The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The opposition groups in Belgium, Italy, France, Austria and the USA, which were said to be ready to join the
KAI, had no real existence.
c) The negation of the economic struggle
Such were the divisions between the Berlin district and the Schröder fraction which controlled the Executive
Committee of the party and the International Bureau that a split between the ‘top’ and the ‘base’ of the KAPD
threatened. However, when the split came it was not caused by the problem of the formation of the KAI. It was
brought on by divergences concerning intervention in immediate economic struggles, and by the bureaucratic
manoeuvres of the Schröder group.
At the beginning of 1922, in January, the theoretical triumvirate of the KAI Schröder, Goldstein and Dethmann
produced a series of articles in Kampfruf, organ of the AAU in Berlin, on the role of the Unionen (AAU) in the
class struggle. 617 They held that in the epoch of ‘the death crisis of capitalism’ wage struggles were
‘opportunist’, and no longer made any sense. The workers organised in the AAU should struggle collectively for
the revolution; struggles for demands should become a ‘private affair’ for each individual worker:
“Reformism is the struggle within capitalism for better conditions of wages and of work; in other words the
struggle for a greater share of private property. The proletarian conducts the struggle as a particular individual in
agreement with other individuals in his interest as an individual. The trades unions represent the interests of the
particular worker within capitalism.
“The AAU organises the proletarian class with one exclusive aim: the direct disappearance of capitalism as a
system; it should not take into consideration nor represent the personal interests of the individual worker within
capitalism... When a Unionist is engaged in a capitalist enterprise he makes a private contract as an individual
worker with the head of the enterprise. Should he find himself with insufficient pay to maintain his simple
material existence, then he goes anew to see his employer, as an individual worker, to demand a change in his
private contract under the form of an improvement in his conditions of pay and work... If the employer does not
agree then the Unionist, as an individual worker in the enterprise, has at his disposal a series of means for
imposing his demands, for example the strike and passive resistance.” 618
This conception, which is foreign to Marxism, is not new. It is related to Proudhonism, which denied the
necessity for economic pay struggles, and to individualist anarchism advocating the individual strike and
resistance against capitalist exploitation. The Schröder Dethmann Goldstein tendency – with somewhat
mitigated support from the Dutch and Gorter 619 – was giving in to impatience. It justified the existence of the
KAI theoretically by pretending that the only item on the agenda was the revolutionary struggles for the
conquest of power. As so often in the history of the revolutionary movement, this impatience developed during
the course of ebb in the class struggle and was based on intellectuals who tended to underestimate if not despise,
the very material reality of the daily struggle for economic demands. These elements, ‘disappointed’ in the
workers who had been idealised when the revolutionary class struggle was visible, considered that these same
workers were ‘egoists’ in struggling for their material demands. They could only “demand” a “larger share of
Protokoll, p. 16). The representative of the group of oppositionists, Grulović who, while present at the congress, signed the
appeal for a KAI with the KAPN and the Bulgarians was handed over to the police on his return to Yugoslavia by the
Yugoslavian CP centre installed in Vienna. And this was solely to prevent the formation of a CP in Yugoslavia [cf. KAPD
pamphlet, 1923: Die Kommunistische Arbeiter-Internationale, Räte-Intemationale oder Führer-Intemationale?, p. 20.]
617 Series of articles by Dethmann: Kampfruf (‘Appeal to struggle’), Nos. 4, 5, 6 and 8: ‚Die Union, was sie ist und was sie
sein soll’.
618 Die Kommunistische Arbeiter Internationale, op. cit., pp. 8-9.
619 In 1923, Gorter found it “a great pity” that the Essen leadership left its members “to conduct themselves as individuals in
wage struggles”, thus making its attitude “equivocal”, but he considered them to be correct theoretically [KAPD pamphlet,
op. cit., p. 10). Gorter is not against wage struggles here, whereas the Essen tendency had the slogan: ‘Down with wage
struggles!’, in the press and even in leaflets.
165