The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

workers, and that every three months it should be renewed, for fear of ‘bureaucratisation’ and ‘intellectuals’! Its
organ was the Rabotnitcheska Iskra, (‘Workers’ Spark’), ‘edited by proletarians’. Very workerist, the party was
made up of more than 1,000 militants and was essentially composed of workers, who had a solid, and justified
distrust for the intellectuals of the party.
c) The exclusion of the German communist Left
All these exclusions took place with the endorsement of the Executive Committee, including in the Netherlands,
where Wijnkoop relied on the support of German delegates of the VKPD on the Executives’ to justify the
expulsion of the Opposition. 581
The KAPD which had come to Moscow with the hope of modifying the Komintern’s policies and of becoming a
full member, through the lifting of the 21 Conditions for joining, was quickly disenchanted. The contacts they
had with different delegations proved that there was no possibility of creating an international opposition in the
Komintern. The most fruitful contacts were those with the Bulgarians, the Workers’ Opposition 582 the delegates
from Mexico, Luxemburg, Belgium (War van Overstraeten), from England and Scotland (Glasgow) 583 or again
with the syndicalists of the Spanish CNT and the American IWW. But, apart from the Bulgarians, these, for fear
of exclusion from the International, refused to form an organised opposition. The five delegates of the KAPD 584
had to bow to the facts: they were tragically alone, but remained in the congress to the end. This was a notable
difference from the irresponsibility of Rühle at the 2 nd Congress: “... We were alone. We had to abandon our task
of founding an opposition. But we cannot conclude that the representation of the KAPD at the Congress was not
justified and that we should have behaved a little like Rühle at the 2 nd Congress.” 585
The KAPD strove with great courage to defend its positions in the congress, on the questions on the agenda
(economic crisis and historic course; unions; Russian question; the March Action). The interventions of its
581 This is shown by a letter from Wijnkoop to Die Rote Fahne, of 15 th June 1921. The KAZ (Berlin), No. 190, put forward
the hypothesis that Wijnkoop was acting on instructions from Moscow.
582 Alexandra Kollontai’s pamphlet The Workers’ Opposition was delivered to Reichenbach, the KAPD delegate, to take out
of Russia and was soon to be translated into German, Dutch and English in the left communist press. The relations between
the KAPD and the Workers’ Opposition were rapidly broken off.
583
This was the Guy Aldred’s Scottish group strongly tainted by anarchism, which established international contacts in the
30s with council communism. Guy Aldred (1886-1963) presented himself many times as MP for the general elections. His
group, with the periodical, Solidarity, defended internationalist positions during the Second World War. For the Communist
left in Great Britain, read the essential book by M. Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism. The Movement for Workers’
Councils in Britain, 1917-1945 (London: Macmillan Press, 1988).
584 As the list of delegations attests, there were 5 KAPD representatives: Jan Appel (ps. Hempel); Alexander Schwab (ps.
Sachs); Bernhard Reichenbach (ps. Seemann); the metal worker Ludwig Meyer (ps. Bergmann). The fifth was probably
Käthe Friedländer, married to a Russian, who did not intervene. She remained after the Congress to follow up contacts with
the Russian Opposition (cf. Canne Meijer archives, map 49/3). At the time of a second, illegal trip to Russia she was
arrested by the Cheka. Another representative of the KAPD, Heinz Kagan, a Rumanian, was arrested straight after the
Congress by the Cheka in Moscow, and came within an inch of being shot as a ‘Polish-Rumanian spy’, when he made
propaganda for the KAP. Freed and returned to Rumania, he was assassinated by the police (cf. KAPD pamphlet, Die
Kommunistische Arbeiter Internationale, 1922, p. 21).
585 KAZ (Berlin), No. 219, ‚Die KAPD auf dem 3. Kongress’. It must be noted that the Executive of the Komintern had
decided to send a delegation to an eventual KAPD congress and to leave a place for its delegate in Moscow to the Executive
Committee. But in August, Lenin expressed a clear will to split “It goes without saying, however, that the semi-anarchist
elements can and should be tolerated only within certain limits ... The Third Congress of the Communist International faced
them with an ultimatum and fixed a definite time limit. If they have now voluntarily resigned from the Communist
International, all the better. Firstly, they have saved us the trouble of expelling them ... We must now pay less attention to
the KAPists. By polemicising with them we merely give them publicity. They are too unintelligent; it is wrong to take them
seriously; and it is not worth being angry with them. They have no influence among the masses, and will acquire none,
unless we make mistakes. Let us leave this tiny trend to die a natural death...” [Letter from Lenin to the German
Communists, 14 th August 1921, in: Collected Works, Vol. 32. pp. 514-515.]
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