Die Neue Zeit
28th September 2009, 03:19
USPD vs. KPD: lessons for organizing today (http://www.revleft.com/vb/uspd-vs-kpd-t103415/index.html)
Today, Die Linke's general secretary Dietmar Bartsch exclaimed, "You have to celebrate when you win!" (http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20090927-22189.html)
This was the same man who called the inter-war Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany, or USPD) "an outstanding role model for Left politics today" that "paid attention to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics."
I have stated in my link above that the KPD was an ultra-leftist formation from the outset:
The mere splitting away from the class-collaborationist, ultra-rightist tred-iunionisty in the SPD is good enough. Of the five tendencies comrade Macnair wrote about in regards to the workers' movement (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/495/marxism.html), three tendencies belonged to the USPD: the Bernsteinian pacifists (who realized how wrong it was to work with the economists to their right), the collapsing center, and the "Hegelian Marxist" left.
While Rosa Luxemburg lamented about the lack of an organisational infrastructure in the ultra-left KPD (I would think newspapers would be part of this deficit), the USPD took quite a number of the SPD's newspapers, and maybe even more "innovative panoply of methods for spreading enlightenment and 'combination'" (Lars Lih's description for sports clubs, social groups, cultural societies, etc.).
Over time, the "profoundly revolutionary wing" of the USPD became the majority, and the "ultra-revisionist wing" became the minority. Why did this majority do the exact reverse of the RSDLP's liquidationism episode and liquidate itself instead of fighting the other side?
However, I have found out that my description may have been an understatement. There was a fourth tendency within the USPD that actually maintained the politics of the pre-war Marxist center (Kautsky, Guesde, Hilferding, the Bolsheviks, and Iskra-ites amongst the Mensheviks) and combated certain renegades and their cover for right-syndicalist tendencies towards cozying up to the mislabelled "Majority" SPD. However, they had a negative attitude towards the sectarian exit of the Spartacists led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and certainly towards the continued, propped-up existence of the KPD after the revolutionary period in Germany had passed.
This tendency consisted of realo figures such as Arthur Crispien, Wilhelm Dittman, Georg Ledebour, Paul Levi (later reconciliation in spite of the initial breakaway), Theodor Liebknecht, and the feminist Toni Sender.
Any particular thoughts on this USPD center tendency and how they organized?
Today, Die Linke's general secretary Dietmar Bartsch exclaimed, "You have to celebrate when you win!" (http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20090927-22189.html)
This was the same man who called the inter-war Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany, or USPD) "an outstanding role model for Left politics today" that "paid attention to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics."
I have stated in my link above that the KPD was an ultra-leftist formation from the outset:
The mere splitting away from the class-collaborationist, ultra-rightist tred-iunionisty in the SPD is good enough. Of the five tendencies comrade Macnair wrote about in regards to the workers' movement (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/495/marxism.html), three tendencies belonged to the USPD: the Bernsteinian pacifists (who realized how wrong it was to work with the economists to their right), the collapsing center, and the "Hegelian Marxist" left.
While Rosa Luxemburg lamented about the lack of an organisational infrastructure in the ultra-left KPD (I would think newspapers would be part of this deficit), the USPD took quite a number of the SPD's newspapers, and maybe even more "innovative panoply of methods for spreading enlightenment and 'combination'" (Lars Lih's description for sports clubs, social groups, cultural societies, etc.).
Over time, the "profoundly revolutionary wing" of the USPD became the majority, and the "ultra-revisionist wing" became the minority. Why did this majority do the exact reverse of the RSDLP's liquidationism episode and liquidate itself instead of fighting the other side?
However, I have found out that my description may have been an understatement. There was a fourth tendency within the USPD that actually maintained the politics of the pre-war Marxist center (Kautsky, Guesde, Hilferding, the Bolsheviks, and Iskra-ites amongst the Mensheviks) and combated certain renegades and their cover for right-syndicalist tendencies towards cozying up to the mislabelled "Majority" SPD. However, they had a negative attitude towards the sectarian exit of the Spartacists led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and certainly towards the continued, propped-up existence of the KPD after the revolutionary period in Germany had passed.
This tendency consisted of realo figures such as Arthur Crispien, Wilhelm Dittman, Georg Ledebour, Paul Levi (later reconciliation in spite of the initial breakaway), Theodor Liebknecht, and the feminist Toni Sender.
Any particular thoughts on this USPD center tendency and how they organized?