The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

looked to changes in the sociological composition of the working class since the first world war: to the
emergence of the ‘mass worker’, whose situation, with the introduction of Taylorism, is different from that of the
skilled workers. The latter are reformist, partisans of the trade unions, whereas the ‘mass worker’ is
spontaneously opposed to the ‘reformist’ unions and in favour of radical revolutionary action. Apart from the
writers’ enthusiasm for these ‘lower’ strata of the proletariat which they see as the sociological base of workers’
radicalism and left communism, the interpretation is essentially the same as that of Geyer and Rosenberg.
This sociological vision does not correspond to historical reality. The militants of the KAPD and the AAU Game
from all sectors of the German working class, from old industries as well as from new ones. Many of them
worked in the great concentration of the Ruhr (mines, steel), in the Wasserkannte (Hamburg and Bremen), in
shipbuilding, in the merchant navy and even the fishing industry. They had a very strong presence, in 1920,
among the skilled workers of Berlin (transport, electricity, steel, etc). Very strong in the big industrial
concentrations, they also had many members in the small enterprises of Saxony alongside the huge Leuna
chemical plants (20,000 workers) near Halle, which was a bastion of the AAU and the KAPD. Furthermore, it
was in the small factories of Saxony that the KAPD came up against the most problems: the workers affiliated to
the AAU, unlike those of the big factories, showed a visceral distrust of any centralised organisation and of any
discipline. In the end they left the AAU for the anticentralist AAU-E and developed a localist, workerist cult of
‘the factory chimney’. In The Netherlands, the KAPN had a lot of influence in old sectors of the working class
(cigar workers, diamond workers, textiles), sectors that regrouped both highly skilled and unskilled workers, as
well as in more modern sectors like shipbuilding. The leaders of the KAPN were often ‘old style’ workers:
Emmanuel and Bram Korper were cigar workers.
The social composition of the KAPD does not appear to show that it was overwhelmingly made up of unskilled
workers. Many of the workers in the party were skilled, such as Appel, Scharrer and Mattick. The majority of
party militants had been through social democracy and the trade union movement before the war. It was the
same with the KAPD’s mass organisation, the AAU. While there were tendencies towards the rejection of
organisation and authority, these tendencies were generalised throughout the German working class as a reaction
against social democracy and the trade unions, which had participated in the war and smashed the revolution
with the aid of the Freikorps. It was more a political reaction than a rejection of the ‘higher strata’, of a ‘labour
aristocracy’ assimilated with the trade unions. The fall in union membership between 1919 and 1922 shows that
even the skilled layers of the proletariat felt this same hostility towards the trade unions. A significant number of
the latter also joined the AAU.
Finally, another sociologically based explanation was developed in the KPD by Paul Levi, the party leader.
According to him, ‘left radicalism’ (cf. Die Internationale no. 26, December 1920) was, because of its activism
and putschism, an expression of the social weight of the “lumpen proletariat”, which, moreover, he assimilated
with the unemployed. It is symptomatic that this position was rejected even by a determined adversary of the
KAP like Karl Radek (cf. Die Internationale no. 3, March 1921), who insisted on the revolutionary role of the
unemployed.
It does not at all appear to be the case that the KAPD, and left communism in general, regrouped a significant
fraction of the “lumpen proletariat”. The latter constitutes a social stratum distinct from the unemployed, who
are workers momentarily ejected from the process of production. Marx and the Marxists defined the “lumpen
proletariat” either as a sub-proletariat which had never been integrated into wage labour (cf. The German
Ideology, Collected Works, Vol. 5.) and reduced to a state of vagabondage, or as a stratum of declassed elements
who have fallen into banditry. According to Marx – Class Struggle in France, C.W., vol. 10, p. 62 -, it forms a
“mass quite distinct from the industrial proletariat. It is a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all sorts,
living off the garbage of society, people without a definite trace, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [without
home, fearing neither God nor Law], varying according to the cultural level of their particular nation, never able
to repudiate their lazzaroni character”.
In fact, in 1920-21, a large part of the KAPD was composed of unemployed workers. In the unemployed
committees, KAPD members were elected in a crushing majority, as in Berlin. Very radical, the unemployed
recognised themselves in the KAPD’s call for revolution. The troops of Max Hölz and Karl Plättner, in Central
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