Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From The New International, Vol. IX No. 5, May 1943, pp. 142–145.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
There is no other situation in history that so clearly reveals the objective revolutionary possibilities that are ruined by lack of determined, revolutionary leadership. The above-mentioned Held, however, goes so far in his stupidity that he states:
Numerous utopian radical elements lacking theoretical knowledge and political experience had linked themselves to the Spartakusbund during the first days of the revolution. Some of them considered armed uprising as a panacea and every other form of political activity as sheer betrayal, etc., etc.
How Held would organize in revolutionary crises, especially after the experiences of the last twenty-five years, after the victory of the counter-revolution in Europe, other than with inexperienced elements, remains his secret, which we shall not try to uncover. The entire anti-Hitler movement, and especially its revolutionary wing, would fall off its feet with joy today if there were only some groups, no matter how small and inexperienced, who would be ready to fight with arms in hand against the Nazis in Germany. Even the Cannonites would not go so far in folly as to call these elements “slum proletarian adventurers,” but would naturally contend at the top of their lungs that they are “genuine Trotskyists” or at least sympathizers of the Fourth International. Unfortunately, however, many and variegated influences combined to combat, suppress and destroy all the active elements in the German labor movement, and a not insignificant factor in this campaign of destruction was the Paul Levi so eulogized by Held, the Paul Levi who, twenty years afterward, is praised for having purged the Spartakusbund of “radical elements” and expelling the majority of the activist worker-elements at the Heidelberg Congress in September 1919 with highly undemocratic methods, in the hope of being able to take the road of a large, oppositional, mass party with the remaining minority.
The historical misfortune of Paul Levi, Brandler, Paul Frölich, Jakob Walcher, e tutti quanti, consisted, however, in the fact that once they had at last kicked out the radical elements and gotten started on the road of the “conquest of the masses,” these same masses played them a trick by once more endeavoring to unhorse the counter-revolutionary rider.
The German working class did not have the insight into the weakness of the counter-revolution that we are now able to gain in the dead calm of the Stalinist counter-revolutionary era by a study of the documents. It knew nothing about the “feeling of depression and despondency of the Supreme Army Command” upon receiving the revolutionary reports from Berlin in December 1918. It knew nothing of the grave internal crises, inside the Supreme Army Command itself, of the ghastly fear of the bourgeois young men who collected in the White Guardist and various counter-revolutionary organizations (characteristic of this is, among other things, the description in the autobiography of Ernst von Salomon of the quaking terror of the Baltic gangs before the Harburg workers – Harburg is an industrial city near Hamburg). But impelled by the right instinct, by the right awareness that the forces of the counter-revolution can only grow and those of the workers only diminish if the regime should be allowed to stabilize itself, they tried over and over again, with countless sacrifices and by staking “their own and their blood,” that is, their jobs and their lives. The various partial struggles from 1918 to 1923, the March Action included, must be examined from this standpoint in order to be able to analyze them in connection with the subsequent National-Socialist development, to be able to gain a correct point of view. In this connection, the much-debated question of how the March 1921 Action was organized, “badly” or “well,” is a question of second-rate or third-rate importance.
That this uprising was possible at all shows the lasting revolutionary restlessness and the revolutionary possibilities in Germany of that period. Let someone just try to bring Pittsburgh to the point of an armed uprising against Roosevelt and he will learn in practice the difference between truly genuine “Putschism” and real adventurism, namely, the difference between an armed uprising in a non-revolutionary situation and an armed uprising in a revolutionary situation. Max Hölz’s action in the Vogtland, for example, is thus one of the most instructive episodes of the revolutionary German labor movement; and it might be said in passing, that it is necessary for the future German labor movement, which will face tremendous struggles with the counter-revolution of the whole world, especially with the counter-revolution of the Stalinist tint, to link itself to the tradition of its active pioneer fighters, and among them are Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – and Max Hölz as well; but not the Luxemburgian epigone, Paul Levi. In passing it might also be said that the Russian Central Committee first supported the March Action, only to condemn it later on, but not so much on grounds of a different appraisal of the situation alone, but rather in connection with the change of course of Russian policy after Kronstadt and the commencing preparation for the NEP.
One of the most important and interesting episodes is the Kapp Putsch. Against the feeble and immature attempt to set up the Kapp-Lüttwitz dictatorship, the whole German proletariat arose, and wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie and certain fractions of the bureaucracy associated themselves with it. The Noske-Ebert government was losing strength; it fled first to Dresden and then to Stuttgart and saw its whole “work of stabilization” imperilled. The fighting labor movement proceeded from defense against the Putsch and developed in the direction of the proletarian struggle for power. Things reached the point at that time of the formation of the Red Army in the Ruhr region, the only large, cohesive, armed formation that the German working class was able to produce out of its midst. The Spartakus Central Committee, under the leadership of Thalheimer, taken completely by surprise, came out in favor of “neutrality” at the beginning of the movement. Paul Levi was then in prison and disapproved of this position. But it was only the consequence of his political line, especially the consequence of the splitting-off of the Communist Labor Party (KAPD). The Ruhr uprising was strangled by the Bielefeld Agreement, which was signed by another supporter of Paul Levi, Wilhelm Pieck, along with the social-democrat, Severing, and which opened wide the gates to the White reaction in the Ruhr region. The platform of the Spartakusbund in the Kapp Putsch was the demand for the formation of a “Workers’ Government,” by which it understood a coalition government between the Independent Socialist Party (USP) and the majority Social-Democratic Party. Lenin criticized this attitude of the Spartakus Central Committee in his Infantile Malady, but confined himself to the criticism of the concrete mistake during the Kapp Putsch, without disclosing the connection with the precedent political events and the attitude of the Spartakus Central Committee in these events. How far removed the Spartakus Central Committee was from a genuinely correct estimation of the situation is shown by a report of a member of the committee, probably Wilhelm Pieck in the Kommunistische Internationale, No. 10, which says:
There was a possibility of forcing the Ebert-Bauer government to establish a workers’ government with the bourgeoisie excluded by threatening it with the continuation of the general strike.
In this formulation, every word is characteristic of the fundamental line of the then communist leadership. The general strike was “threatened,” that is, an energetic continuation of the general strike and its extension to an armed action is renounced, and that in turn means that the leadership was trailing the movement which changed from a general strike into an armed action. The armed workers in the Ruhr region and Saxony had the very modest aim of marching on Berlin to finish off the counter-revolution. The Central Committee, however, sets the aim of “excluding the bourgeoisie,” that is, the exclusion of the bourgeois parties from the parliamentary coalition. Here too the slogan trails behind the actual standing of the movement which, by the formation of Workers’ Guards and Revolutionary Committees, is in the process of organizing the “dual power” and of doing it on a higher and more developed foundation than the movement of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils in November 1918, because between 1918 and March 1920 lie two and a half years of revolutionary struggles and experiences.
Let us note in passing that the left wing, so disdainfully designated as adventuristic by Held, arose under the leadership of Maslow inside the KPD in March 1920, when a few representatives from Berlin, Hamburg and the Ruhr region criticized the lamentable failure of the Spartakus Central Committee in the Kapp Putsch. This failure did not prevent the independent social-democratic workers from shifting to the side of October a few months later, that is, to separate from their reformist leadership in Halle and to undertake seriously the formation of a revolutionary party. It is not the Twenty-One Points of the Comintern that split the USPD, but the revolutionary events and experiences the working class had gone through in the Kapp Putsch and especially the enormous betrayal of the workers by the Bauer-Ebert government after the Putsch. The Bauer-Ebert government, which called for a general strike to protect itself against Kapp-Lüttwitz, which cleared out of Dresden because it feared arrest at the hands of its own General Marker, later let the same Reichswehr march into Saxony, the Ruhr region and Berlin against the striking and fighting workers, disarmed them, arrested them, destroyed their organizations – and all this made a much greater impression and spoke much more emphatically of the need of a revolutionary party than all the theses and speeches from Moscow.
In the anti-Stalinist movement, especially in its Trotskyist wing, it is an axiom that the situation in Germany in 1923 was objectively revolutionary, ripe for the overturn and for the seizure of power by the Communist Party of Germany. In saying this, it is always taken for granted that Trotsky, then still a member of the Political Bureau of the Russian Communist Party and of the Presidium of the Communist International, was the exponent of this conception in the Russian party, its protagonist and pioneer. Trotsky defends this conception in his Lessons of October and in many other articles and theses, although he nowhere expressed himself on the early history of the Communist Party of Germany, nowhere analyzed how the collapse of the communist movement in 1923 came about. In passing, he once said casually:
In their criticism of Brandler, the ultra-lefts aired many correct ideas at the end of 1923, which did not hinder them from committing the grossest mistakes in 1924–25.
In this statement, the phrase “the end of 1923” should be borne in mind above all, because it provides indirectly a confirmation of the fact, covered by many legends, that Trotsky, in the internal disputes of the Communist Party of Germany, adopted the views of the then left wing of the KPD only at the end of 1923. A mendacious concealment of the real state of affairs, dangerous for the young generation, has indeed been created by Trotsky’s Lessons of October, which in no wise suffices for an understanding of the crisis of 1923.
The occupation of the Ruhr region by the Franco-Belgian troops took place in January 1923, on the grounds of the failure to pay reparations and with the aim of a lasting occupation of this important industrial center. First of all, the march into the Ruhr broke off all the possibilities of cooperation between German and French imperialism and promptly created a political and economic crisis of the first order. The German bourgeoisie organized the so-called passive resistance in the Ruhr, that is, sabotage. At the same time, it tried to combine with English imperialism against the French. The result of this policy, the result of the occupation, was a tremendous weakening of the strength of the central power in Berlin and a precarious situation in one of the most important key regions of German economy. The occupation power was in no position at all to organize administration and production, and the working masses understood very well and very soon that the absence of the hated counter-revolutionary Reichswehr troops and the weakness of both adversaries – the French as well as the German – could be exploited by them at that moment and made possible an independent revolutionary movement. The costs of the emptied pits and of the dissolving administrative apparatus had to be borne by the Ruhr proletariat, a proletariat that was seething more than in any other locality in Germany, and in which the revolutionary struggles and experiences of the years past, especially during the Kapp Putsch, were still alive.
At this moment, that is, in January 1923, the Congress of the Communist Party of Germany met in Leipzig under the leadership of the Brandler-Walcher-Thalheimer-Frölich Central Committee, whose political line was very strongly influenced by Karl Radek, a politician closely linked at that time with Trotsky. The line of the Central Committee was based upon the relative stabilization of the class fronts in Germany, upon a struggle within the democratic republic or, as the theses adopted at the congress expressed it, “within the framework and with the methods of the democratic republic.” The road to this struggle was to be participation in a coalition government in the provinces of South Thuringia, Saxony, whose industry bore a different character from that of the Ruhr, and whose working class, by origin and tradition, represented the type of the radical, social-democratic party member.
The left wing in the KPD demanded at the January Congress that the Ruhr crisis be placed in the center of the debates and action. This proposal was voted down by the Brandler Central Committee and its majority and a split almost took place in the Communist Party over the Ruhr crisis, prevented with great difficulty only by the Moscow emissaries. In this sharp conflict, which revolved exclusively around German questions, that is, the appraisal of the revolutionary crisis in Germany and the road the KPD should take in this first-rate crisis – in this sharp party crisis, which, as has been said, almost led to a split, Trotsky stood on the side of the Brandler faction and supported its political line against the Left Opposition. The Brandler Central Committee tried to throw the left wing out of the KPD all through the year 1923, and to organize a second Heidelberg. To achieve this aim, it employed every means of provocation and persecution (of course, within the limits of party methods of those days, removing party officials, transfers, disciplinary interventions from above, party orders to defend conceptions in public with which the comrade did not agree), and personal calumny, especially against Maslow.
In this sharp party crisis, the interests of Brandler’s conception, which would not be moved by the Ruhr crisis from its line of approachment to the social-democratic policy and the renunciation of “civil war methods,” were backed for the time being by the foreign-political interests of the Political Bureau of the Russian party. In this Political Bureau, the opinion prevailed throughout the first half of 1925 that the Ruhr crisis might lead to a military collision between France and Germany which would force the German bourgeoisie to establish the “Eastern orientation,’’ that is, to lean upon Soviet Russia and to dissolve the tendency toward cooperation with England, which was feared in the Russian Political Bureau as the premise of a possible war of intervention against Russia. Such an Eastern orientation was being prepared by intensive collaboration between the heads of the Red Army and the Reichswehr, and it is this foreign-political line to which the interests of the German working class were entirely subordinated.
The high point of the revolutionary crisis in Germany in in 1923 was reached in the spring and summer, when the inflation was rushing to its peak, the German bourgeoisie vacillated impotently between passive resistance and negotiations with England and France, and big strike movements of a political character broke out in the Ruhr region. The strike of the Berlin workers against the Cuno government on August 12 should have been the moment for the organizing of the uprising movement. During these months, however, the Political Bureau, in complete agreement with Trotsky, followed the line of cooperation with Cuno’s government, a line represented at that time in Berlin by Radek in person, who turned fiercely against any policy of revolutionary sharpening of the situation and who had his friend Thalheimer provide a theoretical foundation for this policy of supporting German nationalism. Thalheimer wrote at that time, entirely in agreement with Radek, and thereby also with Trotsky, the following:
The German bourgeoisie, counter-revolutionary though it still is, has reached a situation, thanks to the cowardice of petty bourgeois democracy (that is, primarily, of the social democracy) where its actions abroad are objectively revolutionary. Abroad (at least temporarily) it is revolutionary in spite of itself [wieder Willen], just as Bismarck was in 1864–70 and for analogous historical reasons. The failure of the German socialist revolution of 1918 left to Cuno, Stinnes & Co. the role that should have been that of the German socialist revolution ... Vanquished, disarmed Germany, threatened with dismemberment and complete political and economic enslavement, is, it is true, a future imperialist power according to purely theoretical reality. Today that is certainly not the case. It is not the subject but the object of imperialist policy.
This article, inspired by the Russians, is remarkable not only for its under-estimation of German imperialism, but primarily for its declaration of the “finally collapsed German socialist revolution, whose tasks must now be solved by Cuno and Stinnes.” Stinnes is mentioned here particularly because he was the exponent of the passive resistance of heavy industry in the Ruhr and because he was also the exponent of class hatred against the Ruhr workers, to whom this kind of collaboration with Cuno and Stinnes was thus to be made more palatable. This astounding counter-revolutionary, disastrous, liquidationist botching of history should not really be charged against the theoretician, Thalheimer, alone. The statement dates from the early summer of 1923 and can be supported by countless and much cruder statements by Bukharin, Pawlowski and others. What Thalheimer writes here was the line of the Russian Political Bureau of the time, and this line was the real reason for the KPD holding back at the moment of the maturing of the revolutionary crisis.
After the strike of August 12, the Cuno government withdrew and the Stresemann-Hilferding government, oriented toward the English, began its secret negotiations with the Comité des Forges. This swing of German foreign policy was regarded in Moscow as extremely dangerous and the “betrayal” of the German bourgeoisie was answered with a change in the line of the KPD. The Brandler Central Committee received the order for an uprising in September, and it is unimportant if Trotsky urged the turn in the German line somewhat sooner than the others, that is, some time in July or in August. Preceding the Cuno strike was a series of internal conferences between the right wing Central Committee and the left opposition in Moscow, especially a “conciliation conference” in May, at which the Presidium of the Comintern completely supported the Brandler policy, with Trotsky – if nuances are to be dealt with – far stronger for Brandler than, say, Zinoviev.
When Brandler received his order for an uprising, the movement was already receding. Brandler rightly always brought up this fact in his defense, although to this day he has not expressed himself with complete frankness on how he actually became a deceived deceiver who, in the course of 1923, received two entirely different directives from Moscow. Brandler received the order for the uprising with the firm conviction that it could not be executed, that the situation was not objectively revolutionary and that the German proletariat was not capable of seizing power. He staged a complicated comedy of obscurance which was expressed in the wretched caricatures of the so-called workers’ governments in Saxony and Thuringia and ended in the conference of the Chemnitz Workers’ Councils in October 1923, at which Brandler let himself be “overpowered” by the social-democratic majority under the leadership of Graupe.
It is then, certainly, that Trotsky turned against Brandler. But that is when the entire Russian Political Bureau turned against Brandler, for a different communist policy was wanted in Germany against the English-oriented Stresemann government. It is not to be disputed that Trotsky was sincerely for the uprising at the end of 1923, but it is disputable that this position suffices to uphold the Trotskyist legend of an always-correct standpoint in the German crises. Rightly appraised, it was then the left opposition in the KPD under the leadership of Maslow that was alone in recognizing from the very beginning the first-rate revolutionary character of the Ruhr crisis and in seeking, in good time, both in the Ruhr as well as in Berlin and Hamburg, to bring the party on to the road of the struggle for power. This fact has been covered over by Stalinist baiting and by Trotskyist legend-making. It is necessary to reestablish it, not for reasons of historical research, or because of any personal polemics that have now become quite senseless, but because the future revolutionary party of Germany cannot move ahead without a discussion of this question which is peculiarly its own.
We want to disregard entirely, for the time being, the question of whether the main historical mistake of the left communist opposition consisted in its “adventurism” or in its insufficient respect for the wise teachings of Paul Levi, but essentially in the fact that it did not split at Leipzig and thereby free itself not only from the reformist politics of Paul Levi and Brandler but also from the foreign-political zigzag of the Russian Political Bureau. The reply to this question can be reserved for subsequent consideration.
What must be borne in mind here is the fact that with the defeat of 1923, the revolutionary period in Germany was terminated and the counter-revolutionary development made powerful advances. The strengthening of the counter-revolutionary forces in Germany went parallel with the counter-revolutionary process in Russia, which led to the victory of Stalin and the Stalinist bureaucracy after the sharp conflict with the Opposition Bloc of Zinoviev-Trotsky in 1925–27, and took the singular road of the “exploitive state,” the road of bureaucratic terror against the working class. If the Stalinist rule and the Stalinist regime are regarded as a peculiarly new, unprecedented form of counter-revolution, another estimation is reached of the development in Germany directly before the seizure of power by Hitler; in the rise and triumph of National Socialism and the National-Socialist Party may then be seen a peculiar German form of the European counter-revolution which, while revealing very many essential differences from the Stalinist regime, especially in the form of production, is nevertheless understandable only as a product of the historical process of the European counter-revolution. The KPD, connected with the counter-revolutionary Stalinist center in 1929–33, a German detachment of the corrupted and corrupting Russian bureaucracy, is then seen as utterly incapable of taking over the leadership of the working class in the struggle against fascism and in the struggle for power.
In the above-quoted polemic of Trotsky against Urbahns, Trotsky is wrong. The task of the Trotskyists and of all anti-Stalinists in Germany before Hitler should have been the construction of a revolutionary party independent of the Stalinist center, militantly opposed to it theoretically and practically. The Trotskyist conception or the workers’ state in Russia led to the false estimation of the KPD and thereby to the false posing of the question of the united front between the KPD and the SPD as the best fighting tactic against National Socialism. A correct policy probably would not have prevented the temporary victory of National Socialism, but the tremendous tragedy of our present situation does not consist merely in the victory of the counter-revolution in Russia, Germany and Europe. The tragedy consists primarily in the fact that no bridges were built from the October Revolution to the other shores, that not only was the October generation destroyed by Stalin but that the ideas of October had almost no living representatives left; that the “defense” of the Stalinist Soviet Union is one of the most mendacious and misleading formula; that was ever introduced into revolutionary Marxism and has led to such an obscuring of all essential theoretical questions that the youth either follows the Stalinists, or surrenders to the philosophy of spontaneity which leads to the rejection of party thinking and reveals itself in practice, for example, in the existence of countless “independent existences” of a comparatively meaningless kind within the German emigration.
A commencing clarification of the German question cannot take place without a debate with the historical mistakes of Trotskyism and it is false to recoil from it in horror. The heritage of the great revolutionist, Trotsky, is not diminished by living criticism, but increased. We need a new gathering of all the undecayed elements, for tomorrow we may be “taken by surprise” by new tasks.
Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 26 May 2015