The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

the nationalist, even anti-Semitic policy’ of the KPD. 687 It strongly opposed the policy of ‘workers’
governments’ which it characterised as anti-worker governments. 688 It had, finally condemned the formation of
‘Proletarian Centuries’ (Proletarische Hundertschaften) by the KPD as a putchist enterprise in the absence of
workers’ councils. 689
After 1923 during the period of the ‘relative stabilisation of capitalism’ which lasted from 1924 to 1928, the
KAPD had continued its propaganda. It was convinced that although a first revolutionary wave had failed in
Germany, under the blows of the inevitable world economic crisis a second one would once more sweep over the
country. This was somewhat simplistic. Proletarier, the KAPD’s theoretical organ, wrote in January 1926: “If
1924 was the year of stabilisation, 1925 the year of crisis, 1926 will be the year of struggles”. 690
In fact, 1926 was a year of intense KAPD activity directed at the left of the KPD, which rejected Bolshevisation.
The KAPD by no means considered the KPD as a ‘bourgeois party’ but rather as a ‘centrist party’ from which
revolutionary militants could emerge, out of the crisis in the sections of the Komintern. 691 It was a question, as
the KAPD noted, not of forming an opposition within the KPD but of beginning a political balance sheet in order
to start down the revolutionary road:
“Like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, [the opposition] fights the effects, where it is a question of revealing the causes
which have a fundamental significance for the structure and field of action of the revolutionary workers’
movement [...] Instead of throwing the gauntlet at the head of the party, with a positive critique, this left fights
for the legalisation of its opposition [...] The left in the KPD must soon decide if it wants to run behind the
wagon of history by moaning and making a row or if it wants to oppose the united front of capitalism from
Moscow to Washington with the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat.” 692
Opposed to a regroupment of ‘malcontents’ without principles, the KAPD waited for the KPD opposition to be
excluded, to begin the work of clarification. From May 1926 onwards, a crowd of groups, often politically
heterogeneous, which had been constituted as fractions with the KPD, had indeed been excluded:
Ernst Schwarz and Karl Korsch’s, ‘Entschiedene Linke’ (‘Resolute Left’) group, with about 7,000 members;
the Ivan Katz group which together with the Franz Pfemfert group formed an organisation of 6,000
members, close to the AAU-E, under the name of the cartel of communist organisations of the left, and
which published the journal Spartakus. The latter became the organ of the Spartakusbund no. 2;
687 See, for example, Paul Frölich: “Those who share the national interest must ally themselves with the fighting proletariat,
must want the revolution... We don’t deny the necessity of national defence, when it is on the agenda…” [Rote Fahne,
Nationale Frage und Revolution, 3 rd August 1923.] Or Ruth Fischer, addressing nazi students: “Those who call for a
struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class strugglers, even if they don’t know it. You are against Jewish
capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post,
stamp on them” [meeting of 25 th July 1923, reported in Die Aktion No. 14, 1923). The KAPD gave a florilège of this kind of
nationalist prosa in its pamphlet: Die KPD im eigenem Spiegel. Aus der Geschichte der KPD und der 3. Internationale,
(Berlin-Brandenburg, 1926), pp. 59-79.
688 See KAZ No. 75, September 1923, ‘Zur Frage der Arbeiter und Bauernregierung:’ “We are not a legal party and we have
never yet accorded any value to legality. If necessary, we would fight the “workers’ government” from conspiratorial
hiding-places, like the Bolsheviks fought Tsarism”. Finally the KAPD, in KAZ, No. 71, Sept. 1923 (‘Neues Blutbad der
sächsischen Arbeiter und Bauernregierung’) recalled that the ‘workers’ government in Saxony had fired on a demonstration
of unemployed, leaving 3 dead and 30 wounded.
689 Members of the KAPD who participated in the KPD’s ‘Proletarian Centuries’ (‘Proletarische Hundertschaften’) were
expelled.
690 Proletarier, Heft 1, Jan. 1926, ‚Dem Jahrgang 1926 zum Geleit’. According to a police report, the Proletarier had a
printing of 7,000 copies. [See: E. Ritter, op. cit., R134/23, 16.04.1924.)
691 See for example the article by Carl Happ, under the pseudonym of Carl Schlicht, in: Proletarier No. 8, August 1927: Der
Zentrismus in der KPD. Stalinism in Russia was also described as ‘centrist’: “the struggle against Moscow is firstly the
struggle against this centrism: unmasking it is the principal task of proletarian class politics”.
692 ‚Die Zukunft der Linken in der KPD’, by Carl Schlicht [Carl Happ], in: Proletarier, No. 2/3, April 1926.
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