USPD vs. KPD: Letter Debate

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=838

[b]Realisten

Jack Conrad wrote: “Lenin cited the Spartacists and the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party. And it is worth adding that, with the merger of these two organisations in October 1920, the resulting united Communist Party of Germany assumed genuinely mass proportions” (‘“Leftwing” communism’ Weekly Worker October 14).

In a blog series on internationals, Louis Proyect said: “The German Communist Party would have been much better off if the Comintern had simply left it alone.” I’ll go further than what he said or what Lenin wrote, considering that he didn’t truly appreciate Kautsky’s framework for what a revolutionary period was and what it wasn’t.

The German worker-class movement would have been better off if the ultra-left KPD hadn’t been formed in the first place - at the expense of “an outstanding role model for left politics today” that, through its own state within a state, “paid attention to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics” (to quote Die Linke’s Dietmar Bartsch).

Left-Wing Communism did not contain the one key suggestion that was needed to counter that infantile disorder that was German Spartacism: dissolve the KPD itself into a majority tendency of the USPD to counter the rightwing, SPD ass-kissing renegades in that party’s leadership.

Conrad conveniently forgets that the USPD had a centre tendency as well as a right and a left. This tendency, which was hostile to both the SPD and the Comintern, consisted of ‘Realisten’/‘Realos’ (yes, I am using Die Linke language here, but I distinguish between real Realo-ism and the pseudo-Realo-ism of the Die Linke right wing): Theodor Liebknecht, Arthur Crispien, Wilhelm Dittman, Georg Ledebour, Tony Sender, etc.

Internationally, this means that the Comintern itself should have folded into the International Working Union of Socialist Parties, the closest organisation to a proper third worker-class international (between communist left sectarianism and reformist labour internationals).

Jacob Richter
email

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=839

USPD and KPD

Jacob Richter’s letter raises some interesting questions about the German left during the formation of Comintern (October 21). A period rich in history, from which we can draw a lot of positive lessons today. However, I think comrade Richter is drawing the wrong ones.

Despite sharing his frustration with the leftism that was rife in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) at its formation, I think he is wrong to say “it would have been better” if the formation of the KPD had not occurred. Actually, it should have happened a lot earlier. Unlike in Russia, when revolutionary crisis broke, there was no distinct, well known, mass, revolutionary organisation with a programme to lead the majority to power.

The final straw for those like Rosa Luxemburg, in splitting from Independent Social Democracy (USPD) to form the KPD, was the fact that USPD leaders Willhelm Dittmann, Hugo Haase and Emil Barth had decided to become the new government’s ‘people’s commissars’ alongside the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Although the USPD leaders soon stood down from the coalition with the SPD, they had provided ‘left’ cover for the capitalist state it created and the brutal repression of the German working class which ensued.

Forged late, in the heat of enormous repression and semi-legality/illegality, the new KPD obviously had problems. Its best leaders were murdered within weeks. Paul Levi only survived because he was in prison. In such conditions of counterrevolution painted in ‘socialist’ colours, rank-and-file KPD members drew understandable, yet potentially disastrous, conclusions: reject working alongside the SPD supporters of the butcher Gustav Noske or USPD socialists in the unions, boycott the national assembly and so on. But “German Spartacism”, as comrade Richter puts it, was not one homogeneous bloc and, like the USPD itself, was to be radically transformed by the turbulent events of 1919-20.

Partly due to Lenin’s polemical intervention and the skilful leadership of Paul Levi, the KPD came round to the view that its future as a party depended on the rank and file of the USPD. Many of those who rejected this went over to the syndicalist dead end that was the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD).

Fortunately, more and more German workers were looking to Russia and the example of the Bolsheviks as their model. And these were the people that the KPD, alongside the newly formed Comintern, were looking to win: the majority of those workers in the USPD committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat and unity with their brothers and sisters in Comintern. After the split at the Halle congress in October 1920, hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers were united behind the banner of an openly communist organisation with an openly communist programme.

Comrade Richter is wrong to suggest that there was a tenable ‘third way’ between Comintern and the Second International in the form of the International Working Union of Socialist Parties. Despite making much noise about the “national reform socialists” of the SPD, within just two years those from the USPD ‘centre’ tendency around Dittmann, Arthur Crispien et al were back in the governing SPD, alongside those, like the new German finance minister, Rudolph Hilferding, with whom they had allied against the so-called “Moscow dictatorship” during the Halle congress. This was the nature of the split, and why things ended up the way they did.

Ben Lewis
London

[Zanthorus]

The KAPD.

Lewis' claim that the KAPD was a "syndicalist dead end" is nothing but slander. The German Left did allow a number of disparate currents to write for their papers, including elements who confused the Arbeiter-Unionen for traditional syndicalist unions. This allowed the KPD Central Committee to launch a torrent of calumnies against the Left's apparent syndicalism by picking and choosing a few choice quotes. This would be like me going through back issues of the Weekly Worker, finding a few articles by Stalinists, then using quotes from them to show that the CPGB (PCC) is still a Stalinist organisation.

The Arbeiter-Unionen movement based itself on the concept of 'unitary organisation', which implies a unity of economic and political functions. The Unionen were not just trade-unions, they were revolutionary organisations. The basis for entry into them was the acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Unionen differed themselves from traditional syndicalist unions by their willingness to affiliate with the Third International and it's parties.

Lewis also talks about the KPD Left "going over" to the KAPD, as if this was a voluntary act. In fact it was the result of the beuracratic maneuvering of the Levi leadership. At the Heidelburg Congress they published a set of theses on the tactics of the KPD, which state that anyone who did not accept them would be kicked out of the party. Initially the KPD left thought there had been a misunderstanding and tried to negotiate an alteration of the theses, and even sent delegates to the KPD's third congress to argue their position, but the Central Committee remained intransigent.

This is how Gilles Dauvé describes the KPD after the Left was expelled:


After the leftists were excluded, in a process which started at the Second Congress (October 1919) and was completed by the Third Congress (February 1920), the KPD, strictly speaking, no longer existed. The reports of the delegates to the Third Congress provided evidence of the party’s utter prostration. In Berlin, out of 8,000 members, only 500 supported the central committee; in Essen, 43 out of 2,000, etc. “After his experience in Rhineland-Westphalia, Brandler resigned himself to saying, ‘We no longer have a party at all’.” Its weakness led the KPD to regularly support the directives of the USPD during this period, and was also the reason for the extremely “prudent” position it assumed in March of 1920... [it] had been reduced to a mere skeleton financed by Moscow until it could be grafted onto the left wing of the USPD.

The creation of the KAPD was a reaction to the opportunist moves of the Levi leadership towards a fascile unity with the centrists.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The response to Ben Lewis was gutted down a bit, so here's a fuller text:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=840

In between (originally titled "German Left")

The majority of the KPD left were expelled after refusing to accept a "bureaucratic-centralist" maneuvering by the tendency around Levi. The only mistake the KPD left did was to facilitate confusion between traditional syndicalism and red unionism.

For my part, this just illustrates the sheer hypocrisy of the KPD leadership.

In response to Ben Lewis (Letters, October 28), I would say that if the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) had been formed before 1917, during an earlier phase in the revolutionary period, then its existence could have been more justifiable. That is why my opinion of the Parti de Gauche in France is lukewarm at best: It was an attempt to take advantage of the PCF's moribund state and steal thunder from the NPA.

German workers did look to the Russian Revolution as a model, but did they look to the Bolsheviks or the Menshevik-Internationalists? Along with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the MIs won soviet elections in 1918, which the Bolsheviks - having lost majority political support from the working class - reacted to with Milrevcom takeover substitutions, gangster-style shutdowns and Cheka arrests. In short, there were Bolshevik coups, but not in 1917.

As comrade Macnair noted, by 1920 Germany exited from a revolutionary period. The insulting slogan "Moscow dictatorship" was quite valid. I don’t have extensive information on all the figures of the Independent Social Democracy (USPD) center, just that the likes of Theodor Liebknecht and Georg Ledebour were hostile to both the Social-Democratic Party and the KPD/Comintern. They were consistent realos.

To say that the USPD was “an outstanding role model for left politics today” actually says more about today’s situation than the more revolutionary situation back then. On the left, the participatory economists have called for a Participatory Socialist International, but let us not forget the call from Hugo Chávez for a Fifth Socialist International (damn delays) and, more importantly, the potential for a new workers’ international in between the two proposals (ie, ideologically positioned like the International Working Union of Socialist Parties) as a result of bold initiative on the part of Die Linke’s international commission, headed by Oskar Lafontaine.



Beyond this letter, I should note that "in between" refers to being in between ultra-left ambitions for the PSI to be a World Social Forum Mark II (anti-partyism) and the FSI being on the opportunist right on "anti-imperialist" geopolitical issues (most notably the Iranian regime).

[bricolage]

As comrade Macnair noted, by 1920 Germany exited from a revolutionary period.
It's all very well to say this now but I would imagine for the political militants of the time it certainly still seemed a revolutionary period.