The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Germany in 1921, were in the majority made up of unemployed workers. But when the membership of the
KAPD began to decline and the perspective of revolution faded, the KAP was mainly composed of skilled
workers, most of them still involved in production. At the beginning of 1930, when unemployment reappeared
on a massive scale, the membership of the KAPD felt again. Many militants, sunk into long term and
demoralising unemployment, left its ranks. The mass of unemployed workers in this period joined the shock
troops of the KPD [Roter Frontkämpferbund (RFB)], and to a lesser extent the Brownshirts.
The sociological composition of left communism, but also of Dutch council communism in the 1930s, is an
insufficient explanation for its audience, its activity, and its theory. The raison d’être of this current has to be
sought in its political foundations.
A ‘syndicalist’ current?
The most favoured definition by its adversaries in the Komintern was that left communism was a ‘syndicalist
current’, a kind of ‘utopian extremism’ (A. Rosenberg) or ‘sectarian prophetism’.
The ‘syndicalist’ nature of left communism, and indeed of council communism, does not appear at all obvious.
In the particular sense of ‘partisans of the syndicat, the Gewerkschaft, the trade union, and thus of activity within
the latter, the syndicalism of the Gorter-Pannekoek current is non-existent after 1919. On the contrary it was a
rigorously anti-syndicalist current, whose slogans were ‘destruction of the trade unions’ or ‘leave the trade
unions’ (“Heraus aus den Gewerkschaften”). This condemnation of the classical, social democratic unions also
extended to the small anarcho-syndicalist unions, like the NAS in The Netherlands, the Spanish CNT or the
German FAU, and also – but to a lesser degree, given their political character – to the American IWW. The
accusation of ‘syndicalism’ made by the Komintern was actually based on the formation of the AAU, in which
the KAP had been the moving force. The AAU regrouped tens of thousands – probably more than 100,000 – of
industrial workers on political criteria, such as the rejection of parliamentarism and trade unionism and the
acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat through the workers’ councils. These Unions, which were not
seen as autonomous, had in fact to recognise the political pre-eminence of the KAPD through its programme.
This position, was not so different from that of the KPD, which had formed its own unions at the beginning, then
the ‘red trade unions’ attached to the Red Trade Union International (Rote Gewerkschafts-Internationale). For
the KAPD, the Unions were not trade unions, but organisations of a new type, politico-economic factory
organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) whose aim was the creation of workers’ councils under the ‘spiritual’
leadership of the party. As such, their destiny was to disappear when the councils were formed. In the KAPD’s
view, their existence was therefore temporary. They were more the ‘transmission betel’ of the KAPD in the
workers’ milieu than real trade unions, which regroup workers on a professional basis without distinction as to
political opinion or religious belief.
Nevertheless, this conception of the KAPD did leave the door open to syndicalist tendencies, to the kind of
revolutionary syndicalism that manifested itself in the IWW. By developing permanent organisations – due to
the fact that the situation wasn’t developing towards the immediate formation of workers’ councils – which
participated in economic struggles, the Unions appeared either as small radical trade unions, autonomous vis-àvis
the KAPD, or as the KAPD’s ‘factory groups’. Here resided the ambiguity of the whole project. A part of the
KAPD believed that they had resolved this contradiction by launching the slogan of non-permanent ‘struggle
committees’ under the leadership of the Unions. Another part more and more affirmed the autonomy of the
Unions, which thus became a kind of ‘rank and file’ trade union structure. This led to the birth of the AAU-E
which was openly federalist and anarchistic, to the point where it moved towards the FAU. This finally resulted
in the break-up of the KAPD, when the militants of the AAU no longer wanted to recognise the political
‘dictatorship’ of the KAPD. What remained of the AAU then increasingly expressed activist and revolutionary
syndicalist tendencies.
A ‘utopian extremist’ and ‘messianic’ current?
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