The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Led by Wolffheim and Laufenberg, this tendency had the majority in Hamburg. 455 It advocated a revolutionary
war against the Entente, supported by the Red Army. Wolffheim and Laufenberg were theoreticians of the
Unionen, and were spreading nationalist conceptions foreign to Marxism as early as 1919: “The enterprise
councils become the element of national regroupment, of the national organisation, of national unity, because
they are the basic element, the original cell of socialism”. 456
Worst of all, the Hamburg tendency saw nationalism, not internationalism as a weapon of the proletariat: “The
national idea has ceased to be a means of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, and is
turning against the former [...] The great dialectic of history makes the national idea an instrument of proletarian
power against the bourgeoisie.” 457
The ‘anti-party’ Unionist tendency of Rühle and Pfemfert
The communist tendency of Rühle was the only in the German Workers’ councils to resign in November 1918,
one week after the break-up of the revolution: “Every day the revolution is more and more revealed as a
grandiose deceptive manoeuvre, desired and prepared by the bourgeois government in order to save capitalist
society from threatened doom. […] The task of pushing forward, escalating, and completing the incipient
revolutionary movement can be accomplished only by Communists.” (Rühle, chairman of the workers and
soldiers’, Dresden, 16 th Nov.) After March 1919, the tendency of Rühle decided to contribute to the building of
the revolutionary factories organisations (Betriebsorganisationen), forerunner of the Unionen, born after Oct.
1919.
The Unionen, with some 80,000 members in 1920 (this was to peak at 200,000 in 1921) had not been admitted
into the KAPD (30,000 members), which stuck to a rigorous separation between the party and factory
organisations. A workerist minority, which was very strong in Saxony both amongst the workers and with
intellectuals like Rühle, considered that “the revolution is not a party matter”. It rejected the notion of a
proletarian political party, and any organisational centralisation, preferring federalism, and even localism. With
its ‘factoryism’, it was in fact closer to Gramsci than to Gorter, who was a firm partisan of the political party. 458
In the left radical literary periodical Die Aktion 459 , it found a centre for the regroupment of all the malcontents of
the centralisation, first of the KPD(S), then of the KAPD. In 1919, there was little difference between the
‘Unionist’ tendency and national-Bolshevism. Some, like Rühle, were very briefly propagandists for a
predecessor to national-communism. The ‘radical’ Rühle denounced the Versailles treaty, signed by the USPD,
in terms that differed little from those used by Wolffheim and Laufenberg: “The USPD peace is the ruin of
Germany, the end of the revolution, the strangulation of socialism, the decadence of our culture [sic], the
annihilation of our future. The only means of salvation is Bolshevism.” 460
The Berlin tendency
455 Nonetheless, the national-bolshevik tendency was fought in Hamburg by the future leaders of the KAPD: Jan Appel and
Carl Happ. It was strong also in Frankfurt, but unimportant elsewhere.
456 Kommunistische Arbeiter-Zeitung (KAZ), Hamburg, 3 rd June 1919.
457 KAZ (Hamburg), No. 19, Jan. 1920, ‚Volkskrieg und Volksorganisation’, article by Erler (Laufenberg).
458 “The communists must be the vanguard of the masses [...] They must be the pure, crystalline nucleus of the masses [...]
The international communist party alone leads towards the revolution and towards socialism.” (Gorter, August 1919, in: De
grondslagen van het communisme, Amsterdam, 1920).
459 Die Aktion was published in 1911 by Franz Pfemfert (1879-1954), who became member of the KAP in 1920-1921, until
he had left. Thereafter, the periodical was directed towards the positions of the AAU-E, till 1926. Cf. compilation of texts of
F. Pfemfert: Ich setze diese Zeitschrift wider diese Zeit (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985).
460 O. Rühle, Der USPD Frieden!, Dresden, 1919.
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