A Marxist Historian
24th June 2012, 05:58
The following analyses of the Comintern "workers government" slogan, as applied to the German Revolution of 1923, are excerpted from a longer article analyzing the failed 1923 German Revolution from the Spartacist theoretical magazine. Very much worth reading in itself, but this forum is theory not history.
-M.H.-
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http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/56/germany1923.html
Spartacist English edition No. 56
Spring 2001
http://www.icl-fi.org/images/spacer.gifhttp://www.icl-fi.org/images/spacer.gif
Rearming Bolshevism:
A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern
....
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 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....
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
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 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 [I]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)
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.”
....
-M.H.-
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http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/56/germany1923.html
Spartacist English edition No. 56
Spring 2001
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Rearming Bolshevism:
A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern
....
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 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....
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
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 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 [I]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)
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.”
....