The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

KAI would be “infinitely difficult”. 613 Since they could only attempt to go “against the current”, what influence
could a KAI formed during a course towards counter-revolution have? What credibility could be given to the
presenter, Dethmann, who declared that the KAI would be constituted in countries linked to the German
bourgeois state? The Opposition delegates were far from having a clear vision. Some supported the idea that the
KAI could not be constituted in the underdeveloped countries, where parliamentarism, corresponding to the
phase of the bourgeois revolution, could be used. Others held that the precondition for the formation of the KAI
was that the Russian government withdraw from state power. 614 A minority thought that a joint opposition with
the revolutionary syndicalists was possible. Much clearer was the representative from Berlin, Adam Scharrer
supported by Jan Appel, in a minority on the central committee. 615 Wisely he put forward the need to let things
mature; not to found the International before left groups had left the Komintern; not to artificially proclaim a
new International starting from the KAPD.
However, despite the opposition from Berlin and Bremerhaven, the congress delegates decided, particularly
those from Rhineland-Westphalia, to approve the principle of the foundation of the KAI. The proposal of
Schröder, Dethmann and Goldstein to create an international Bureau of Information and Organisation was
accepted by the majority – with Gorter, Schröder, Kropf and Ivan Kolinkoev, to represent all organisations
adhering to this Bureau. Such a bureau could only serve as co-ordination between different opposition groups.
The Schröder leadership, which followed Gorter totally in this adventure, went beyond its mandate. It was as if
the KAI had already been formed: Proletarier, the theoretical periodical of the KAPD, became the journal of the
KAI.
The most surprising thing was that the KAI was in fact proclaimed before having been officially formed.
Certainly the Sylvia Pankhurst group excluded from the CPGB in September 1921 announced the entrance of
500 militants – an exaggerated number – into the KAI on 8 th October, with sections in London, Glasgow,
Liverpool, Cardiff, Northampton and Southampton, Sheffield. In this last town, the CWP of Pankhurst formed in
1922 a short-lived ‘All Workers Union’.
With the Bulgarians, the Sylvia Pankhurst group constituted the bulk of a Lilliputian international army. Two
hundred militants in Holland, plus a small nucleus in Yugoslavia, supported the ‘large’ sections of the KAI. 616
613 Protokoll, idem, p. 6-14.
614 Intervention by August Wülfrath (1895?-1976?), a metal worker from Berlin, a member of the Geschäftsführender
Hauptausschuß (GHA) of the KAPD. He wrote after 1926 in the kapedist periodical Proletarier using of the pseudonym of
Friedrich Oswald. Member of the SED after 1946, he was at the head of the Potsdam Library (1950-62); died in East Berlin
in the late ‘70s.
615 Adam Scharrer (1889-1948) – pseudonyms: Adam, A. Licht – son of a shepherd, ironworker, turner. In 1916, he served
as artilleryman on the Russian front. Mobilised as worker in Essen, then in Berlin in 1917, he participated to the big
armaments factories’ strikes in 1918. He had belonged to the Spartakusbund in 1918. He was a veritable pillar of the KAPD
from the split in 1922 to at least 1929. From 1924 he was proofreader in the KAPD printing in Berlin: Iszdonat. He was
expelled from the AAUD in 1929, but seemed to have written some articles for the KAZ until 1931. He maintained contact
with Paul Mattick until 1932, claiming on the “antibonzes pychosis” of his former comrades. He wrote novels, of which
some were in German CP editions (Agis Verlag). In 1933, after plunging in the clandestinity in Berlin, he was a refugee in
Prague, but quickly abandoned his revolutionary positions. He took refuge in the USSR in 1934, firstly in Moscow, then in
Ukraine in 1935, in Peredelkino, and finally in Tashkent in 1941-43. Soviet editions published some novels of Scharrer.
During the war he worked for the Russian war propaganda machine, in German language, like other German writers:
Theodor Plivier (1892-1955), Alfred Kurella (1895-1945), Erich Weinert (1890-1953), president of the stalinist comité
“Freies Deutschland”. Returning to Germany in June 1945, he worked for the new stalinist regime in the ‘cultural services’
(Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands). He claimed that he had been ‘non-party’ since 1920 (sic) [cf.
Hans Harald Müller, in: IWK, Berlin, March 1975, Heft 1). Certainly the East German editions of his novels were silent on
his membership of the KAPD. His best known novels are: Vaterlandslose Gesellen: das erste Kriegsbuch eines Arbeiters
(1929), on World War I, reprint in 1974; In jungen Jahren: Erlebnisroman eines Arbeiters, on his worker’s youth, reprint
1977. It exists a republication of his whole literary work: Adam Scharrer, Gesammelte Werke (Berlin-Weimar: Aufbau
Verlag, 1979).
616 These were the ‘Revolutionary Communists of Yugoslavia’. In a letter to the KAPD Congress, the opposition group had
not pronounced in favour of a KAI, but on the contrary for a unitary opposition core inside the 3 rd International” [cf.
164