The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

theses on tactics were adopted, despite the presence of left communists such as Bordiga and Sylvia Pankhurst. In
reality, the KPD’s programme of 18 th December which, with the programme of the Russian CP, had been at the
basis of the Komintern’s foundation, was abandoned. In recommending work in the trades unions, the KPD’s
merger with the USPD, and the CPGB’s entry into the Labour Party, the Komintern rejected the Left’s theses in
favour of those of the Right. There was a serious danger that mass parties would be formed from parties that had
only just left the 2 nd International, and were barely purged of their opportunist majorities. The Komintern was
being seduced by the mirage of numbers. Had not Zinoviev answered Wijnkoop (who was playing the radical to
earn forgiveness for his pro-Entente policy during the war) that “[the Congress] should listen to the [USPD]
delegates who represent 800,000 members and speak to the masses, rather than to the advice of Wijnkoop,
whose party only has 1,500 members after 15 years of activity?” 470 The way was open to the formation of
enormous parties: like the 400,000 strong party created in December 1920 by the merger of Levi’s party with the
left wing of the USPD; or the formation of Šmeral’s Czechoslovak Communist Party in May 1921, a particularly
opportunist party whose 350,000 members regrouped the majority of the country’s workers. 471
The Komintern was certainly aware of the ‘danger’. It recognised the “threat of invasion by undecided and
hesitant groups that have not yet been able to break with the ideology of the 2 nd International”. Many communist
parties still contained “opportunist and reformist elements”. As early as 1919, a high price had been paid for the
merger of Hungarian communists and socialists. 472 The Komintern’s ‘21 Conditions’ for membership were
drawn up against precisely this danger. Although they had been directed against the right-wing and centrist
elements, they were just as valid for the left communist current. Point 9 obliged the communist parties to work
within the unions. Point 11 – like Bukharin’s Theses on parliamentarism – implied a duty to get deputies elected
to parliament. As for the 21 st Point, drawn up by Bordiga, it could exclude the right, but also the left, should the
latter reject Points 9 and 11. Point 12, demanding “an iron discipline close to military discipline”, and directed
against anti-centralist elements, was a serious threat to the communist parties’ lefts, which were far from being
federalists in the same way as Rühle. Wijnkoop, a member of the commission for conditions of admission to the
Congress, made skilful use of these same conditions to eliminate the left from the CPH a year later.
But the Komintern did not want to eliminate the left; it considered that the danger from the right was much
greater, and that ‘left wing radicalism’ was in the end a benign disorder. As Lenin wrote: “the error represented
by left doctrinarism in the communist movement is at present a thousand times less dangerous and less serious
than the error represented by right doctrinarism...”. 473
The Dutch-German current was not, therefore, kept away from the 2 nd Congress. The KAPD sent two official
delegates, Jan Appel and Franz Jung – with Willy Klahre from the KAPD. Due to the difficulty to arrive to
Russia by other middles, they embarked in Cuxhaven as stowaways in the fishing boat “Senator Schröder”, and
hijacked it, with the help of the sailor of Cuxhaven Hermann Knüfken, from the KAPD, and the help of the crew.
As they passed the northern tip of Heligoland, they arrested the captain and his officers at gunpoint and locked
them up in the forward cabin. The journey began on the 20 th April and ended on 1 st May at Alexandrovsk, the
seaport of Murmansk. They were received as comrades, and thereafter travelled on the railway, built during the
war, to Petrograd. In Petrograd, they met briefly Lenin, who gave to the hijackers the nickname of “comrades
pirates”.
They presented the views of their current during the Congress, and formally committed themselves, following
the Komintern’s open letter to the KAPD 474 , to the exclusion from the party of both the ‘national-bolsheviks’ and
470 Der II. Kongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale. Protokoll der Verhandlungen vom 19. Juli in Petrograd und
vom 23. Juli bis 7. August1920 in Moskau (Hamburg: Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1921), p. 133. [Reprint:
Erlangen: Karl Liebknecht Verlag, 1970.]
471 With the entry of Südeten German communists, the Czech CP had 400,000 members, in a population of 12 million.
Bohumir Šmeral had been a ‘social-patriot’ in 1914.
472 “Requirements of membership in the Communist International ”.
473 Lenin, ‘Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder’ (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), p. 108.
474 “Open letter to the members of the KAPD (2 nd June 1920)”, translated in: Broué, op. cit., p. 224-242. Apart from the
exclusion of Rühle and the ‘national-Bolsheviks’, the Komintern’s Executive demanded the acceptance of the 2 nd Congress’
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