionary situation, timing
is critical. There are no “impossible” situations for the bourgeoisie; if a
revolutionary party does not act, the bourgeoisie will regain
control. Such was the outcome in 1923 in Germany.
At bottom, the KPD banked on the illusion that the left wing of the
Social Democracy could be induced into becoming a “revolutionary” ally. This
strategy was codified in the misuse of the “workers government” slogan, which
for the KPD had come to mean something other than the dictatorship of the
proletariat—increasingly, a coalition government with the SPD on the basis of
the bourgeois parliament. This was an opportunist and self-defeating revision of
the understanding of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks that a workers government
would be achieved by the overthrow of the bourgeois state apparatus and the
forging of a new state power founded on workers councils (soviets). The KPD’s
abuse of the workers government slogan was endorsed by the Comintern under the
leadership of Zinoviev, and found its culmination in October 1923 in the entry
of the KPD into coalition governments with the SPD in the states of Saxony and
Thuringia. In the event, the “red bastions” in Saxony and Thuringia simply
melted away when they were challenged by the German army; the KPD’s entry into
these bourgeois provincial governments was the prelude to the party’s calling
off an insurrection which the Comintern had prodded it into planning.
The defeat had enormous consequences, and not only in Germany. For
the imperialists it meant a stabilization of the bourgeois order. In Soviet
Russia, the workers had looked forward expectantly to the German workers
revolution; the debacle in October unleashed a wave of disappointment and
demoralization that was seized upon by the nascent Soviet bureaucracy to usurp
political power from the proletariat in January 1924. Toward the end of that
year, Stalin drew his balance sheet on the German events, promulgating the
nationalist dogma of building “socialism in one country.” As Trotsky stated a
few years later: “From 1923 on, the situation changed sharply. We no longer have
before us simply defeats of the proletariat, but routs of the policy of the
Comintern” (The Third International After Lenin [1928]). The default of
the Comintern led ultimately to Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 without a
shot being fired.
As the German events unfolded in 1923, Lenin was already seriously
ill. Zinoviev, who then headed the Comintern, vacillated, while Stalin said that
the KPD ought to be restrained. It was only in August that Trotsky realized a
revolutionary situation existed in Germany, and it was he who demanded that the
KPD and Comintern organize a struggle for power. But Trotsky’s approach at the
time was largely administrative, centered on fixing a date for the insurrection.
He approved of the KPD’s entry into the governments of Saxony and Thuringia,
with the view that this would provide a “drillground” for revolution.
It was not until later that Trotsky grappled with the underlying
political reasons for the failure. In a series of writings beginning a few
months after the October debacle, Trotsky undertook a critical evaluation of the
political problems of the German events, leading to his 1924 work, The
Lessons of October. Trotsky drew an analogy between the German events and
the Russian October, noting that a section of the Bolshevik Party leadership,
including Zinoviev and Kamenev, had balked at organizing the seizure of power in
1917. Trotsky detailed the series of fights which Lenin waged after the outbreak
of revolution in February 1917 in order to rearm the party. It was only these
fights which made the victory in October possible. The fundamental issue in
dispute was “whether or not we should struggle for power.” Trotsky asserted:
“These two tendencies, in greater or lesser degree, with more or
less modification, will more than once manifest themselves during the
revolutionary period in every country. If by Bolshevism—and we are stressing
here its essential aspect—we understand such training, tempering, and
organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power,
arms in hand; and if by social democracy we are to understand the acceptance of
reformist oppositional activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an
adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become
imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state; then, indeed, it is
absolutely clear that even within the Communist Party itself, which does not
emerge full-fledged from the crucible of history, the struggle between social
democratic tendencies and Bolshevism is bound to reveal itself in its most
clear, open, and uncamouflaged form during the immediate revolutionary period
when the question of power is posed point-blank.”
— Trotsky, The Lessons of October
Uncovering the Roots of the 1923 Defeat
The Lessons of October was part of the process through which
Trotsky rearmed Marxism against the Stalinist bureaucratic perversion—beginning
with the 1923 Russian Opposition and deepening fundamentally with his 1928
critique of Stalin/Bukharin’s “Draft Program of the Communist International,”
the core of The Third International After Lenin.
Trotsky, however, deals with the actual events in Germany only in
broad outline in The Lessons of October. It is no substitute for a
concrete analysis of the events, as Trotsky himself later noted:
“They [the Brandlerites] accuse us of not yet having provided a
concrete analysis of the situation in Germany in 1923. That is true. I have
already many times reminded the German comrades of the necessity to produce such
a work.... I formed my picture of the German situation just as I did of the
Russian situation in 1905 and 1917. Of course now, after the fact, above all for
the sake of the young generation, it is necessary to theoretically reconstruct
the situation, facts and figures in hand. The Left Opposition should do this
work and it will do it.”
— Trotsky, “Principled and Practical Questions Facing the Left
Opposition,” 5 June 1931 (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1930-31)
There have been few serious efforts to carry this out, notable
among them an exchange between Walter Held and Marc Loris (Jan van Heijenoort)
in the American Trotskyist press in 1942-43. The actual architects of the 1923
defeat engaged in massive coverup. Zinoviev blamed it all on KPD leader
Brandler, while Brandler and his supporters sought to alibi themselves by
claiming there had never been a revolutionary situation. Brandler’s alibi was
later picked up by historian and Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher, and
subsequently by the British Labourite journal
Revolutionary History and every variety of de
facto reformist. As for Brandler’s factional opponents, the KPD “lefts”
organized around Zinoviev’s tools, Ruth Fischer and Arkady Maslow, they were
just as incapable of charting a revolutionary course in 1923. Fischer’s later
account in Stalin and German Communism (1948) is just as
self-serving as (and even more mendacious than) Brandler’s.
In an attempt to get to the bottom of the apparent opportunist
bulge on Trotsky’s part in supporting entry into the Saxon and Thuringian
governments, the International Communist League undertook an investigation and
discussion of the Germany events. A highlight of this discussion was an
educational presentation given in 1999 by a leader of our German section, as
well as discussion at two meetings of the ICL International Executive Committee
and the publication of two international bulletins which included English
translations of documentation from German-language sources.
The sources in the English language for studying the 1923 events
are sparse. Documentation in German is much more abundant, but it is no easy
task to cull what is useful from mounds of coverup. Often it is what is
not said that is significant. Thus, a comrade who searched through
issues of the KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) for the first
six months of 1923 found exactly one reference to socialist revolution—and that
was in a resolution of the Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI)—and none to the
dictatorship of the proletariat!
Our study of the Germany 1923 events indicated that far from acting
as a corrective to the parliamentarist appetites of the KPD leadership, the ECCI
under Zinoviev was deeply complicit in its course. The CI-endorsed entry into
bourgeois coalition governments with the SPD in Thuringia and Saxony was
theoretically prepared by the discussion at the 1922 Fourth Congress of the
Communist International, which included such coalition governments as possible
variants of a “workers government.” The Spartacist tendency has always been
critical of the obfuscationist Fourth Congress resolution; from our inception we
have insisted that a workers government can be nothing other than the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Our recent study showed that the Fourth
Congress resolution was directly inspired by and an implicit codification of the
revisionist impulse that would shipwreck the German Revolution.
This article is intended as a contribution toward the
theoretical reconstruction of the Germany 1923 events which Trotsky pointed out
was necessary for the rearming of future generations of revolutionaries.
Certainly, with the passage of over 75 years, some of the events are difficult
to reconstruct. We think we have uncovered the essentials, but we are under no
illusion that we have the whole picture.
The Aborted 1923 German Revolution
In late 1922, the Weimar government failed to make reparation
payments to France, in the form of requisitions of coal and other basic
commodities, as dictated by the Versailles Treaty of June 1919, which had been
designed by the imperialist victors of World War I to strip their defeated rival
of its economic and military strength. This prompted the Poincaré government to
occupy the Ruhr in January 1923. The German government, then under Chancellor
Cuno, adopted a policy of “passive resistance”—civil disobedience toward the
French and Belgian occupation authorities. Rightist paramilitary groups,
maintained by conservative industrialists both with private funds and government
funds siphoned from the army budget, quickly infiltrated the Ruhr. There they
carried out provocative, though largely ineffectual, guerrilla warfare against
the French troops.
The occupation triggered massive financial chaos in Germany, not
only impoverishing the working class but ruining the lower middle classes. Under
armed guard, the French bourgeoisie extracted its blood-sucking reparations,
crippling the rest of German industry. Inflation took off on a scale that is
hard to believe. The value of the German mark depreciated from 48,000 to the
U.S. dollar in May to an astronomical 4.6 million in August! From 6 percent in
August, unemployment increased dramatically to 23 percent in November.
Hugo Stinnes and other Ruhr industrialists organized a series of
protests against the occupation, preaching the necessity for national unity
against the French. A de facto national front stretched from the fascists on the
right to the SPD. The KPD, while initially quite contradictory, gradually fell
into line. The Social Democrats issued statements solidarizing with Ruhr
businessmen arrested by the French, while SPD propaganda sought to utilize anger
over the French occupation to justify the SPD’s criminal support to German
imperialism in World War I. But it was not lost on the proletariat that Stinnes’
appeals for “equal sacrifice” were sheer hypocrisy. The economic malaise was
manipulated by the capitalists to attack the unions. The rapid depreciation of
the mark made German goods dirt-cheap on the world market and enabled the
industrialists to make a killing in profits, while the trade unions were utterly
incapable of defending the standard of living of the workers in the face of
hyperinflation. The initial intoxication of the workers with “national unity”
did not last long.
The Communist International moved quickly to mobilize its European
sections to respond to the French provocations in the spirit of proletarian
internationalism. A few days prior to the occupation of the Ruhr, a conference
of delegates from West European Communist parties meeting in Essen passed a
resolution denouncing the Versailles Treaty and the threatened occupation.
In the Ruhr, fraternization with the French troops was an important
component in drawing a political line against the German nationalists (and
Social Democrats), and the KPD youth achieved some success in such efforts. The
French Communists, working with the Communist Youth International, vigorously
campaigned against the occupation; propaganda was distributed to soldiers in
both French and Arabic. In one case, French troops tried to protect striking
German workers from German cops, and several of the French soldiers were shot.
After a massacre by French troops of workers in Essen, Die Rote Fahne
published a letter of solidarity by French soldiers who were collecting money
for the families of the slain workers. The KPD also ran a big solidarity
campaign when French miners went on strike.
The CI-initiated campaign stiffened the German party. When Cuno
called for a vote of confidence on his “passive resistance” policy in the
Reichstag on January 13, the KPD parliamentary fraction demonstrated and voted
against him. The KPD issued an appeal titled “Smite Poincaré and Cuno on the
Ruhr and on the Spree [Berlin’s river],” a principled statement of opposition to
both French and German imperialism.
But the KPD did little to organize independent proletarian
resistance to the depredations of French imperialism. Strikes and protest
actions in the Ruhr, appealing to fellow proletarians in France and especially
in the French army of occupation, might well have led in a revolutionary
direction and sparked broader international workers’ struggle. The KPD was far
from such insurrectionary intentions. A manifesto issued by the party’s Eighth
Congress in late January/early February 1923 revealed that it was already
accommodating to the SPD’s defense of the Versailles-dictated postwar European
capitalist order. The KPD effectively called for a “workers government” to pay
the imperialist debt:
“The workers government will propose negotiations to France; it
will state honestly and openly what portion of the debts imposed on it by the
bourgeoisie the working people can pay. The workers government will appropriate
from the capitalists assets as security for the payment of these debts, thus
providing a guarantee that its words express an honest intention. In this way
the workers government will assist the German workers in bearing the burdens
that the bankrupt imperialist bourgeoisie has laid on them, until the French
proletariat assists them in breaking the chains of Versailles.”
— Manifesto on “The War in the Ruhr and the International Working
Class,” Eighth Party Congress, 28 January-1 February 1923, Dokumente und
Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung [Documents and
Materials on
the History of the German Workers Movement] Dietz Verlag, 1966
the History of the German Workers Movement] Dietz Verlag, 1966
As anger at the French occupying forces heated up, the KPD bent to
nationalist pressures, describing Germany as a virtual colony, with France the
“main enemy.” In February 1923, Brandler’s lieutenant Thalheimer claimed that
the German bourgeoisie had acquired “an objectively revolutionary role...in
spite of itself.” Sliding over to a defensist posture toward the German
bourgeoisie, Thalheimer asserted, “The defeat of French imperialism in the world
war was not a communist aim, its defeat in the war in the Ruhr is a communist
aim” (quoted in E. H. Carr, The Interregnum, 1923-1924 [1954]). It fell
to internationalist-minded Czech Communists like Neurath and Sommer to refute
Thalheimer’s patriotic arguments. Writing in the KPD’s Die Internationale
(1 April 1923), Sommer denounced Thalheimer’s thesis as “a magnificent flower of
national Bolshevism” (quoted in The Interregnum), referring to the banner
under which some German leftists had earlier advocated a “war of national
liberation” together with the German bourgeoisie against the Entente powers. In
a 22 September 1920 speech at the Ninth Party Conference in Moscow, Lenin had
sharply condemned “national Bolshevism” as a “contrary-to-nature bloc,” warning:
“If you form a bloc with the German Kornilovists [right-wing militarists], they
will dupe you.”
On 13 May 1923, a strike wave began in the Ruhr city of Dortmund, a
major industrial center. Starting as a strike over wages by miners at one pit,
it quickly spread to include probably 300,000 strikers, about half the miners
and metal workers in the Ruhr. There were pitched battles with the cops and
demonstrations of over 50,000 workers. Workers militias, the so-called
Proletarian Hundreds, took over the street markets and shops for the “control
commissions,” which enforced price cuts.
But the KPD, which had real influence among the proletariat in the
area, did nothing for four days! And when it did intervene, it was to counsel
the workers not to raise political demands but simply to settle for a wage
increase of 52 percent, which was quickly eaten up by the skyrocketing
inflation. Reporting on the German situation to a September 21-25 meeting of the
Russian, German, French and Czechoslovakian CPs in Moscow, Brandler literally
bragged how the KPD had kept the Ruhr strikes within the bounds of
economic demands. He claimed that fascistic elements worked in the Proletarian
Hundreds with the aim of turning the wage struggles into a struggle for power,
supposedly as a provocation to invite repression by the bourgeoisie. While there
were some fascists operating in the Ruhr, this was a militant proletarian
stronghold. Brandler in effect labeled any worker who wanted to fight for power
an agent of reaction.
Just as the proletariat was beginning to break from nationalism, an
overt appeal was made to the most backward, outright fascistic elements. On May
29, in an unvarnished appeal to nationalism, Die Rote Fahne published a
statement titled “Down With the Government of National Disgrace and Treason
Against the People!” In June, at an enlarged ECCI meeting in Moscow, Karl Radek
made his notorious speech eulogizing the German fascist Schlageter, who had been
executed by the French in the Ruhr. Schlageter had fought against the Bolsheviks
in the Baltics and then against the workers in the Ruhr. The KPD’s embrace of
the “Schlageter line,” endorsed by Zinoviev, set off a campaign of appeals to
the German nationalists, including joint public meetings and “debates” with the
fascists. This campaign undoubtedly had a chilling effect on the initiatives
toward fraternization with the French soldiers, though fraternization apparently
continued throughout 1923.
The KPD was adapting to both the nationalist right and the Social
Democrats. In the universities, KPD leaders fraternized with Nazi students.
However, among the proletariat the KPD played the “anti-fascist” card, whose
real thrust was to look to the SPD for a bloc against fascism (which is how the
entry into the Saxon and Thuringian governments was later motivated).
The “Schlageter line” was eagerly assented to by the KPD
“lefts”—indeed, Ruth Fischer was a regular speaker at these “debates,” which
continued until the Nazis broke them off. At one such meeting
Fischer declared, “Whoever cries out against Jewish capital...is already a
fighter for his class [Klassenkämpfer], even though he may not know it”
(quoted in Werner Angress, Stillborn Revolution—The Communist Bid for
Power in Germany, 1921-1923 [1963]). Despite their shrill denunciations of
the party leadership, the Fischer-Maslow “lefts” had no more impulse than
Brandler to struggle for power. Both factions were mainly concerned with
cliquist maneuvering to ingratiate themselves with Zinoviev.
Despite the KPD leadership’s efforts to pour water on the flames of
class struggle, the working masses were breaking by the thousands from the
Social Democracy to the KPD. This is attested to in a 1936 account by Arthur
Rosenberg, who had been in the KPD in 1923 and was elected to the
Zentrale (the resident leading body) in 1924 as a supporter of the
Fischer group. Rosenberg noted:
“In the course of the year 1923 the power of the SPD steadily
decreased. The Party passed through a crisis which was reminiscent of that of
1919. The Independent Trade Unions especially, which had always been the chief
support of Social Democracy, were in a state of complete disintegration. The
inflation destroyed the value of the Union subscriptions. The Trade Unions could
no longer pay their employees properly nor give assistance to their members. The
wage-agreements that the Trade Unions were accustomed to conclude with the
employers became useless when the devaluation of the currency made any wages
paid out a week later worthless. Thus Trade Union work of the old style became
unavailing. Millions of German workers would have nothing more to do with the
old Trade Union policy and left the Unions. The destruction of the Trade Unions
simultaneously caused the ruin of the SPD....
“The KPD had no revolutionary policy either, but at least it
criticized the Cuno Government loudly and sharply and pointed to the example of
Russia. Hence the masses flocked to it. As late as the end of 1922 the newly
united Social Democratic Party comprised the great majority of the German
workers. During the next half-year conditions were completely changed. In the
summer of 1923 the KPD undoubtedly had the majority of the German proletariat
behind it.”
— Arthur Rosenberg, A History of the German Republic
Probably the most comprehensive English-language book on this
period is Angress’ Stillborn Revolution. Even Angress, who
manifestly does not believe that a workers insurrection was possible in 1923,
acknowledges that the KPD was gaining strength and refers to the “diminishing
hold which the Social Democratic Party was able to exert on its rank and
file.”
If ever there was a revolutionary situation, this was it. But while
the KPD had several hundred thousand revolutionary-minded workers at the base,
the leadership lacked the appetite to mobilize the proletariat to take power.
When the situation was at its hottest, Brandler declared in Die Rote
Fahne (2 August 1923): “We must fight the battles to which we are destined
by history, but we must always keep in mind that we are at the moment still the
weaker. We cannot as yet offer a general battle, and we must avoid everything
which would enable the enemy to beat us piecemeal” (quoted in Angress).
Brandler maintained this position long after the events of 1923.
Today this same piece of “wisdom” is the sum and substance of what the British
social democrats of Revolutionary History, a
“non-party” publication supported by a spectrum of pseudo-Trotskyist individuals
and groups, have to say about 1923. In an issue of
Revolutionary History (Spring 1994) devoted
to “Germany 1918-23,” Mike Jones claimed that Trotsky’s fatal mistake in 1923
was that he supposedly “underestimated the hold of the SPD over millions of
workers. He underestimated the material strength of reformism, of bourgeois
democracy, and so on, amongst the German workers.” This, of course, is the
time-honored technique of opportunists, who always blame defeats on the
“immaturity of the masses,” alibiing the misleaders.
With the SPD’s hold on the masses weakened, the KPD did little to
expose the reformists and press its own political advantage. One of the grossest
expressions of this conciliationism came in an article in Die Rote Fahne
on 21 January 1923, which appealed to the SPD for “Burgfrieden”—civil
peace—among the workers. “Burgfrieden” was the call of the Kaiser
in 1914, demanding that there be no class warfare within Germany as the
bourgeoisie went to war against its imperialist rivals! In Saxony, the KPD gave
backhanded support to the government of left SPDer Erich Zeigner. When cops shot
into a demonstration of workers and unemployed in Leipzig in June, killing
several, Brandler refused to do anything about this and instead asked for...a
commission of inquiry! Just as pathetically, on the CI side Zinoviev and Radek
demanded that the KPD withdraw support from Zeigner unless...he appointed a new
police commissioner. All sides clearly feared a political collision with the SPD
“left” leaders who administered Saxony.
From August to October
The government was toppled in August by the “Cuno strike,” begun by
Berlin printers who refused to print any more money. The KPD-influenced
Betriebsräte, the factory councils, pushed this into a virtual general
strike, over the objections of the trade-union tops. But the party lacked any
offensive policy, never going beyond the framework of a militant strike. The
strikers had demanded Cuno’s resignation. When that happened, the workers
streamed back to their jobs, against the wishes of the KPD. The KPD called for a
“workers government” but did not call for establishing organs of dual
power that would serve as a bridge to proletarian rule.
The Cuno government was replaced with Gustav Stresemann’s “great
coalition,” which included four SPD ministers. For Mike Jones and
Revolutionary History, the Stresemann/SPD coalition put an end to
any revolutionary possibilities which “could” have existed earlier in the year.
But by no means did Stresemann’s government stabilize the situation to the
extent Jones would have us believe. Stresemann himself wasn’t so confident upon
taking office; hence his statement that “we are the last bourgeois parliamentary
government.” There was still an expectant mood among the German masses in
October 1923, as Victor Serge, who worked in Berlin as a Comintern journalist,
later testified:
“On the threshold...Losschlagen!
Losschlagen means strike the blow you had been holding back,
trigger off action. This word is on everyone’s lips, on this side of the
barricade. On the other side, too, I think. In Thuringia, outside
semi-clandestine meetings where a Communist is due to speak, workers—whom he
doesn’t know—plant themselves in front of him. A railwayman asks, coming
straight to the point: ‘When shall we strike? When?’
“This worker, who has traveled 50 miles by night to ask this
question, understands little about matters of tactics and timing: ‘My people,’
he says, ‘have had enough. Be quick about it!’”
— Victor Serge, “A 50 Day Armed Vigil” (February 1924), reprinted
in Witness to the German Revolution (2000)
In early October, the KPD entered the SPD governments in Saxony and
Thuringia as coalition partners, supposedly with the aim of utilizing its
ministerial posts to get arms. Naturally, nothing of the sort happened. General
Müller, demanding that the Proletarian Hundreds be disbanded, marched on Saxony.
Now himself a minister, Brandler pegged the organizing of an uprising to gaining
the support of the Social Democrats at a conference of Saxon workers
organizations held in Chemnitz on October 21. Brandler put forward a motion for
a general strike, which was supposed to be the spark for the insurrection. But
when the SPD delegates objected, Brandler simply backed down. And that was the
end of the German Revolution, except for some fighting in Hamburg, where several
hundred Communists seized a number of police stations and acquitted themselves
well before being compelled to retreat.
Who ever heard of Communists organizing a revolution where the
Social Democrats were given veto power? Historian Evelyn Anderson noted
astutely:
“The Communist position was manifestly absurd. The two policies of
accepting responsibility of government, on the one hand, and of preparing for a
revolution, on the other, obviously excluded each other. Yet the Communists
pursued both at the same time, with the inevitable result of complete
failure.”
— Evelyn Anderson, Hammer or Anvil: The Story of the German
Working-Class Movement (1945)
Russia 1917 vs. Germany 1923
Trotsky never based his evaluation of the KPD’s fatal vacillations
in 1923 on the view that autumn represented the high point for revolution.
Autumn was already late. In May 1924 Trotsky wrote:
“True, in the month of October a sharp break occurred in the
party’s policy. But it was already too late. In the course of 1923 the working
masses realized or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching.
However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the
side of the Communist Party. And when the latter began its feverish preparations
for an uprising, it immediately lost its balance and also its ties with the
masses.”
— Trotsky, introduction to The First Five Years of the Communist
International
Within the Russian Political Bureau it had been Lenin’s assignment
to monitor the German party; Trotsky had responsibility for the French. Lenin
suffered a debilitating stroke in March 1923. Trotsky realized Germany had
entered a revolutionary situation only in August. The Russian Political Bureau
met on the 23rd of that month, with Brandler in attendance, to discuss the
perspectives of the German party. Zinoviev was vacillating and equivocal, as was
Radek. Stalin, as Trotsky was only to discover some years later, had been urging
that the Germans be restrained, writing to Zinoviev and Bukharin: “Of course,
the fascists are not asleep, but it is to our interest that they attack
first.... In my opinion, the Germans must be curbed and not spurred on” (cited
in Maurice Spector’s 11 January 1937 introduction to The Lessons of
October). The PB appointed a standing committee to mobilize support for a
German revolution, and initiated a campaign for solidarity that had an
electrifying effect on the Red Army and on the Soviet populace more broadly.
Scarce grain reserves were accumulated in the cities to be shipped to Germany at
the critical moment. But the Political Bureau continued to dither about whether
the KPD should set course for an immediate insurrection. Fischer and Maslow were
summoned to Moscow and finally in September it was decided that the KPD should
set the date for the seizure of power. Brandler was honest about his doubts
regarding this course and his own abilities—he specifically said that he was no
Lenin and asked that Trotsky be sent to Germany to lead the revolution.
Evidently Brandler was hoping that Trotsky could conjure up soviets and a
revolution out of the ground.
German considerations were increasingly becoming subordinate to the
vicissitudes of the factional struggle within the Russian party. By this time,
Trotsky was being sidelined by the leading troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev and
Stalin. But the troika could hardly be seen to oppose proletarian revolution in
Germany, and went along with Trotsky in setting the date. Zinoviev also went
part way toward meeting Trotsky’s demand that Fischer and Maslow be kept in
Moscow to dampen the disruptive potential of the German “lefts” during the
insurrection (Maslow stayed in Moscow, while Fischer was allowed to return). But
the troika could not risk giving Trotsky a chance to lead the German Revolution;
they insisted Trotsky’s presence was required in Moscow.
Behind Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev stood the burgeoning
bureaucratic apparatus of the Russian party and state. In a few months the
troika would smash the anti-bureaucratic opposition and seize political power
for the bureaucracy at the January 1924 party conference. But in the summer and
early fall of 1923 the door was still open for Trotsky to fight for a Comintern
intervention that would have made the critical difference in politically arming
the KPD to take advantage of the revolutionary opportunity. Unfortunately,
Trotsky lacked the political understanding and information as to the KPD’s
actual practice in Germany. His approach at the time was largely
administrative.
What was required in 1923 was a political rearming of the German
Communists, akin to what Lenin had carried out in the Bolshevik Party upon his
return from Switzerland in April 1917. In the early period following the
February Revolution Stalin, Kamenev and other elements of the Bolshevik
leadership returning from internal exile had overturned the early decision of
the Bureau of the Central Committee and committed the party to a policy of
extending critical support to the bourgeois-democratic Provisional Government
formed after the abdication of the tsar “in so far as it struggles against
reaction or counter-revolution.” In his April Theses, Lenin argued strongly
against this capitulatory line, opposing any support to the Provisional
Government or rapprochement with the social-democratic Mensheviks, and calling
for all power to the soviets and for arming the workers. Without this crucial
fight, as well as further struggles against those like Kamenev and Zinoviev who
flinched at organizing the insurrection, the October Revolution would never have
happened.
In particular, Lenin stressed the need for crystal clarity on the
nature of the state. Even the most “democratic” bourgeois republic is an
instrument for maintaining the rule of a minority of exploiters over the masses
of exploited. Socialist revolution means the smashing of the existing state
apparatus—whose core is the army, police, courts and prisons—and its replacement
with a new one based on organs of proletarian rule, soviets, which would repress
the capitalist class, thus constituting the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This perspective was realized in the October Revolution, opposed even by
left-wing Mensheviks like Martov.
Following the October Revolution, the German left social democrat
Karl Kautsky took the Bolsheviks to task for liquidating the Constituent
Assembly in his 1918 polemic, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Kautsky claimed that this bourgeois parliamentary body was a higher form of
democracy than the soviets. Lenin, who had been forced to break off work on
State and Revolution in order to lead the October Revolution, used the
leftover material in his 1918 reply to “the renegade Kautsky.” Lenin illustrated
that despite Kautsky’s “left” pretensions and his professed enthusiasm for
soviets, Kautsky’s fundamental affinity lay with the Menshevik Martov and his
horror at the idea of the soviets as the vehicle for proletarian state
power:
“The crux is: should the Soviets aspire to become state
organisations...or should the Soviets not strive for this, refrain
from taking power into their hands, refrain from becoming state organisations
and remain the ‘combat organisations’ of one ‘class’ (as Martov expressed it,
embellishing by this innocent wish the fact that under Menshevik leadership the
Soviets were an instrument for the subjection of the workers to the
bourgeoisie)?...
“Thus [for Kautsky], the oppressed class, the vanguard of all the
working and exploited people in modern society, must strive toward the ‘decisive
battles between capital and labour,’ but must not touch the
machine by means of which capital suppresses labour!—It must not break
up that machine!—It must not make use of its all-embracing
organisation for suppressing the exploiters!...
“This is where Kautsky’s complete rupture both with Marxism and
with socialism becomes obvious. Actually, it is desertion to the camp of the
bourgeoisie, who are prepared to concede everything except the transformation of
the organisations of the class which they oppress into state organisations.”
— Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade
Kautsky, October-November 1918 (Collected Works, Vol. 28)
This polemic between Lenin and Kautsky over the October Revolution
foreshadowed what was about to happen in Germany. When Kaiser Wilhelm was forced
to abdicate as a result of the November Revolution of 1918, the working masses
set up workers and soldiers councils in an attempt to follow in the path of the
proletariat of Russia. The SPD was desperate to liquidate these councils and
replace them with the National Assembly, a bourgeois parliament. The newly
formed KPD was for all power to the workers and soldiers councils. The
Independents, the USPD, led by the likes of Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding,
claimed to be for both the National Assembly and the workers
councils, demanding that the latter be incorporated into the Weimar
constitution. The USPD proved of great utility to the SPD in getting the
National Assembly accepted, after which it was relatively easy to dismantle the
councils.
With no communist organization yet in existence, the working masses
radicalized by the war had poured into the USPD. Although thoroughly reformist
in deed, the USPD’s Marxist phraseology made it even more dangerous than the
SPD, for it served to dupe more advanced workers who saw through the SPD. In the
midst of the burgeoning revolution, the Spartakusbund of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht finally quit the USPD and joined with some smaller groups of
independent radicals to form the KPD. The failure to break earlier with
Kautsky’s centrism shipwrecked the 1918 German Revolution. The German Communists
never really assimilated the importance of the Bolsheviks’ intransigent
political split with all varieties of reformism and centrism.
In September 1918, as Kautsky’s attacks on the October Revolution
went unanswered in Germany, Lenin wrote to the Soviet envoys in West Europe:
“Kautsky’s disgraceful rubbish, childish babble and shallowest
opportunism impel me to ask: why do we do nothing to fight the
theoretical vulgarisation of Marxism by Kautsky?
“Can we tolerate that even such people as Mehring and Zetkin keep
away from Kautsky more ‘morally’ (if one may put it so) than
theoretically.”
— Lenin, “Letter to Y.A. Berzin, V.V. Vorovsky and A. A. Joffe,” 20
September 1918 (Collected Works, Vol. 35)
Lenin urged the envoys to “have a detailed talk with the Left
(Spartacists and others), stimulating them to make a statement of
principle, of theory, in the press, that on the
question of dictatorship Kautsky is producing philistine Bernsteinism, not
Marxism.” It was Lenin and Trotsky, and not any of the German leaders, who wrote
the main polemics against Kautsky, from Lenin’s The State and Revolution
(1917), Renegade Kautsky and “Left-Wing” Communism
(1920) to Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism in 1920 and
Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention in Russia, 1918-1921
(Between Red and White) in 1922.
The German Communist leaders could not defeat Kautsky, the
pre-eminent prewar leader of German “Marxism,” because they had never broken
decisively from his conception of the “party of the whole class” and the
parliamentarism of the old SPD. The prewar Social Democracy had increasingly
accommodated to the autocratic legal structure of the Wilhelminian Reich. One
expression of this was the SPD’s submission to a law—which remained in effect
until 1918—mandating an official police presence at all publicly announced
meetings, which included local branch meetings and even party congresses. As
documented by Richard Reichard in Crippled from Birth—German Social
Democracy 1844-1870 (1969), this meant that the cops could instantly shut
down any SPD gathering if they heard something they didn’t like.
Marxist revolutionaries fight for the right to carry out their
activities legally under capitalism. But to accommodate a priori to what
the bourgeois state deems “legal” is to give up the struggle for proletarian
revolution. Even in the most “democratic” capitalist countries, it required an
illegal party organization and press for Marxists to be able to tell the truth
about their own imperialist governments during World War I. Yet for the Brandler
leadership of the KPD, the Leninist conception of the vanguard party and the
whole experience of the Bolsheviks, including the necessity to set up a parallel
illegal organization, were not appropriate for “civilized” countries like
Germany. The KPD leadership oscillated between the opportunism and
parliamentarism of Brandler and the idiot ultimatism of Fischer and Maslow,
unable to organize the fight for power and decisively break the hold of the SPD
on the working class.
In 1923, the KPD blurred the lines which Lenin had clearly
demarcated between a bourgeois state and a workers state. Absent was any call
for the building of soviets, or workers councils, that would be the organs of
workers rule. Instead, KPD propaganda emphasized the building of a “workers
government,” which a resolution at the KPD’s Eighth Congress in late January and
early February 1923 made clear was “neither the dictatorship of the proletariat
nor a peaceful parliamentary advance toward one,” but an “attempt by the working
class, within the framework of and initially employing the instruments of
bourgeois democracy, to pursue proletarian politics, based on organs of the
proletariat and mass movements of the workers” (Dokumente und
Materialien). In May, a resolution was cooked up in a meeting with the ECCI,
supported by Fischer’s “lefts,” which was in principle no different, projecting
that “the workers government can issue out of the existing democratic
institutions.”
This was the heart of the problem: the KPD leadership—both
wings—expected political power to devolve to them through the mechanism of the
bourgeois state. What was absent was any concept of seizing power
and the need for organs of proletarian rule to serve as a basis for that power.
Soviets or some equivalent body would have to replace the existing state power
in a process which would inevitably entail a military conflict.
When the Communists accepted ministerial portfolios in Saxony and
Thuringia in October, this only reinforced existing parliamentarist prejudices.
If this was indeed already a workers government, then presumably
extraparliamentary revolutionary struggle, the formation of workers councils and
armed workers militias, would be totally superfluous. The vast majority of
workers had no clue that an armed uprising was in the offing. To be sure, no
leadership in its right mind would telegraph in advance the date of an
insurrection. But in Russia in 1917 the proletariat clearly understood that the
Bolshevik program was to take power based on the soviets.
In The Lessons of October, Trotsky defended the advice of
the CI in 1923 not to call for soviets, but to rely instead on the factory
councils. Trotsky argued that the factory councils “had already become in action
the rallying centres of the revolutionary masses” and that soviets formed at
that stage in the struggle would be organizationally redundant. Moreover, as
Trotsky explained in revisiting this question in his 1931 article “Workers
Control of Production,” after 1917-18 the word “soviet” had become “a synonym
for the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks, and hence a bugbear on the lips of
Social Democracy.... In the eyes of the bourgeois state, especially its fascist
guard, the Communists’ setting to work creating soviets will be equivalent to a
direct declaration of civil war by the proletariat” (The Struggle Against
Fascism in Germany [1971]).
The Betriebsräte (factory councils) were established by the
SPD government under a February 1920 law as a substitute for the workers and
soldiers councils that had been dismantled. The SPD wanted to keep the factory
councils—which were to be elected in all enterprises with more than 50
employees—under the thumb of the union bureaucracy, so they were charged with
enforcing the provisions of contracts negotiated by the unions. The month before
the legislation was passed, tens of thousands demonstrated against it; the
protest was fired on by the Berlin police, who killed 42.
However, in the years that followed the Betriebsräte
increasingly became the locus of militant struggle. So-called “wildcat” (or
unauthorized) conferences of factory councils took place on a regional and even
national level. These were dominated by the KPD, and generally boycotted by the
SPD. Our own research on the extent to which the working masses embraced the
factory councils is somewhat inconclusive, although there is considerable
evidence that they were becoming much more of a factor in 1923. Trotsky’s
argument for the factory councils as instruments for a proletarian insurrection
was a realistic revolutionary perspective in 1923. They were becoming
potentially far more representative than simply factory-based organizations:
factory councils were linking up with each other and also working with the
Proletarian Hundreds and the control commissions that regulated distribution and
prices of food, which were particularly widespread in the Ruhr.
The problem is that the KPD did not seek to invest these embryonic
forms of proletarian dual power with revolutionary content. Even after the
Comintern had prodded the KPD leadership into agreeing to organize an armed
uprising, there is no evidence whatsoever that the factory councils were
anything beyond militant strike committees. That could have been a starting
point—indeed, the Russian soviets originally emerged from strike committees in
1905—but the KPD never sought to imbue the proletariat with the consciousness
that it needed to create organs of workers rule. There was nothing along the
lines of “All power to the Betriebsräte.” Nor were the Proletarian
Hundreds conceived of by the KPD leadership as instruments to overthrow and
supplant the bourgeois state, but more as adjuncts to that state. In
Gelsenkirchen, a city in the Ruhr effectively controlled by the KPD, the
Communists asked the local government to assign a police officer to instruct the
workers militias! In Saxony, the KPD proposed that the SPD government integrate
the workers militia into the police force. Likewise, the KPD strategy toward the
control commissions was to try to get them “legalized” by local governments.
The Military Question
As the saying goes: victory has many fathers, defeat is ever an
orphan. In The Lessons of October, Trotsky observed that had Lenin not
been present to drive the Russian Revolution forward to victory, “The official
historians would, of course, have explained that an insurrection in October 1917
would have been sheer madness; and they would have furnished the reader with
awe-inspiring statistical charts of the Junkers and Cossacks and shock troops
and artillery, deployed fan-wise, and army corps arriving from the front.”
Any number of writers, some of a leftist persuasion, claim to prove
that revolution was impossible in Germany in 1923. The historian Helmut Gruber,
arguing that “the proletarian hundreds were not intended as a match for the army
or police but as a counterweight against rightist paramilitary units,” concludes
that a “force of 250,000 well-trained and heavily armed men was a match for an
uprising even with a broad popular base. In this case, as in others, the
Russians obscured the danger by discovering homologues to their October
Revolution” (Gruber, International Communism in the Era of
Lenin [1967]).
Thus, as this tale goes, the German workers were hopelessly
outgunned and outmanned; the sober-minded KPD leader Brandler understood this,
but allowed himself to be bullied by the Russians, whose mistake was to believe
that the experience of the October Revolution was relevant. And if revolution
was impossible, then logic dictated that the only alternative was change through
parliamentary reform, to which the mass of the German proletariat was ostensibly
reconciled.
Yet the German proletariat was mobilized by the thousands with arms
in hand in 1923, ready to take power. The workers had access to tens of
thousands of small arms they had buried in the fields after the war, while their
militias were composed of front-line World War I veterans who were quite
experienced fighters. But the idea that an insurrection required disciplined
units of men armed not only with rifles but with machine guns and heavy weapons
proved totally beyond the ken of the KPD leadership.
The Reichswehr was an all-volunteer and highly motivated force,
with many drawn from the ranks of the Freikorps—later euphemistically renamed
“defense associations”—fascistic paramilitary units financed by big
industrialists and experienced in counterrevolutionary butchery. The army
carefully screened out communists, socialists and Jews and preferred to recruit
from rural areas. The army could not be easily split, but its small size—limited
to 100,000 men under the terms of the Versailles Treaty—made it little more than
a good-sized police force. It would not be adequate to put down a determined
national proletarian insurrection.
By 1923 much of the Freikorps had been integrated into the regular
army. There were also the “Black Reichswehr”—illegally recruited adjuncts to the
army, generally of dubious fighting ability—and the fascist bands. As Trotsky
noted, the forces of the fascists were monstrously exaggerated and to a
considerable degree existed only on paper, as was demonstrated by the ease with
which Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” in Bavaria was dispersed in November. Stalin
and Radek had overstated the strength of the fascists as an excuse to avoid
organizing an insurrection. This is not to say the fascists were negligible, but
neither was this 1931, when Hitler had a hundred thousand stormtroopers.
Insurrectionary Turmoil in the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic had brought not some mythical stable
parliamentary democracy, but five years of insurrectionary and
semi-insurrectionary movements, with sizable clashes between armed workers and
the state. In January 1919 and again that spring, there were massive
confrontations between insurgent workers and the SPD government, which acted on
behalf of the bourgeoisie to crush the threat of revolution. The USPD played a
critical role in the first month following the abdication of the Kaiser, joining
the government and thereby helping to lull the proletariat while the
counterrevolutionaries regrouped their forces. The workers fought bravely in
these early insurgencies, but lacked an authoritative revolutionary party to
coordinate struggle on a national level. The government was able to isolate
these struggles on a local level and pick them off one by one.
Reichswehr and Freikorps troops occupied Berlin in January 1919 and
again in February. A punitive expedition was dispatched to depose the workers
and soldiers council in Bremen, where a workers republic had been declared. Then
came the turn of central Germany, where government troops occupied one town
after another, in many cases after heavy fighting. Many thousands were killed
during street battles. When a five-day strike broke out in Berlin on March 3,
SPD defense minister Noske issued shoot-to-kill orders to the army, which was
equipped with aircraft and artillery. Some 1,200 people were killed. Troops were
also sent to Halle that spring to break a general strike. In the Ruhr there were
militant strikes in the mines, at their peak embracing three-quarters of the
workforce, which raised not only economic demands but called for acceptance of
the workers councils, the arming of workers against the Freikorps, and
recognition of the Soviet Union. The last major battle in 1919 was the
suppression of the Bavarian commune, where a thousand were killed in the
fighting and well over a hundred revolutionaries were murdered.
The new Communist Party had little sense of how to operate in a
volatile situation where there were rapid surges of revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary forces. Where the Bolsheviks took the necessary step of
sending Lenin into hiding during the reactionary July Days in Russia in 1917,
when the SPD government unleashed the Freikorps in 1918-19, the KPD did not take
sufficient precautions to protect its leadership. Within the first few months of
the founding of the KPD, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches were
all murdered. In June, Eugen Leviné was shot by a firing squad for leading the
defense of the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
On 13 March 1920, a general named Von Lüttwitz marched Freikorps
troops into Berlin and sought to install a right-wing military government under
the Prussian civil servant Kapp. The army officers behind the Kapp Putsch blamed
the Social Democrats for the national humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and
particularly its provision limiting the size of the army. The SPD government
fled Berlin and appealed to the Reichswehr command for intervention. Not
surprisingly, the army did nothing to oppose the Kapp Putsch. Finally, the
conservative SPD head of the trade unions, Karl Legien, called for a general
strike.
The powerful actions of the proletariat completely smashed the
attempted putsch. After two days, the Kapp government was powerless, and after
two more days it was gone. Legien tried to call the strike off, but the more
combative sections of the proletariat were not to be restrained. Workers dug up
the weapons they had hidden after the suppression of the 1919 uprisings. Workers
militias sprang up, often under the leadership of the USPD lefts or the KPD, and
a 50,000-strong “Red Army” was formed in the Ruhr. Highly decentralized and
improvised, it was nevertheless capable of dispersing Freikorps brigades and
even Reichswehr units. This highlighted the potential of an armed proletariat to
equip themselves with weapons and overcome the army. As one writer described
it:
“Meanwhile Reichswehr units in the area (largely unreconstructed
Free Corps) demonstratively welcomed the new regime; and General von Watter,
regional commander in Münster, misjudging the situation, set some of his units
in motion toward areas where an insurrectionary spirit was suspected. The armed
workers responded aggressively. At the town of Wetter on March 15 a Free Corps
detachment was surrounded (largely by workers from Hagen) and, after several
hours of battle, forced to surrender. The same night, insurgent forces
surrounded another detachment of the same Free Corps in another town, receiving
its surrender the next morning. Through such victories, and by disarming the
citizens’ guards of the smaller towns, the workers’ forces soon acquired a
proper arsenal of small arms. The example was followed elsewhere. On March 16 a
larger Free Corps unit was badly mauled by a workers’ army while trying to march
out of the district; two days later, the Westphalian part of the Ruhr was
entirely free of Reichswehr troops, all having been disarmed by the workers or
withdrawn from the area. There remained troops in the Rhenish part of the Ruhr
and a large body of security police in Essen; but when the latter city fell on
March 20, after a three-day battle, no regular armed forces were left in the
district.”
— David Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution
(1975)
The upshot of the workers’ suppression of the Kapp Putsch was the
Bielefeld Accords signed on 24 March 1920 by bourgeois politicians, the unions,
the two social-democratic parties, and two representatives from the KPD. These
accords included a call on the state to disarm and liquidate the
counterrevolutionary bands and to purge civil servants “disloyal” to the
republic. The Red Army was to give up its weapons, except for some workers who
would supposedly be incorporated into the local police. In exchange, the
Reichswehr was supposed to stay out of the Ruhr. But when the workers
surrendered their arms, government forces marched into the Ruhr, together with
the Freikorps units—which had been dissolved...into the army! A virtual White
Terror ensued; throughout Rhineland-Westphalia, working-class neighborhoods were
pillaged and burned out and entire families were shot. It was a bloody lesson in
what comes from trusting the “neutrality” and “evenhandedness” of the bourgeois
state.
Although the KPD later claimed that its two representatives had no
mandate to vote for the Bielefeld Accords, KPD propaganda during the early 1920s
was saturated with similar appeals to the bourgeois state to outlaw fascist and
monarchist groups, purge the civil service of reactionaries, constitute a police
force out of “trade-union-organized workers,” etc. This was a touching display
of confidence in the bourgeois state. The Law for the Protection of the
Republic—passed in 1922 after a far-right hit squad assassinated Foreign
Minister Walther Rathenau, a prominent Jewish politician—was used overwhelmingly
against the left. The false conception that the state could somehow be rendered
“neutral” by passing “progressive” laws undermined the necessary understanding
on the part of the working class that it must take its defense into its own
hands and that the state would have to be overthrown by the armed proletariat
itself.
The March Action and the “Theory of the Offensive”
By the time the March Action erupted in 1921, the KPD had become a
mass party. In October 1920, the USPD had split at its Halle Congress over
acceptance of the Comintern’s famous 21 Conditions, which were designed to draw
a sharp line against the centrists and specifically called for the exclusion of
Kautsky and Hilferding. Speaking against affiliation were Hilferding and Martov;
answering Hilferding was Zinoviev, whose impassioned four-hour speech won the
day. Brandler, notably, opposed the USPD split. The left wing of
the USPD, about two-thirds of the active membership, fused with the KPD to form
the United Communist Party (VKPD), though the party reverted to the name KPD
after several months.
In March 1921, strikes, stop-work meetings and plant occupations
rolled across the Mansfeld coal fields in central Germany in response to police
provocations in the mines, and the miners flocked to the banners of the VKPD. On
March 16 the Social Democrats Hörsing, governor of Saxony, and Severing,
Prussian minister of the interior, sent troops and police to suppress the
workers. What was in order were defensive tactics, which if successful might
permit the proletariat to then go onto the offensive. But the VKPD leadership
replied to the government’s provocation with a call for armed resistance. In
some areas, the workers heeded the call and fought heroically, but even then the
fighting was sporadic and by no means generalized. Elsewhere, the call went
unanswered. A call for a general strike a week later was similarly unsuccessful,
leading to physical fights in many places between a Communist minority and
workers under the influence of the Social Democrats.
The VKPD eventually called off the action. Casualties were heavy
and thousands were arrested. In Stillborn Revolution, Angress
estimates that the VKPD probably lost half its membership, and according to
official party figures it never fully recouped these losses, even with rapid
recruitment in 1923. Most importantly, its trade-union base was significantly
weakened.
At the time of the March Action the KPD was headed by Ernst Meyer,
who had replaced Paul Levi in February. Levi, a brilliant but opportunist
dilettante, had resigned as VKPD chairman after the Zentrale
refused to endorse his actions at a January conference of the Italian Socialist
Party. While adhering to the Comintern, the Italian leadership under Serrati had
refused to accept the twenty-first condition of membership—the need for a break
with the reformists. Levi had stood with Serrati. Now, in his pamphlet Our
Road: Against Putschism (3 April 1921), Levi slanderously asserted that the
March Action was a “putsch.” In fact, the workers in Mansfeld had responded en
masse to a clear provocation by the SPD cop Hörsing. While many of Levi’s other
criticisms of the March Action were correct, he went public with
his attacks on the VKPD leaders—going so far as to compare them with Hitler’s
crony General Ludendorff—at a time when the party was under fire from the class
enemy. Showing no sense of solidarity with the party, as Lenin noted, Levi “tore
the party to pieces” (Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of
Lenin [1934]). For this cowardly and spiteful act of indiscipline, Levi was
rightly expelled from the party. For a period he had his own organization, but
it was only a brief way station en route to returning to the SPD via the
USPD.
Just prior to the March Action, the Comintern had sent Hungarian
Communist Béla Kun to Germany. Only two years earlier, Kun’s disastrous
liquidation of the Hungarian Communists into a common party with the social
democrats had helped doom the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Now Kun was a prominent
advocate of the “theory of the offensive,” insisting that a Communist party must
be always on the offensive against the bourgeoisie. This so-called theory was
upheld by the VKPD leadership of Meyer, Brandler and Thalheimer and by the
“lefts” like Fischer and Maslow.
The Russian Politburo was split down the middle in the discussion
on the March Action. This occasion marked a growing political rapprochement
between Lenin and Trotsky following the deep rift that had developed between
them over the trade-union dispute at the 1921 Tenth Party Congress. They won
over Kamenev, thereby gaining the majority on the Politburo. Zinoviev and
Bukharin (then a candidate member of the PB) supported the March Action, as did
Karl Radek, the CI representative to Germany. For a period of time, the two
sides met in separate caucuses, indicating a pre-factional situation.
Eventually the Russian delegation to the 1921 Third Comintern
Congress reached agreement on a compromise motion. At the Congress Lenin and
Trotsky defeated attempts by the German lefts and others to water down the
motion by amendments aimed at gutting the resolution of any criticism of the
March Action. The central slogan of the Third Congress was “To power through a
previous conquest of the masses!” It marked a recognition that the political and
organizational resources of the Communist parties were not yet sufficient for an
immediate conquest of power. Lenin devoted much time and attention to the
Organizational Resolution, which sought to distill the essence of how the
Bolshevik Party functioned and to convey it to the young parties of the CI.
Lenin was particularly concerned that these points be grasped by the German
party, insisting that the report be written in German and that a German comrade
be assigned to make the presentation at the Congress.
An interesting account of this period, which exposes the absurdity
of the claims made later that to obtain arms the KPD had to enter the Saxon
government, is contained in From White Cross to Red Flag, the Autobiography
of Max Hoelz: Waiter, Soldier, Revolutionary Leader (1930). A self-taught
worker, Hoelz organized a Red Army in the Vogtland area bordering Czechoslovakia
during the Kapp Putsch and established an army of 2,500 partisans in central
Germany during the March Action. Albeit on a small scale, Hoelz and his militia
boldly armed themselves by disarming cops and soldiers and requisitioning
munitions from local factories. Hoelz was an impulsive, primitive communist who
generally did not wait for instructions before acting, but a smart leadership
would have sought to utilize him for his obvious talents as a military
leader.
After the March Action, Hoelz was sentenced to life imprisonment,
serving seven years before being released under the terms of an amnesty act.
Campaigning for his freedom, the Comintern saluted Hoelz in a 25 June 1921
resolution as a “brave fighter in revolt against the capitalist system,” while
noting: “Max Hoelz did not act wisely. White terror can only be broken by the
mass proletarian uprising, which alone guarantees the victory of the class. But
his action sprang from his dedication to the proletarian cause and his hatred of
the bourgeoisie.”
At his trial, Hoelz turned the tables on his accusers, saying that
the real defendant was bourgeois society. Hoelz had become a pacifist after four
years in the army during the war, but his experiences quickly convinced him that
you couldn’t change anything through words or empty appeals to the bourgeoisie
for justice. He had of course resorted to force, he said, but that was nothing
compared to the wanton and gratuitous orgy of violence carried out by the
perpetrators of the White Terror. The cruelties exacted by the bourgeoisie would
harden the workers and make them less soft-headed. Hoelz scoffed at the
prosecutor’s claim that change could come through elections, asserting: “What
happened in 1918 in Germany was no revolution! I recognize only two revolutions:
the French and the Russian” (Hölz’ Anklagerede
gegen die bürgerliche Gesellschaft [Hoelz’s Prosecution Speech against
Bourgeois Society] [1921]).
Brandler was tried a couple of weeks before Hoelz. The contrast was
striking: with reprehensible cowardice and lack of solidarity, Brandler denied
having anything to do with calls for an armed uprising and sought to save his
own skin by pinning the blame for violence on Hoelz and members of the ultraleft
Communist Workers Party (KAPD). Brandler assured the prosecutor that workers
rule was compatible with the bourgeois constitution: “I say: the dictatorship of
the proletariat is possible even under the German constitution!” He added,
“Since 1918 the possibility of determining the fate of Germany through armed
uprisings has increasingly diminished.” Dissociating himself completely from
other targets of state repression, Brandler told the court: “In the KAPD, many
think that this prolonged method of seizing power can be achieved through
sabotage and individual terror. We expelled them from the party in 1919” (Der
Hochverratsprozess gegen Heinrich Brandler vor dem ausserordentlichen Gericht am
6. Juni 1921 in Berlin [The High Treason Trial of Heinrich Brandler before
the Special Court on 6 June 1921 in Berlin] [1921]).
This is illuminating as to the mindset of the KPD leadership after
the March Action. Having burned their fingers, yesterday’s enthusiasts for the
“permanent offensive” like Brandler, Thalheimer and Meyer now genuflected before
bourgeois legalism and respectability. At an August 1923 meeting of the Russian
Politburo, Trotsky said trenchantly of the German leadership: “What they have
over there is the mindset of a whipped dog after the experience of the failure
of its March [Action]” (Recording of discussion “On the International Situation”
at the 21 August 1923 session of the Politburo of the CC of the RKP(b),
Istochnik, May 1995 [our translation]).
In 1919 and 1920 there was no mass communist party that could take
advantage of the revolutionary opportunities. In 1921 the Communists mistook a
very powerful, but sectionally limited, outburst of class struggle for an
insurrectionary situation. But the generalized radicalization precipitated by
the Ruhr occupation and a mass Communist Party presented a pre-eminent
opportunity to struggle for power. As Anderson noted:
“In 1923 a situation had developed in Germany in which ‘anything
was possible.’ In 1923 the people—and by no means only the industrial working
class—had become insurrectionist and the time had really come for that
‘offensive strategy’ which two years previously had failed so miserably. The
situation had changed decidedly.
“But the Communist Party, too, had changed. Unluckily its change
had worked in exactly the opposite direction. For fear of repeating the
‘ultra-left’ mistakes of 1921, the Communists had reversed their policy so
thoroughly that they were quite incapable of taking action when the time for
action came at last.”
— Hammer or Anvil
The Origins of the “Workers Government” Slogan
The KPD’s blurring of the line between the dictatorship of the
proletariat and a parliamentary coalition of workers parties stretched back at
least to the time of the Kapp Putsch, described by Lenin as “the German
equivalent of the Kornilov revolt,” the attempted military overthrow of
Kerensky’s Provisional Government in Russia in August 1917. The Bolsheviks made
a military bloc with Kerensky’s forces, but opposed any political support to the
government. Following Kornilov’s repulse, Lenin, as he had before the July Days,
challenged the parties of petty-bourgeois democracy, the Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries, to break from their liberal bloc partners and take power on the
basis of their majority in the soviets. Lenin explained:
“The compromise would amount to the following: the Bolsheviks,
without making any claim to participate in the government (which is impossible
for the internationalists unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor
peasants has been realised), would refrain from demanding the immediate transfer
of power to the proletariat and the poor peasants and from employing
revolutionary methods of fighting for this demand.”
— Lenin, “On Compromises,” September 1917 (Collected Works,
Vol. 25)
Lenin’s point was this: since the Bolsheviks were then a minority
of the proletariat, they would forswear revolutionary violence to overthrow a
government formed solely of the reformist parties. But Lenin did not imply that
such a government was a workers government, nor did he offer to give it
political support, much less join it.
The Bolshevik tactic of a military bloc but no political support
was also indicated in response to the Kapp Putsch. However, the KPD initially
refused to join the general strike against the putsch and when it reversed its
sectarian line a day later, it flipped to an opportunist posture toward the
reformists. Thus, when Legien proposed a government based on the ADGB
trade-union federation, the SPD and USPD after the putsch collapsed, the KPD
announced that it would be a “loyal opposition” to such a “socialist government”
if it excluded “bourgeois-capitalist parties.” It asserted:
“A state of affairs in which political freedom can be enjoyed
without restriction, and bourgeois democracy cannot operate as the dictatorship
of capital is, from the viewpoint of the development of the proletarian
dictatorship, of the utmost importance in further winning the proletarian masses
over to the side of communism.”
Citing this passage in an appendix to “Left-Wing” Communism—An
Infantile Disorder (April-May 1920), Lenin stated that the “loyal
opposition” tactic was in the main correct, explaining it as “a compromise,
which is really necessary and should consist in renouncing, for a certain
period, all attempts at the forcible overthrow of a government which enjoys the
confidence of a majority of the urban workers.” But Lenin also noted:
“It is impossible to pass over in silence the fact that a
government consisting of social-traitors should not (in an official statement by
the Communist Party) be called ‘socialist’; that one should not speak of the
exclusion of ‘bourgeois-capitalist parties,’ when the parties both of the
Scheidemanns and of the Kautskys and Crispiens are petty-bourgeois-democratic
parties.”
Lenin insisted that it was thoroughly wrong to pretend that
reformist swindlers like the leaders of the SPD and USPD could “go beyond the
bounds of bourgeois democracy, which, in its turn, cannot but be a dictatorship
of capital.”
This lesson was never absorbed by the KPD leaders. The Legien
proposal was in any case scotched because of opposition from the USPD’s left
wing (which was already drawing close to the KPD). But it is evident that the
KPD leadership’s idea of the “loyal opposition” tactic differed from Lenin’s and
was more akin to Stalin and Kamenev’s line in March 1917 of political support to
the bourgeois Provisional Government “in so far as it struggles against reaction
or counter-revolution.”
When USPD leader Ernst Däumig (who later joined the KPD) denounced
Legien’s proposal at a March 23 mass meeting of the Berlin factory councils,
rejecting cooperation with the “compromised right-wing” SPD, it was Wilhelm
Pieck, a leader of the KPD, who spoke and rebuked Däumig from the
right:
“The present situation is not ripe enough for a council republic,
but it is for a purely workers’ government. As revolutionary workers, a purely
workers’ government is exceedingly desirable. But it can only be a transitional
phenomenon.... The USPD has rejected the workers’ government, and has thereby
failed to protect the interests of the working class at a politically
advantageous moment.”
— quoted in Arthur Rosenberg, “The Kapp Putsch and the Working
Class” (excerpted and translated by Mike Jones from Geschichte der Weimarer
Republik [History of the Weimar Republic] [1961])
Clearly, as early as the spring of 1920 at least some KPD leaders
viewed a social-democratic parliamentary government as a halfway house to
workers rule.
Following the fusion with the left wing of the USPD, the VKPD found
itself holding the balance of power between the SPD and USPD, on the one hand,
and the right-wing bourgeois parties on the other, in regional parliaments
(Landtags) in Saxony and Thuringia. After the November 1920
elections to the Saxon Landtag, the KPD decided to support the
formation of an SPD/USPD government and voted for the budget, which of course
included funding for the police, the courts and the prisons. The budget vote
constituted a vote of political confidence in this capitalist
government.
“Left-Wing” Communism has been willfully misinterpreted and
misused over the years by fake leftists to justify opportunist maneuvering. But
in this work as well as in his intervention in the Third Congress discussion on
the united front, Lenin sought to imbue the young Communist parties of the West
with the understanding that the conquest of power had to be prepared through a
patient and methodical struggle to win the proletariat to the program of
communism, including through the use of intelligent tactics aimed at exposing
the social-democratic misleaders.
In spite of Lenin’s sharp criticism of the KPD in “Left-Wing”
Communism, in November 1921 Die Rote Fahne published “Theses on the
Relationship to Socialist Governments.” The theses asserted that such “socialist
governments” were the “immediate result” of mass proletarian struggles “at a
stage when the proletariat lacks the consciousness and power to establish its
dictatorship.” The KPD promised to facilitate such governments and “defend them
against bourgeois rightists, just as it actively defends the bourgeois republic
against the monarchy.” This statement of “lesser evilism” blurs any distinction
between a military bloc with bourgeois democrats against
right-wing reactionaries and political support to bourgeois
democrats in the form of the Social Democracy. The theses did stop short of
advocating KPD entry into a regional government. But there was an inexorable
logic posed here: If one could support a capitalist government from the outside,
then why not join it in order to “push it to the left”? It didn’t take long
before debates on exactly this issue broke out within the KPD.
The Comintern, notably Zinoviev and Radek, played a role in this,
not only approving the decisions of the KPD but actively driving forward such a
perspective. In a 10 November 1921 letter expressing “serious reservations”
about the KPD theses, Radek explicitly laid open the possibility of entering an
SPD government:
“The Communist Party can join any government with the will to
struggle seriously with capitalism.... The Communist Party is not an opponent in
principle of participation in a workers government. It stands for a soviet
government, but in no way does this specify how the working class will achieve
one. It is just as likely that a soviet government will be won by force in a
revolution against a bourgeois government as that it can arise in the unfolding
struggle of the working class in defense of a democratically attained socialist
government that honestly defends the working class against capital.”
— cited by Arnold Reisberg, An den Quellen der
Einheitsfrontpolitik: Der Kampf der KPD um die Aktionseinheit in Deutschland
1921-1922 [At the Sources of United-Front Politics: The KPD’s Fight for
Unity in Action in Germany 1921-1922] (1971)
The thrust of this was duly incorporated in KPD statements. An 8
December 1921 circular asserted that “The KPD must say to the workers that it is
willing to facilitate, by all parliamentary and extra-parliamentary means, the
coming into being of a socialist workers government, and that it is also willing
to join such a government if it has a guarantee that this government will
represent the interests and demands of the working class in the fight against
the bourgeoisie, will seize material assets, prosecute the Kapp criminals, free
the revolutionary workers from prison, etc.” (Political Circular No. 12, 8
December 1921).
The same month a CI resolution, later appended to the “Theses on
Comintern Tactics” adopted at the CI’s Fourth Congress in 1922, endorsed a KPD
decision to “support a homogeneous workers government that is inclined to take
up with some degree of seriousness the struggle against the power of the
capitalists” (Protokoll des Vierten Kongresses der
Kommunistischen Internationale, Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale
[1923] reprinted by Karl Liebknecht Verlag [1972]). In January 1922, the ECCI
advised the KPD to publicly declare its willingness to enter a “workers
government of struggle against the bourgeoisie” (Reisberg). The change in
terminology from “socialist workers government” to “workers government” was
aimed at leaving open the possibility of bringing in the Catholic trade
unions!
The KPD couched its opportunist policy toward SPD/ USPD governments
as an application of “united-front tactics.” But the real issue here was that
the KPD leaders were not prepared to take power through leading the proletariat
to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with organs of workers power. The
KPD leaders (as well as Zinoviev/ Radek) saw the reformist and centrist leaders
not as obstacles—the last line of defense of the disintegrating capitalist
order—but as potential (if vacillating) revolutionary allies. Their policy was,
in essence, “Make the SPD lefts fight!” This is reflected in an article by
August Kleine (Guralski), a Comintern representative to the KPD who was known as
a “Zinoviev man”:
“Overcoming the right wing of the SPD and USPD, the strengthening
of their left wing and control of the socialist government by the organized
working class are the prerequisite for the struggle of the masses for vital
reforms.
“These are simultaneously the preconditions that we pose for our
entry into the socialist government. But carrying out these demands means
the creation of a workers government.”
— “Der Kampf um die Arbeiterregierung” [The Fight for a Workers
Government] Die Internationale,
27 June 1922
27 June 1922
Such views did not go unchallenged inside the KPD. One example was
Martha Heller, a correspondent from Kiel, who was quoted as follows in an
article by the right-wing KPD leader Paul Böttcher:
“Suddenly everything we hitherto held to be the common beliefs of
all Communists has disappeared. Revolution, mass struggle to smash the
bourgeoisie’s apparatus of economic and political power is magicked away, and we
obtain the class government of the proletariat simply by casting votes, by
accepting ministerial posts.”
— “Falsche Schlussfolgerungen: Eine Replik zur sächsischen Frage”
[Wrong Conclusions: A Response on the Saxony Question] Die
Internationale, 18 June 1922
In the summer and fall of 1922, a major debate raged within the KPD
over the Saxon Landtag, where the KPD held the balance of power.
In July, the Zentrale took a position to vote for the provincial
budget. The Zentrale subsequently reversed its position when the
SPD refused to pass a face-saving amnesty bill, but the KPD’s parliamentary
fraction dragged its feet. It wasn’t until late August that the SPD provincial
government was brought down.
But even as the KPD voted to bring down the government, it looked
to new elections scheduled for November to potentially increase the number of
KPD deputies and create “the possibility of expanding the basis of the
government through the entry of the Communist Party into the government.” The
KPD drafted a proposal laying out “ten conditions” for entry into a “workers
government” with the SPD, which later became the basis for negotiations. The
results of the November elections were 10 deputies for the KPD, 42 for the SPD,
and 45 for the right-wing parties. Shortly thereafter, the SPD sent a letter to
the KPD inviting it to “join the government, while recognizing the Reich and
State constitutions” (Reisberg, citing Vorwärts No. 535, 11 November
1922). This proposal precipitated a split in the KPD leadership; the issue was
then thrown into the lap of the Comintern at the 1922 Fourth Congress.
Where the sharp differences within the German party had been openly
fought out at the Third Congress, this was not the case in 1922. In the interim,
Lenin had suffered his first stroke, and the main Comintern operatives in
Germany became Radek and Zinoviev, much to the detriment of the KPD. Lenin’s ill
health prevented him from playing more than a limited role at the Fourth
Congress. There was no agenda point to address the dispute over Saxony and the
KPD’s parliamentary tactics more generally. These matters were only referred to
obliquely in the Congress sessions.
The question of entry into the regional Landtag was
taken up at a consultation between German and Russian delegates (which
apparently included Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek). According to
the East German historian Arnold Reisberg, documentary reports on the
conversation have not been preserved. From the memoirs of some of the
participants and from what came out in the wash following the October 1923
debacle, it seems evident, however, that the Russian delegation spiked the
proposal favored by the majority of the KPD leadership to enter the Saxon
government. A 5 April 1924 letter by Zinoviev to Clara Zetkin notes that the
Russian comrades were unanimously opposed to the entry. Similar statements were
made by Zinoviev and others at the January 1924 ECCI post-mortem on the German
events. However, we do not know the political parameters of the Russian
intervention, though it undoubtedly saved the KPD from overtly crossing the
class line at that time. The meeting was never reported into the Fourth
Congress. There was never a real discussion inside the KPD (or CI) to correct
the ominous parliamentarist bulge of the German party, and the KPD went into the
critical events of 1923 politically disarmed.
The 1922 Fourth Comintern Congress
The beheading of the German party leadership in 1919 brought its
every weakness to the fore. The KPD tended to polarize between staid, plodding
parliamentarists like Meyer, Zetkin, Brandler and Thalheimer on the one hand and
petty-bourgeois demagogues like Fischer and Maslow on the other. Zetkin’s
recollections of Lenin from this period are particularly interesting, since her
memoirs (unlike those of the mendacious Ruth Fischer) do not purport to have
Lenin agreeing with her about everything. According to Zetkin, Lenin had little
use for the Fischers and Maslows: “Such ‘leftists’ are like the Bourbons. They
have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. As far as I can see, there is behind
the ‘left’ criticism of the mistakes in carrying out the united front tactics,
the desire to do away with those tactics altogether.” He told Zetkin that he
considered Fischer to be a “‘personal accident,’ politically unstable and
uncertain.” But if such people got a hearing from revolutionary workers inside
the KPD, said Lenin, it was the fault of the party leadership:
“But I tell you frankly that I am just as little impressed by your
‘Center’ which does not understand, which hasn’t the energy to have done with
such petty demagogues. Surely it is an easy thing to replace such people, to
withdraw the revolutionary-minded workers from them and educate them
politically. Just because they are revolutionary-minded workers, while radicals
of the type in question are at bottom the worst sort of opportunists.”
— Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (1934)
In Lenin’s one speech to the Fourth Congress, he emphasized the
importance of the Third Congress Organizational Resolution. He worried that the
resolution was “too Russian,” by which he did not mean (as has
often been misrepresented) that it was irrelevant to West Europe but rather that
it was difficult for the young Communist parties to grasp. He urged that they
“study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the
organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work.” Lenin
believed that the Communist parties—the German party in particular—had not yet
assimilated the Bolshevik revolutionary experience. Tragically, he was proven
right.
The “Workers Governments” Discussion
The discussion at the Fourth Congress on the “workers government”
slogan took place mainly under Zinoviev’s ECCI report. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky
were at the session. In his opening presentation, Zinoviev reasserted his
statement at an expanded ECCI plenum several months earlier that the workers
government was simply a popular designation for the dictatorship of the
proletariat. But when he was challenged by Radek and Ernst Meyer, Zinoviev
retreated. The ensuing codification in the “Comintern Theses on Tactics” is
deliberately obfuscationist and at times self-contradictory, incorporating
different political thrusts. The theses recognize five possible varieties
of “workers governments,” grouped in two categories:
“I. Ostensible Workers Governments:
“1) Liberal workers government, such as existed in
Australia and is also possible in the near future in England.
“2) Social-democratic workers government
(Germany).
“II. Genuine Workers Governments
“3) Government of the workers and poorer peasants. Such a
possibility exists in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, etc.
“4) Workers government with participation of Communists.
“5) Genuine revolutionary proletarian workers government, which,
in its pure form, can be embodied only through the Communist Party.”
— Protokoll des Vierten Kongresses der Kommunistischen
Internationale
(This is our translation from the German. The English-language
Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the
Third International [Ink Links, 1980] is not reliable; here, for example, it
omits the classification of workers governments into two categories.)
The schema of a sliding scale of “workers governments” ranging from
the not-so-good to the very-good-indeed was taken by the KPD leadership as an
endorsement of its conciliation of and submissiveness to the left Social
Democrats. The theses also state that “The Communists must under certain
circumstances declare their willingness to form a workers government with
non-Communist workers parties and workers’ organizations. However, they may do
so only if there are guarantees that the workers government will really wage a
struggle against the bourgeoisie.”
Zinoviev tried to delimit the conditions in which the workers
government could be realized: “It can only be adopted in those countries where
the relationships of power render its adoption opportune, where the problem of
power, the problem of government, both on the parliamentary and on the
extra-parliamentary field, has come to the front.” But in situations where the
question of power is being raised on the streets—i.e., a prerevolutionary
situation—the most fatal mistake is to confuse the workers as to the class
nature of the state.
What delegates were really concerned about was whether the
Communists could join a coalition government with the Social Democracy. In that
regard, Zinoviev asserted:
“A third type is the so-called Coalition government; that is, a
government in which Social-Democrats, Trade Union leaders, and even perhaps
Communists, take part. One can imagine such a possibility. Such a government is
not yet the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it is perhaps a starting point
for the dictatorship. When all goes right, we can kick one social-democrat after
another out of the government until the power is in the hands of the Communists.
This is a historical possibility.”
— Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Abridged
Report of Meetings Held at Petrograd and Moscow, Nov. 7-Dec. 3, 1922
(London, CPGB, undated)
This nonsense is a gross denial of the lessons of the October
Revolution. Zinoviev’s whole conception assumes that the other side—the social
democrats and the bourgeoisie—are incapable of thinking. In practice, things
worked out quite differently in Germany a year later, as they were bound to. As
soon as the KPD announced its coalition with the SPD in October 1923, the Reich
government took immediate steps to suppress it militarily. Correspondingly, the
idea that there exists a halfway house between the dictatorship of the
proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie constitutes a revision of the
Marxist-Leninist understanding of the state. The working class cannot simply
“take hold” of the existing state machinery and run it in its own class
interests. The bourgeois state must be overthrown through workers revolution and
a new state—the dictatorship of the proletariat—must be erected in its
place.
It did not take the German developments in October 1923 to
demonstrate the dangers of coalition with the social democrats; the Comintern
already had experienced several such disastrous experiments. In Finland in 1918,
a pro-Bolshevik minority in the social-democratic party proclaimed a
dictatorship of the proletariat before even forming its own Communist
organization. What ensued was a massive bloodbath of the Finnish proletariat by
General Mannerheim’s forces in league with German imperialism. In the spring of
1919, soviet republics were proclaimed in Hungary and Bavaria. The Hungarian
Soviet Republic was formed on the basis of a reunification of Béla Kun’s small
Communist forces with the Social Democracy. In Bavaria, the government included
the Independents and even a section of the SPD, some of whose ministers then
organized a punitive expedition to crush the revolutionary government. Eugen
Leviné heroically led the defense against the reactionary onslaught. But both
the Bavarian and Hungarian Soviet Republics were soon drowned in blood.
Much of the Fourth Congress discussion suffered from trying to base
programmatic generalizations on historical speculations. But tactics are
concrete, and depend on particular circumstances. Two Polish delegates,
Marchlewski and Domski (a Polish “left” who was aligned with Ruth Fischer) spoke
particularly well on this point. Marchlewski said:
“I would like to speak a few words on the slogan of the Workers’
Government. I believe there has been too much philosophical speculation on the
matter. (“Very true,” from the German benches.) The criticism of this slogan is
directed on three lines —the Workers’ Government is either a Scheidemann
Government or a coalition government of the Communists with the social traitors.
It finds support either in Parliament or in the Factory Councils. It is either
the expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or it is not. I believe
that philosophical speculation is out of place—for we have practical historical
experience. What did the Bolsheviks do in 1917 before they conquered power? They
demanded ‘All Power to the Soviets.’ What did this mean at that time? It meant
giving power to the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries who were in the
majority in the Soviets. It meant at that time a Workers’ Government in which
social traitors participated, and which was directed against the dictatorship of
the proletariat. But this slogan was a good weapon of agitation in the hands of
the Bolsheviks.”
Domski observed:
“Comrade Radek has solaced me in private conversation that such a
government is not contemplated for Poland (Comrade Radek: I never said that).
Oh, then Poland will also have to bear the punishment of this sort of
government. It is thus an international problem. Comrade Radek says that the
workers’ government is not a necessity but a possibility, and it were folly to
reject such possibilities. The question is whether if we inscribe all the
possibilities on our banner we try to accelerate the realisation of these
possibilities. I believe that it is quite possible that at the eleventh hour a
so-called workers’ government should come which would not be a proletarian
dictatorship. But I believe when such a government comes, it will be the
resultant of various forces such as our struggle for the proletarian
dictatorship, the struggle of the social-democrats against it and so forth. Is
it proper to build our plans on such an assumption? I think not, because I
believe that we should insist on our struggle for the proletarian
dictatorship.”
— Fourth Congress Abridged Report
As the old Comintern saying went, the German party was the
biggest, but the Polish party was the best.
Trotsky Drew the Lessons
In a December 1922 report on the Fourth Congress, Trotsky made the
following analogy in introducing the Saxony question:
“Under certain conditions the slogan of a workers’ government can
become a reality in Europe. That is to say, a moment may arrive when the
Communists together with the left elements of the Social Democracy will set up a
workers’ government in a way similar to ours in Russia when we created a
workers’ and peasants’ government together with the Left Social-Revolutionaries.
Such a phase would constitute a transition to the proletarian dictatorship, the
full and completed one.”
— The First Five Years of the Communist International,
Volume II
This analogy is totally inappropriate. The Left Social
Revolutionaries entered the government after the proletarian seizure of
power and on the basis of soviet power, whereas in Germany the question
concerned a regional bourgeois parliament in a capitalist state! Trotsky
explained that the CI had opposed the KPD entering the Saxon Landtag at
that time. But he added:
“In the Comintern we gave the following answer: If you, our German
Communist comrades, are of the opinion that a revolution is possible in the next
few months in Germany, then we would advise you to participate in Saxony in a
coalition government and to utilize your ministerial posts in Saxony for the
furthering of political and organizational tasks and for transforming Saxony in
a certain sense into a Communist drillground so as to have a revolutionary
stronghold already reinforced in a period of preparation for the approaching
outbreak of the revolution.”
Trotsky’s “drillground” conception assumed that the major
battalions of the German proletariat were ready to break
decisively from the bourgeois order and embark on the course of
insurrection under Communist leadership. In other words, he assumed exactly what
still had to be forged, tested and tempered. When the KPD did enter the
governments in Saxony and Thuringia the following October, Trotsky defended this
in several speeches, including a 19 October report to the All-Russian Union of
Metal Workers and another two days later to the Conference of Political Workers
in the Red Army and the Red Navy (The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon
Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, Vol. V [New Park Publications,
1981]). Trotsky may not have been aware of the degree to which the KPD had sunk
into parliamentarism, but the tactic he defended could only have reinforced such
appetites.
Trotsky began to evaluate the reasons for the defeat almost
immediately. Though the German events did not figure as a central issue in the
fight of the 1923 Opposition, Trotsky made a preliminary statement in a December
article:
“If the Communist Party had abruptly changed the pace of its work
and had profited by the five or six months that history accorded it for direct
political, organizational, technical preparation for the seizure of power, the
outcome of the events could have been quite different.... Here a new orientation
was needed, a new tone, a new way of approaching the masses, a new
interpretation and application of the united front....
“If the party surrendered its exceptional positions without
resistance, the main reason is that it proved unable to free itself, at the
beginning of the new phase (May-July 1923), from the automatism of its preceding
policy, established as if it was meant for years to come, and to put forward
squarely in its agitation, action, organization, and tactics the problem of
taking power.”
— Trotsky, “Tradition and Revolutionary Policy” (December 1923,
later published as part of The New Course)
Trotsky drew a parallel between the routinism of the KPD
leadership and the conservativism of the newly crystallizing bureaucratic
stratum in the Soviet Union. Stigmatized as a “new boy” because of his more
recent adherence to the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky ridiculed the “old Bolsheviks”
(like Kamenev) who stood on the ground of what Lenin called the “antiquated”
formula of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the
peasantry” in order to oppose Lenin’s April Theses in 1917.
Trotsky’s re-evaluation of the German events led him to an implicit
self-criticism of his earlier, administrative stress on the need to set a date
for the insurrection. In June 1924, he wrote that “a sharp tactical turn was
needed” from the moment of the occupation of the Ruhr:
“The question of setting a date for the uprising can have
significance only in this connection and with this perspective. Insurrection is
an art. An art presumes a clear aim, a precise plan, and consequently a
schedule.
“The most important thing, however, was this: to ensure in
good time the decisive tactical turn toward the seizure of power. And
this was not done. This was the chief and fatal omission. From this followed the
basic contradiction. On the one hand, the party expected a revolution, while on
the other hand, because it had burned its fingers in the March events, it
avoided, until the last months of 1923, the very idea of organizing a
revolution, i.e., preparing an insurrection.”
— Trotsky, “Through What Stage Are We Passing?”, 21 June 1924
(Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-25)
The importance of such a turn and the necessity to politically
combat and overcome the conservative, Menshevik resistance in the party to this
turn is developed most fully in The Lessons of October.
Where Trotsky tried to address the root cause of the German defeat,
for Zinoviev the main point of the ECCI plenum convened in January 1924 to
discuss the October debacle was to amnesty his own role and scapegoat
Brandler. (The Polish Communists submitted a letter sharply criticizing the
ECCI’s failure to take any responsibility for the German disaster.) In his
pamphlet Probleme der deutschen Revolution (Hamburg, 1923) and
again at the plenum, the infinitely flexible Zinoviev had taken to again
asserting that the workers government meant the dictatorship of the proletariat
and cynically attacked the Brandlerites for denying this. Having personally
signed the order for the KPD to enter the governments of Saxony and Thuringia,
Zinoviev couldn’t very well criticize Brandler for that. Instead he insisted
that Brandler had not conducted himself as a Communist minister should...in what
was a bourgeois government! Leadership of the KPD was soon turned over to
Fischer and Maslow. And compounding the October defeat, the majority line in the
ECCI pushed by Zinoviev argued that the revolutionary moment had not passed but
rather was impending, a position that could only be disorienting.
At the January 1924 ECCI plenum, Radek submitted a set of theses
whose purpose in part was to alibi the leadership of Brandler (and Radek
himself) in the 1923 events. Trotsky, then ill, was not at the plenum. Radek
contacted him by telephone in an effort to get his support. Although he later
acknowledged that he had placed too much confidence in Radek in agreeing to have
his name appended to a document which he had never read, Trotsky explained that
he had endorsed the theses on the assurance that they recognized that the
revolutionary situation had passed. In a March 1926 letter to the Italian
Communist Amadeo Bordiga, Trotsky stressed that “I lent my signature because the
theses affirmed that the German party had let the revolutionary situation lapse
and that there began for us in Germany a phase that was favorable not for an
immediate offensive but for defense and preparation. That was for me the
decisive element at the time.”
Since Radek had been allied with Brandler on Germany, and Trotsky
was associated with Radek in the 1923 Opposition, Trotsky’s signature on Radek’s
theses made it easy for Zinoviev and later Stalin to attack him as a
“Brandlerite.” This was, of course, an entirely cynical game. Trotsky opposed
scapegoating Brandler, not out of political solidarity, but because he knew the
Comintern leadership was also complicit and that Fischer and Maslow were no
better. Trotsky’s differences with Brandler were spelled out in a number of
speeches and writings. This was well known in the upper circles of the Russian
party, but less so among European Communists. Trotsky was compelled several
times to repeat the explanation he had made to Bordiga, including in a September
1931 letter to Albert Treint and one in June 1932 to the Czech Communist
Neurath.
Trotsky’s Later Writings
In his later writings, Trotsky fully recognized that the “workers
government” (or “workers and peasants government”) slogan had been, in the hands
of the degenerating Comintern, a theoretical opening for the most monstrous
opportunism. In the Transitional Program (1938), Trotsky wrote:
“This formula, ‘workers’ and farmers’ government,’ first appeared
in the agitation of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was definitely accepted after the
October Revolution. In the final instance it represented nothing more than the
popular designation for the already established dictatorship of the
proletariat....
“The chief accusation which the Fourth International advances
against the traditional organizations of the proletariat is the fact that they
do not wish to tear themselves away from the political semi-corpse of the
bourgeoisie. Under these conditions the demand, systematically addressed to the
old leadership: ‘Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power!’ is an extremely
important weapon for exposing the treacherous character of the parties and
organizations of the Second, Third and Amsterdam Internationals. The slogan,
‘workers’ and farmers’ government,’ is thus acceptable to us only in the sense
that it had in 1917 with the Bolsheviks, i.e., as an anti-bourgeois and
anti-capitalist slogan, but in no case in that ‘democratic’ sense which later
the epigones gave it, transforming it from a bridge to socialist revolution into
the chief barrier upon its path.”
However, to our knowledge, Trotsky never explicitly repudiated
the Fourth Congress formulations on the “workers government” slogan.
That resolution has since been used as a theoretical opening for
pseudo-Trotskyist revisionism of all stripes. In a series of articles in Max
Shachtman’s Labor Action in October-November 1953, Hal Draper cited the
Fourth Congress discussion in an attempt to argue that a “workers government”
need not be a workers state. The purpose of this was to embellish the Attlee
Labour government elected in Britain in 1945. In the early 1960s, Joseph Hansen
of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) likewise drew on the 1922 CI
discussion to buttress his claim that the Castro regime in Cuba was a “workers
and farmers government.” This was in the service of the SWP’s uncritical
enthusing over the Castroite leadership of the Cuban deformed workers state.
Hansen even extended the label to the neocolonial government of Algeria under
Ben Bella, using it as a theoretical basis to extend political support to
bourgeois populist and nationalist regimes.
Hansen’s revisionist apologias filled up a whole
Education for Socialists bulletin (April 1974) on the
“Workers and Farmers Government.” In addition to the Fourth Congress theses,
Hansen also seized on the following guarded speculation by Trotsky in the
Transitional Program:
“One cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical
possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances
(war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the
petty-bourgeois parties including the Stalinists may go further than they wish
along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case one thing is not to
be doubted: even if this highly improbable variant somewhere at some time
becomes a reality and the ‘workers’ and farmers’ government’ in the
above-mentioned sense is established in fact, it would represent merely a short
episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Just as the Stalinists (and other opportunists) abused Lenin’s
“Left-Wing” Communism to justify the most grotesque
class-collaborationist betrayals, clever revisionists like Hansen sought to
impute to Trotsky their own reformist capitulation to non-proletarian
forces.
The Revolutionary Tendency (RT)—predecessor of the Spartacist
League—waged a sharp struggle within the SWP against the leadership’s
capitulation to Castro. In an 11 June 1961 document titled “A Note on the
Current Discussion—Labels and Purposes” (SWP Discussion
Bulletin Vol. 22, No. 16 [June 1961]), James Robertson, one of the leaders
of the RT, pointed to the link between terminology and political appetite:
“And over the Cuban question the same underlying issue is
posed—what do you want, comrades? Take the use of the transitional
demand ‘the workers and peasants government.’ It is transitional right enough,
that is it is a bridge, but bridges go two ways.
Either the workers and peasants government is the central demand
of the Trotskyists in urging the workers and peasants to take power into their
own hands through their mass organizations—i.e., the struggle for soviet power
(this is the use the Cuban Trotskyists put it to); or it is a
label to apply from afar to the existing government and thus serve, not for the
first time, as an orthodox sounding formula to side-step the consummation of
proletarian revolution and to justify revolution ‘from above’ by leaders ‘one of
whose principal difficulties is imbuing the working people with a sense of
revolutionary social responsibility.’
“In short, is the Cuban revolution to pass forward over that
bridge to soviet power or is an American SWP majority to go backwards?”
Indeed, the SWP’s adaptation to Castro marked its descent into
centrism and, a few years later, reformism.
In the course of fusion discussions with the Communist Working
Collective (CWC) in 1971, which had broken to the left from Maoism, we
discovered that they had similar misgivings about the Fourth Congress (see
Marxist Bulletin No. 10, “From Maoism to Trotskyism”). The
comrades in the CWC were very familiar with Lenin’s writings on the state. They
knew that in the imperialist epoch there were only two types of state, the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,
corresponding to the two fundamental classes—what then was this vague “workers
government” in between? The convergence of views over this augured well for a
solid revolutionary regroupment!
In the early 1930s, Trotsky wrote quite a bit about the urgency of
applying the united-front tactic against the Hitlerite fascists. Yet the
“workers government” à la Zinoviev, i.e., a KPD/SPD government, is
never an element in Trotsky’s propaganda. His formulations on the
state are likewise much sharper and clearer than in 1923. Trotsky is
categorical, for example, that the cops are the class enemy, even if they are
under Social Democratic influence:
“The fact that the police was originally recruited in large
numbers from among Social Democratic workers is absolutely meaningless.
Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who
becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop,
not a worker.”
— “What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat,” 27
January 1932 (The Struggle
Against Fascism in Germany)
Against Fascism in Germany)
Seeking to justify their invariable electoral support to the social
democracy, latter-day centrists and reformists acclaim the “workers government”
as the highest form of the united front. In contrast, Trotsky wrote in “What
Next?”:
“Just as the trade union is the rudimentary form of the united
front in the economic struggle, so the soviet is the highest form of the
united front under the conditions in which the proletariat enters the
epoch of fighting for power.
“The soviet in itself possesses no miraculous powers. It is the
class representation of the proletariat, with all of the latter’s strong and
weak points. But precisely and only because of this does the soviet afford to
the workers of divers political trends the organizational opportunity to unite
their efforts in the revolutionary struggle for power.”
But against the fetishists of the united front, Trotsky stressed
that soviets “by themselves” were not a substitute for a communist vanguard in
leading the struggle for power:
“The united front, in general, is never a substitute for a strong
revolutionary party; it can only aid the latter to become stronger....
“To avow that the soviets ‘by themselves’ are capable of leading
the struggle of the proletariat for power—is only to sow abroad vulgar soviet
fetishism. Everything depends upon the party that leads the soviets.”
The Fight for New October Revolutions
The last serious examination of the German events in the Trotskyist
movement was an exchange in the pages of the American SWP’s Fourth
International in 1942-43 between the German Trotskyist Walter Held (“Why the
German Revolution Failed,” December 1942 and January 1943) and Jean van
Heijenoort, using the pseudonym Marc Loris (“The German Revolution in the
Leninist Period,” March 1943). The exchange has the merit of attempting to
situate the KPD’s problems in 1923 in the political weaknesses which plagued the
German party from its inception. Held viewed the utterly justified expulsion of
Paul Levi in 1921 as the definitive error which doomed the 1923 German
Revolution to defeat, even seeing in Levi’s expulsion the seeds of the Stalinist
bureaucratic degeneration of the Comintern. Van Heijenoort skewered Held for his
support to Levi. At the same time, Van Heijenoort wrongly sneered at Held’s
correct criticism of Trotsky for failing to carry out Lenin’s instructions to
wage a fight against Stalin at the Russian Twelfth Party Congress in 1923. Held
did believe there were revolutionary possibilities in 1923, and he despised
Brandler. Held also correctly condemned the KPD’s entry into the governments in
Saxony and Thuringia—though not acknowledging that Trotsky himself supported
this.
One’s appreciation of the history of the workers movement very much
correlates with programmatic outlook. All manner of fake Trotskyists view the
events of 1923 through a prism distorted by social democracy. Pierre Broué’s
Révolution en Allemagne 1917-1923 (1971)
uncritically supports the CI’s Fourth Congress line on the “workers government.”
A pamphlet published by the German Workers Power group (Arbeitermacht) on the
November Revolution claims that the Ebert-Scheidemann regime—butchers of
Liebknecht and Luxemburg—was a “workers government,” albeit of a “non-genuine”
type. Pierre Frank, a longtime leader of the United Secretariat (USec), wrote a
polemic denouncing Zinoviev for correctly asserting (on occasion) that a workers
government meant the dictatorship of the proletariat.
These groups mystify the fact that a parliamentary regime headed by
a social-democratic party is a capitalist government, not a
“workers government” or a “reformist government.” This is in line with their own
politics of operating as pressure groups on the mass reformist parties. The
perfection of this social-democratic outlook was the Allende Unidad Popular
government in Chile in the early 1970s—a bourgeois coalition of Allende’s
Socialists, the Communists and some smaller capitalist parties—which lulled the
working masses with suicidal illusions in the “constitutional” military, and
paved the way for Pinochet’s bloody coup.
Brandler himself moved sharply away from Leninism, becoming a
leader of the Communist Right Opposition and hardening up around
social-democratic politics. In an exchange with Isaac Deutscher, Brandler oozed
with the smug satisfaction of a provincial German social democrat who had
nothing whatsoever to learn from the Bolsheviks:
“Only now do I realize how tremendous was the treasure of ideas
which the German workers’ movement acquired by its own exertions and quite
independently. We were so impressed by the achievements of the Bolsheviks that
we forgot our own. Take Lenin’s Imperialism, which
is quite correctly regarded as a standard work. Already at the 1907
International Congress in Stuttgart, and at other conferences at the end of the
previous century, most of the ideas which Lenin developed in his
Imperialism were already being debated, mainly by
Kautsky.”
— New Left Review No. 105, September-October 1977
Lenin’s Imperialism was a polemic
against Kautsky, whose theory of “superimperialism”—today
resurrected by the “anti-globalization” crowd—is premised on the lie that
national antagonisms can be transcended within the framework of capitalism and
therefore interimperialist war is not inherent in the capitalist system. It was
in counterposition to such social-pacifism and social-chauvinism that Lenin
launched the struggle for the Third International!
As for the British Labourite
Revolutionary History, the editorial in its
1994 issue on Germany couches its anti-revolutionary thesis in a series of
questions:
“Was this series of events a failed revolutionary opportunity? Was
the upsurge aborted into a bourgeois republic by the treachery of Social
Democracy and the failure of the revolutionary left? Was a liberal bourgeois
republic a possibility? Were the glaring mistakes of the Communists a result of
their own ineptitude, or due to the meddling of the Communist International? How
far were the policies of the German Communist Party swayed by the Soviet
preference for an alliance with right wing German militarists, a coalition of
the two outsiders excluded from the Versailles system? Could more have been
gained out of the situation than what finally emerged? Was the later triumph of
Hitler made inevitable by the events of this time? If the German Communist Party
had not been established, and the working class had maintained its
organisational unity, could Hitler’s victory have been prevented?”
Where Revolutionary History’s
line of reasoning leads is clear, even if it is necessary to read between the
lines, as is usually the case with this “non-party” journal. The line goes
something like this: the proletarian revolution did not triumph in Germany in
1918-23 and only sectarians and madmen could think it was in the offing; in the
Soviet Union, where in 1917 the revolution did triumph, the Bolshevik leadership
soon proved to consist mostly of misguided fanatics and frauds. What’s left for
RH, then, but to lament the split of the proletarian revolutionary forces
from the Second International? At all costs they seek to deny the fact that
Hitler’s rise to power was the result of the SPD’s craven attachment to the
Weimar Republic, combined with the Communist Party’s inability to decisively put
an end to it in 1923. Fascism, the brutal oppression imposed by imperialism on
the colonial masses, interimperialist war, racism—in the eyes of a social
democrat, these are not the necessary outgrowths of the rotting bourgeois social
order but unfortunate aberrations which episodically mar the orderly, democratic
bourgeois norm.
At bottom, what they all call into question is the validity of the
October Revolution and the attempt of the Bolsheviks to extend that revolution
internationally. Brandler’s line was always one of “Russian exceptionalism,”
i.e., maybe Lenin’s program worked in Russia but it had no applicability in
Germany with its ostensibly more “cultured” working class, allegedly wedded to
the framework of parliamentary democracy. With the destruction of the Soviet
Union, revisionists have “discovered” that Lenin’s program didn’t work in Russia
either, that the Soviet workers state was a “failed experiment.” That’s why all
of the reformists end up today in the camp of the “anti-globalization campaign,”
beseeching the imperialists to be “responsible” and “humane.”
Fake leftists like Workers Power and the USec moved far to the
right through their support to the counterrevolutionary forces that destroyed
the Soviet Union and deformed workers states in East Europe in 1989-1992.
Championing the “democratic” credentials of the imperialists and their chosen
counterrevolutionary henchmen, they helped destroy the world’s first workers
state, condemning the proletariat of East Europe and the former USSR to the
penury dictated by the imperialist stranglehold on the world market. This
underlies the commitment in practice of these fake Marxists to the parliamentary
reformist sandbox of bourgeois “democracy,” tailing right-wing social democrats
like Labour’s Tony Blair in Britain or, in countries like Italy or France,
popular-front coalitions of reformist workers parties and openly bourgeois
parties.
The October Revolution remains our compass. It demonstrated how a
revolutionary party rooted in the proletariat can win the working masses away
from the reformist class traitors and lead them to power. The critical factor
was the subjective element—the revolutionary party. That was the difference
between Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1923.
The strategic task posed for German communists is to break the
proletariat from the Social Democracy. As Trotsky rightly concluded, that could
have been done in 1923. The obstacle was neither the objective situation nor the
“omnipotence” of the Social Democracy; it lay with the failure to pursue a
revolutionary line, particularly in the critical time period. Here the
programmatic weaknesses of the German party, reinforced rather than corrected by
a Comintern that itself was beginning to degenerate, proved decisive. We seek to
critically assimilate the lessons of 1923 in order to strengthen our
international party for the revolutionary struggles that lie ahead.