The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

However, the circular of the Komintern’s Executive Committee (ECCI) on 1 st September 1919 marked a turning
point on this question. Although parliamentary activity and electoral campaigns were still defined as “auxiliary
means”, conquering parliament seemed to be equivalent to conquering the state. The Komintern returned to the
social-democratic conception of Parliament as the centre of the revolutionary struggle: “[...militants] go into
parliament in order to appropriate this machinery [our emphasis] and to help the masses behind the
Parliamentary walls to blow it.” 415
Much more serious was the break between the left and the Komintern on the union question. In a period in which
the workers’ councils had not yet appeared, should Communists’ work within the unions, which had now
become counter-revolutionary, or rather fight to destroy them and to set up real organs for the revolutionary
struggle? The left was divided. Bordiga’s fraction inclined towards the formation of ‘real’ red unions: Fraina’s
Communist Party of America supported working with the revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW and refusing
any form of ‘entryism’ in the reformist unions. The minority in the CPH, with Gorter and Pannekoek, became
increasingly hostile to working within the NAS, considering that a break with the anarcho-syndicalist current
was inevitable.
The exclusion of the German communist left because of their anti-parliamentarism and anti-unionism, was to
crystallise the opposition of the international communist left. The Dutch minority was in fact at the head of
German and international ‘Linkskommunismus’.
The German Question
The leadership of the KPD expelled the left majority from the party in September 1919 by means of a
manoeuvre. From the December 1918 Congress the slogan of this majority had been ‘leave the unions!’ (‘Heraus
aus den Gewerkschaften!’). Communist militants, in Bremen and Hamburg especially, attacked the offices of the
Social-Democratic unions led by Carl Legien, seized their funds and distributed them to unemployed workers.
When the first Unions (Unionen) were formed, the central committee of Levi and Brandler at first supported
them: they called for the formation of Unionen in the railways and among the agricultural workers. The factory
organisations (Betriebsorganisationen), made up of workers and revolutionary delegates, centralised in order to
form Unionen. With the downturn in the revolution the latter seemed to be organs of political struggle, the
successors of the factory councils. Throughout 1919 they spread in the main sectors of the working class:
miners, shipyard workers, sailors, in the engineering industry.
From the summer of 1919, the position of the central committee of Paul Levi and Brandler changed, not without
some ulterior political motives. They wanted to get closer to the Independents in the USPD who controlled the
opposition in the official unions. They began to attack the left as a ‘syndicalist tendency’. In reality, such a
tendency constituted a minority: in Wasserkannte (Bremen and Hamburg) around Laufenberg (pseudonym: Karl
Erler) and Wolffheim, who dreamed of a German IWW, and in Saxony around Rühle. These two tendencies
underestimated the existence of a political party of the proletariat, which they tended to reduce to a propaganda
circle for the Unions. This was not the case for the vast majority who were to form the KAPD in April 1920:
they were extremely hostile to both political anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism. They saw the
Unionen simply as organs of struggle that carried out the directives of the party. They were thus
antisyndicalist. 416
415 Zinoviev, ‘Le parlementarisme et la lutte pour les soviets’, in: P. Broué, Du premier au deuxième congrès de
l’Internationale Communiste (Paris: EDI, 1979), pp. 97-112.
416 The KAPD was hostile to anarcho-syndicalism as represented by the FAUD, formed in 1919, which adopted ‘await and
see’ position in March 1920 at the time of the Kapp putsch, whereas the communist left took part in the armed struggle in
the Ruhr. The KPD for its part did not turn up its nose at the syndicalism of the FAU of Gelsenkirchen, which came under
its control in 1920-21.
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