The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

“The KPD sees in the formation of a socialist government excluding the bourgeois-capitalist parties, a highly
desirable situation for the proletarian masses’ self-activity, their maturing in order to exercise the proletarian
dictatorship. Its attitude towards the government will be that of a loyal opposition [our emphasis], as long as this
government offers guarantees for the workers’ political activity, as long as it combats the bourgeois counterrevolution
with every means at its disposal, and as long as it does not hinder the social and organisational
strengthening of the workers.” 449
Under the august authority of the Reich Commissioner Carl Severing, a member of the SPD, the Social
Democracy certainly used “every means at its disposal”, including the Reichswehr, to crush the insurrection of
the Ruhr workers. 450 To this “loyal opposition”, the KPD added some time after a small nationalist finishing
touch: the policy of the Ebert government was condemned as “a crime against the very whole nation”. 451 The
KPD thus prefigured both the tactic of ‘workers’ governments’ and the ‘united front’ with the social democracy,
applied in 1923, and the ‘national bolshevism’ which led it, in the same year, to collaborate more or less with the
Nazis. 452
The KAPD was born against this opportunist policy, and as a party of revolutionary action. It did not see itself in
opposition to the 3 rd International: quite the contrary, it declared that it was the Spartakusbund (KPD) which was
in contradiction with the International. The KAPD’s first act, agreed unanimously by the founding Congress,
was to declare – not to request – its immediate attachment to the 3 rd International. 453
Nonetheless, although the KAPD’s programme was inspired more by the Theses of Gorter and Pannekoek than
by those of the Komintern, it was from the outset much less homogeneous than the Dutch Left. With the
KAPD’s foundation, the opposition was made up of four tendencies:
The Bremen tendency
This tendency organised the first Unionen in Northern Germany 454 ; anti-union and anti-parliamentary, it
vigorously set itself apart from the Hamburg ‘national bolshevism’. It refused to join the KAPD; as the price of
its return to the KPD, it dissolved the Union that it had founded, and took part in elections.
The “national-bolshevik” tendency
449 Die Rote Fahne, 26 th March 1920. Quoted in the KAPD pamphlet: Die KPD im eigenen Spiegel, aus der Geschichte der
KPD und der III. Internationale (Berlin: KAP Verlag, 1926). This pamphlet is a veritable mine of quotations on the KPD’s
‘opportunism’.
450 See: A. Meinberg, Aufstand an der Ruhr (Frankfurt: Verlag Roter Stern, 1973). This is the testimony of one of the Ruhr
insurrection’s communist leaders on the repression carried out by Carl Severing.
451 Die Rote Fahne, April 7, 1920. Quoted by the KAPD, in: Die KPD im eigenen Spiegel, op. cit., p. 25.
452 1923 was the year of the ‘Schlageter line’ in the KPD. Schlageter was a nazi, shot by the French army for sabotage in the
occupied Ruhr. He was presented as a “hero” by Radek, who declared in Die Rote Fahne of 23 rd June 1923: “In Germany,
the strong insistence on the nation is a revolutionary act, just as it is in the colonies.” This nationalism was shared by the
KPD’s ‘left’, presented as ‘leftist’ or ‘ultra-left’. For example, in a debate against young Nazis in a high school, Ruth
Fischer (1895-1961) glorified “our German fatherland” (quoted by Franz Pfemfert, Die Aktion, No. 14, 31 st July 1923).
453 Bericht über den Gründungsparteitag der KAPD, op. cit., p. 207. The Congress decided to send Jan Appel and Franz
Jung to Moscow, to announce this membership of the Komintern.
454 See P. Kuckuk, op. cit., pp. 318-349. A small group of 70-100 militants followed the KAPD in Bremen, and around 1,000
the local AAU. In 1924, 12 militants were still organised by the KAPD. The local group was led by Käthe Ahrens (1877-?),
ex-IKD, treasurer, and Johann Onasch (1884-1965). This last, gasman, friend of Ernst Schneider (Ikarus), was a leader of
the local AAU. After 1931, he became member of the clandestine group ‘Rote Kämpfer’; in jail in 1933 and 1936-40. After
1945 he joined the KPD in Bremen. (See also: P. Kuckuk, ‚Syndikalisten und Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei in Bremen in
der Anfangsphase der Weimarer Republik’, Archiv für die Geschichte des Widerstandes und der Arbeit (AGWA), No. 14,
Bochum 1996; pp. 15-66.)
127