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large towns passed from capitalism to socialism, the open countryside from feudalism to capitalism. In the large
towns a proletarian revolution was accomplished; in the country, the bourgeois revolution” 598 .
The Russian revolution was then, according to the KAPD, a “compromise between two revolutions”. 599 The
‘serfs’ in the countryside were allied with the proletariat against the ‘feudal nobility’. And these same ‘serfs’
constituted the ‘bourgeois class’ by occupying the land. This conception was divorced from historical reality,
serfdom having been abolished since the end of the 19 th century and the countryside widely penetrated by
capitalism since Stolypin. On the other hand, the immense majority of the peasantry were too economically
backward to be considered as a bourgeoisie. The KAPD looked for the bourgeoisie where they were not to be
found. The bureaucracy was analysed in terms of its social composition and not of its function in the relations of
production: the bureaucracy was the expression of the petty-bourgeoisie on the basis of an economy of scarcity
and not of a bourgeois function.
As opposed to the council communism of the thirties, the KAPD and Gorter gave no support to the idea that the
Russian revolution could only have been bourgeois. This could only have been a regression, an involution; the
phase of the proletarian revolution was on the agenda in Russia, but had been liquidated to the profit of the
bourgeois state, corresponding to the lower phase of the bourgeois revolution 600 : “Proletarian Soviet Russia is
starting to be transformed into a bourgeois state” 601 “The Russian proletariat has been dispossessed of its
state...” 602
The consequence was that Soviet Russia must “reach a point of supporting the international counterrevolution”.
603 This position called into question the defence of Soviet Russia. This defence was “to be
considered case by case”: its government must be supported by the world proletariat on the condition that “it
fought with the Russian industrial proletariat against the common enemy: the feudal nobility; it must be fought
when it represented the interests of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry against the Russian proletariat”. 604
In spite of the counter-revolution the KAPD strongly affirmed that the lessons of the Russian proletarian
revolution remained valid world-wide; they must be applied anew in the future Russian revolution:
“The revolutionary proletariat of the entire world owes the Russian proletariat an infinite debt. The Russian
proletariat has shown it the ways and the methods (mass strike and insurrection) which open the way to political
power; at the same time it has shown the form of the proletarian state: the workers’ councils. There is the great
action, there is the incommensurable success of the Russian revolution!”. 605
The second point approached by Dethmann’s pamphlet was the attitude that the KAPD should adopt towards the
Russian Communist Party. This remained uncertain. On the one hand, implicitly, the Bolshevik Party, although
in degeneration, was considered capable of producing proletarian fractions: the KAPD relied heavily on the
Workers’ Opposition for the birth, through a split, of a second proletarian party. On the other hand, the Russian
598 (A. Dethmann), Die Sowjetregierung und die 3. Internationale im Schlepptau der intemationalen Bourgeoisie!, op. cit.,
p. 7.
599 Op. cit., p. 17.
600 The militants of the KAPD protested at the congress of September 1921 against a schematic vision of ‘stages’ of the
revolution; thus Carl Happ, KAP official in Hamburg: “The schematic theory of stages, feudalism, capitalism, communism,
I consider it a dry and accursed theory...” [Proceedings already cited, pp. 96-99).
601 (A. Dethmann), Die Sowjetregierung und die 3. Internationale im Schlepptau der Intemationalen Bourgeoisie!,op. cit.,
p. 15.
602 Idem, p. 22.
603 Ibid.
604 Idem, p. 25.
605 Idem, p. 28.
Pannekoek defended the ‘proletarian character’ of this revolution; he also emphasised the ‘proletarian role’ of the Bolshevik
Party: “The action of the Bolsheviks is incommensurably great for the revolution in Western Europe. They have first, by
taking political power, given an example to the proletariat of the entire world... By their praxis they have posed the great
principles of communism: dictatorship of the proletariat and the system of soviets or councils...” [In: Proletarier, No. 6,
June 1921, ‚Sowjet Rußland und der west-europäische Kommunismus’.]
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