Create a Mass Party!

Cliff Connolly critiques CounterPower’s vision of the “party of autonomy” and offers an alternative vision of the mass party.

In Praise of Communism by Ronald Paris, sourced from here.

The US left is at a critical juncture where the structure and focus of our organizations will soon be decided. On the one hand, we positively have ongoing processes of cohesion in play with DSA chapters collaborating on writing a national platform and far-flung sects coming together under the banner of Marxist Center. On the other hand, we have many comrades across ideological lines who still echo opposition to the idea of a tightly structured national organization. Central to this contradiction is the question of the party: should socialists strive to build an independent political party, and if so, what should that look like? CounterPower has put forth one possible answer in their article Create Two, Three, Many Parties of Autonomy! They are dedicated organizers and we should all be glad to have them in our midst. However, their strategy of eschewing the mass party model and encouraging the spontaneous formation of multiple “parties of autonomy”, and counting on these disparate groups to unite into an “area of the party”, is unworkable in the long term.

Their argument for the many parties strategy rests on a number of errors—historical misrepresentation (no, CPUSA was not a party of autonomy), uncritical acceptance of failed models (Autonomia Operaia gives us more negative lessons than positive ones), an over-reliance on spontaneity (movements have to be built intentionally), an aversion to leadership (no, it doesn’t automatically create unaccountable bureaucracy), and a confusion of terms (putting anarchist and Marxist vocab words together does not solve the contradictions between them). We will explore each of these points in greater detail. There is also an implicit assumption of false dichotomies built into the many parties line—either we build parties of autonomy or slip into sectarianism, either parties of autonomy or dogmatism, either parties of autonomy or top-down bureaucracy. There is a kernel of truth present here; we certainly don’t want a dictatorship of paid staffers. However, parties of autonomy are not a solution to this problem — in some ways, they would exacerbate the problem.

This was initially written in response to CounterPower’s original essay in 2019, but has since been amended to include dialogue with the updated version published in 2020. The differences between the two are significant and raise new concerns about the many parties model. The most interesting addition in the update concerns the role of cadre — highly trained organizers dedicated full-time to party activity. While we agree wholeheartedly on the necessity of these professional revolutionaries, there is a difference of emphasis that merits debate. This issue will be explored in greater detail below.

That CounterPower started this conversation on the party question is a gift to the whole of the US left—it must be addressed for our organizations to move forward. While many of us vehemently disagree with their conclusions, we should be grateful for their company. After examining each piece of their argument for the many parties model and taking note of its shortcomings, we will investigate a viable alternative—a mass party of organizers built on the principles of struggle, pluralism, and democratic discipline.

Historical Clarification

There are a number of historical errors throughout CounterPower’s article. By this we are not referring to a difference of opinion about a certain historical figure’s thought process or the motivations behind a particular decision, but rather factual inaccuracies. This in itself does not mean the thesis of the article is automatically false, but it does betray a dependency on unfounded assumptions. First, there is the assertion that the Russian soviets arose organically without being built by socialists, at which point the Bolsheviks joined them and worked harmoniously with other autonomous parties in this “area of the party” to link the soviets to other sites of struggle. Second, there is the quotation from Mao Zedong’s 1957 Hundred Flowers speech, which CounterPower uses to bolster their argument for parties of autonomy. Finally, we are led to believe that both the FAI and the Alabama chapter of the Communist Party USA are exemplars of the many parties model.

We will begin with the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the soviets. Here is CounterPower’s characterization:

“The organized interventions of a revolutionary party thus take place ‘in the middle,’ as mediations between the micropolitical and macropolitical. This has been a distinguishing feature of successful revolutionary parties, as in the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when clusters of Bolshevik party activists concentrated in workplaces, recognizing that the participatory councils (soviets) emerging from grassroots proletarian struggles embodied the nucleus of an alternative social system. Thus the party’s organization at the point of production enabled revolutionaries first to link workplace struggles against exploitation with the struggle against imperialism, and then to link the emergent councils with the insurrectionary struggle to establish a system of territorial counterpower”.

On the contrary, it is of utmost importance to recognize that the soviets, factory committees, and militias that formed the backbone of the Russian revolution were built intentionally by socialists. While different factions in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party eventually split into separate organizations as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, both groups were instrumental in the creation of these mass organizations. They did not emerge organically from economic struggles with bosses and feudal landlords like some of the trade unions and peasant associations, but instead were the product of a socialist intervention in economic struggles which emphasized the need for political organization. This strategy, commonly referred to as the “merger formula”, was theorized by Marx and Engels, popularized by the German socialist party leader Karl Kautsky, and accepted by Russian socialists of all stripes (most notably Lenin).¹

The Bolsheviks did not merely help workers build their fighting organizations. They also competed with political rivals for leadership in them. Beyond their efforts that we would call “base-building” today, the Bolsheviks also invested significant resources into propaganda efforts and electoral contests. The struggle for elected majorities in the soviets in 1917 was pursued in tandem with a strategy of running campaigns for municipal offices and the Constituent Assembly (the bourgeois parliament of the Provisional Government), and it worked. The Bolshevik candidates for the assembly were able to publicly oppose the policies of the Provisional Government, while the elected deputies in the soviets were able to win over the working class to the task of seizing political power. These electoral efforts were instrumental in establishing a democratic mandate for the October Revolution.² Consider these words from leading Bolshevik (and later leading opposition member purged by Stalin) Alexander Shliapnikov, in 1920:

The Russian Communist Party (RKP), as the history of the preceding years indicates, is the only revolutionary party of the Working Class, leading class war and civil war in the name of Communism. The R.K.P. unifying the more conscious and decisive part of the Proletariat around the Revolutionary Communist Program of action and drawing to the Communist banner the more leading elements of the rural poor, must concentrate all higher leadership of communist construction and the general direction of policy of the country.

Clearly, the Bolsheviks did not consider themselves a “party of autonomy” working side by side with the Menshevik reformists in a broad “area of the party”. Nor did they simply fuse with organic economic struggles in the trade unions. The reality couldn’t be further from CounterPower’s insinuations: the Bolsheviks were a party of political organizers who started as a minority and slowly won over sections of the working class through diligent mass work and bitter struggle with the other parties of the day. By engaging in this process, they eventually took on a mass character and became capable of leading social revolution. The lesson to learn from the Bolsheviks is this: we must win political hegemony in whatever independent organs of proletarian power that we help build, using every available means, including running opposition candidates in bourgeois elections to expose broader sections of the class to our ideas.

Now we will consider Mao’s echoing of the old Chinese proverb “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” This line of poetry is used by CounterPower to demonstrate the need for dozens of independent communist grouplets to form and collaborate on the task of social revolution. They attribute the quote to Mao, but is this how he used it? The short answer is no. It comes from a speech he gave in March 1957 at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work. It is true that he called for a hundred schools of thought to contend, but this was in the context of winning unaligned intellectuals over to the party’s socialist ideals. He gave a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of how the party could accept criticism from the broader population without sacrificing their legitimacy as the ruling organization of the country:

Ours is a great Party, a glorious Party, a correct Party. This must be affirmed as a fact. But we still have shortcomings, and this, too, must be affirmed as a fact…Will it undermine our Party’s prestige if we criticize our own subjectivism, bureaucracy and sectarianism? I think not. On the contrary, it will serve to enhance the Party’s prestige. This was borne out by the rectification movement during the anti-Japanese war. It enhanced the prestige of our Party, of our Party comrades and our veteran cadres, and it also enabled the new cadres to make great progress. Which of the two was afraid of criticism, the Communist Party or the Kuomintang? The Kuomintang. It prohibited criticism, but that did not save it from final defeat. The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.

Clearly, in March 1957 Mao was concerned with building a mass party, not opening space for a loose collaboration between multiple parties aimed at building socialism. Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party was underprepared for the criticism they would soon face and reversed the Hundred Flowers Campaign. By July of that same year, the Anti-Rightist Campaign brought a series of purges underway, which got so out of control that Mao had to restrain his subordinates from excess killing. Perhaps Chinese conditions in 1957 were different enough from American conditions in 2020 that this was acceptable, or perhaps Mao the statesman should not be looked to for inspiration as much as Mao the general or Mao the revolutionary. It is beyond the purview of this article to answer that question. What is certain CounterPower draws the wrong lesson out of Mao’s 1957 speech.

Demonstration from the Hundred Flowers Movement

After quoting Mao, CounterPower moves on to claim that the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) is in practice a party of autonomy working within the “area of the party” of Spain’s National Confederation of Labour (CNT). Although the idea of “parties of autonomy” was not formulated until forty years after FAI’s founding, there may be a kernel of truth to this claim. For example, if FAI formed a loose coalition with CNT organizers and worked with them on shared projects, this argument could make sense. The reality, however, is that FAI is essentially a hard-line anarchist faction within CNT that has consistently fought for political hegemony within the broader organization and even purged ideological rivals like Ángel Pestaña. Perhaps they were right to do so; it is outside the scope of this article to pass judgment on the internal political conflicts of the CNT.

Despite CounterPower’s framing of the FAI as an independent anarcho-communist organization with an “organic link” to the CNT, they are an explicitly anarchist faction struggling to dominate the politics of the Spanish labor movement. They act as a pressure group within the confederation to make CNT adhere to what they perceive as purely anarchist theory and praxis without deviation. This is not a “symbiotic relationship”, it is realpolitik under a black flag. Roberto Bordiga’s window dressing cannot give us a clear understanding of Spanish labor politics; historians like José Peirats and Paul Preston would be better suited to aid this investigation.

In the updated version of their essay, CounterPower cites the Alabama chapter of CPUSA as a historical example that serves to “elucidate the role and function of a party of autonomy”. This could not be further from the truth. Similar to the FAI, the party of autonomy model would not even be theorized until fifty years after the Alabama chapter’s founding. CPUSA was a mass party with local chapters all over the country for at least the first half of the twentieth century. The Alabama chapter in particular was the result of discussions on “the Negro question” at the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, after which the Central Committee of CPUSA chose Birmingham as a headquarters for its foothold in the South.³ Its success in organizing rural and urban communities in the deep south of the 1920s is proof that the mass party model can be adapted to regional conditions and accountable to local rank and file members. Describing this centralized party model as a “party of autonomy” is categorically false.

Spontaneity vs. Base-Building

Now that the historical context of CounterPower’s narrative has been clarified, we should examine the contradiction between their ideological commitment to spontaneity theory on the one hand, and their practical commitment to base-building on the other. Does the working class organically form explicitly political fighting organizations, or is a socialist intervention required for this to occur? This is a never-ending debate between Marxists and anarchists, despite the pile of evidence pointing to the latter. Some would argue that this debate is pointless at the present moment, and these differences are best put aside until the workers’ movement has grown. We would reply: “First, comradely debate in no way hampers unity of action. We can continue base-building efforts while disagreeing on political questions, and it is only through debate that we might one day get on the same page. Second, simply by engaging in the act of base-building with us, you are agreeing with our point in practice while denying it in theory.” How is this possible?

Our comrades in CounterPower are the perfect example. They admit the masses will not come to accept communist ideas on their own:

From strike committees to workers’ councils, tenant unions to neighborhood assemblies, the disparate forms of organized autonomy that arise in the midst of a protracted revolutionary struggle will not automatically fuse with communist politics to create a cohesive system of counterpower.

Yet they don’t address where these councils and unions come from. The reader gets the sense that these organizations simply pop up during times of crisis, as workers get frustrated with bourgeois politics and independently come to the conclusion that they need to organize against their boss or landlord. This may be true in a minority of cases, but most proletarian fighting organizations come from the same source as the Russian soviets: dedicated socialist base-builders. Who built Amazonians United? Who built Autonomous Tenant Union Network? Who built UE, ILWU, and the original CIO? In every case, the answer is: workers and intellectuals who read Marx, became socialists, and decided to organize.

Our responsibilities go beyond just founding these mass organizations; we have to compete for hegemony within them as well. If we neglect this crucial aspect of organizing due to a fetishization of the autonomy of the masses, reformists and even reactionaries will gladly fill the gap. In the case of something like workers’ councils, we cannot have any illusions that they provide anything beyond a means of representation for political tendencies within the movement. This is precisely why the Bolsheviks competed so vigorously with the reformist Mensheviks and populist Social Revolutionaries for elected majorities in the soviets. In fact, the Bolsheviks only adopted their famous slogan “All Power to the Soviets” after they had secured elected majorities in them.⁴ We only need to look at the difference between the Soviet Republics established in Russia and the brutally crushed Soviet Republic of Bavaria to understand the limitations of the model. Without influence from committed revolutionaries, mass organizations can be rallied to the banner of class-collaboration (as the Russian soviets were before Bolshevik intervention) or adventurism (as in the case of Bavaria).⁵

CounterPower’s overestimation of proletarian spontaneity has practical consequences for its members. In his recent article In Defense of Revolution and the Insurrectionary Commune, Atlee McFellin analyzed the November 2020 election and drew parallels between it and the situation which produced the Paris Commune. Fearing that elections may never take place again, McFellin argued against any participation in electoral efforts (including, but not limited to the creation of a political party independent from the Democrats). What was proposed instead? “Self-defense forces, solidarity kitchens, and everything else that is required to repel fascist assaults”. In other words, anything but a class-independent party capable of coordinating the struggle for socialism across different political, economic, and social fronts. Rather than face the reality of the radical left’s current irrelevance in national politics and the labor movement, and chart a course to resolve this, comrade McFellin called for the construction of insurrectionary communes as a response to the consolidation of ruling class interests under Joe Biden. Whether the working class has the spontaneous energy necessary for this task remains to be seen; if it does, we would be ill-advised to hold our breath in anticipation but should wince at the inevitable brutal consequences if such adventurism bears fruit.

While in theory, CounterPower glosses over the role of communists in building workers’ organizations, in practice they are engaged in precisely this work. Rather than relying on the spontaneous initiative of the masses, they actively build tenant and labor unions, political education circles, and other necessary vehicles of class struggle. In fact, they do it remarkably well. This is what makes the claim that communists must “fuse with grassroots organizations” after they appear rather than actively building them in the first place so bizarre. Ultimately, our task as communists is to build mass organizations of class struggle, and then rally the most active participants within them to a mass communist party. By uniting in one party, we can direct the efforts of thousands of organizers according to a commonly agreed upon plan, which is an absolute necessity for the workers’ movement to grow.

The Role of Cadre

The discussion of cadre organizers is given new attention in CounterPower’s update to their original essay. It mostly focuses on the role these committed party members play in shaping revolutionary strategy and connecting it to active proletarian struggles. As seen in my Cosmonaut article Revolutionary Discipline and Sobriety, those of us who favor the mass party model are in complete agreement with CounterPower on the importance of cadre:

Any collective project, whether a revolutionary labor union or a church’s food pantry, will expect a higher degree of involvement from its core organizers than from its regular members. Not everyone has the time or the technical skills needed to bottom-line such endeavors, and those who do have a responsibility to step up to the plate. These small groups, or cadre, are the powerhouse of the class. Taking direction from the masses they live and labor with, cadre members should focus their lives on facilitating the self-emancipation of the proletariat.

CounterPower rightly points out that these dedicated full-timers are a prerequisite for the development of robust internal political education, external agitation, and consistent recruitment to mass work projects. Key to the every-day functioning of these cadre groups is the organizational center to which they are accountable (and preferably subject to democratic discipline by the whole membership of the organization). While the mass party shares the party of autonomy’s commitment to a common political platform and program, the main difference between the two models is one of scope. Whereas the “area of the party” is composed of diffuse autonomous organizations with separate and often contradictory programs, the local chapters of the mass party work together on a common, democratically agreed-upon plan. As the experience of the Alabama chapter of CPUSA shows, this does not mean the plan cannot be adapted to meet local concerns.

In fact, the mass party model historically proves more capable of achieving its aims than any other method of party organization, whether it is compared to the bourgeois fund-raising parties that dominate US politics or the Italian autonomist model revived by CounterPower. This will be elaborated below in our examination of the Autonomia Operaia movement. For now, suffice it to say that while we agree with our autonomist comrades on the importance of cadre, the mass party model is best suited to coordinate their efforts.

Precision of Terms

Further complicating the problems of CounterPower’s revolutionary strategy is an incoherent collection of opaque and often contradictory terms. Few throughout history have tried to synthesize the theories of the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg, Bordiga, and Malatesta, mostly because it makes no sense to do so. This blend of anarchist shibboleths (affinity groups, autonomy fetishism, Bookchin references) and communist vocabulary (party cadre, collective discipline, professional revolutionaries) is neither an oversight nor the product of genuine cross-ideological left unity. CounterPower is a Marxist organization with a niche ideology informed mainly by the experience of the Italian Autonomia Operaia movement. The fact that they mask this behind an appeal to every possible leftist tendency is frankly dishonest, and makes their writing difficult to follow. Since all these ideas have been presented to us as complementary and harmonious, we must investigate the contradictions between them in order to get a clearer picture.

First, we should consider their framing of the ideas of Luxemburg:

In contrast to a bourgeois party, Rosa Luxemburg identified that a revolutionary party of autonomy ‘is not a party that wants to rise to power over the mass of workers or through them.’ Rather, it ‘is only the most conscious, purposeful part of the proletariat, which points the entire broad mass of the working class toward its historical tasks at every step”

The primary issue with this framing is that Rosa Luxemburg did not write or speak about “a revolutionary party of autonomy” at any point in her political career. She was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) for most of her life before its left-wing split into the USPD and then Spartacist League (later renamed the Communist Party of Germany, or KPD). Both organizations were mass parties who explicitly intended to lead the working class to overthrow the existing political order and form a new proletarian government in Germany, headed by elected party officials. Her point about the party being an instrument that puts the working class in power was perfectly in line with the existing Marxist orthodoxy. Consider this quote from the SPD’s leading theorist Karl Kautsky for comparison:

The socialists no longer have the task of freely inventing a new society but rather uncovering its elements in existing society. No more do they have to bring salvation from its misery to the proletariat from above, but rather they have to support its class struggle through increasing its insight and promoting its economic and political organizations and in so doing bring about as quickly as possible the day when the proletariat will be able to save itself. The task of Social Democracy is to make the class struggle of the proletariat aware of its aim and capable of choosing the best means to attain this aim.⁶

Luxemburg and Kautsky both demonstrate the function of the mass party: cohering the most militant and forward-thinking section of the working class into one organization and giving it the tools to win political power. If the party is not “outside or above the revolutionary process”, as CounterPower puts it, then it is coming to power through class leadership. “Providing the boldest elements in decision-making organs” is just a milder way of phrasing “winning political hegemony in the movement.” While it is right to be skeptical of potential opportunists and wary of inadvertently creating an unaccountable bureaucracy, CounterPower overcorrects by trying to avoid the question of leadership altogether. No amount of out-of-context quotes from historical revolutionaries can paper over that deficiency.

After painting an anarchist portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, CounterPower then calls upon the theoretical authority of actual anarchist Errico Malatesta:

We anarchists can all say that we are of the same party, if by the word ‘party’ we mean all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies. But this does not mean it is possible—or even desirable—for all of us to be gathered into one specific association. There are too many differences of environment and conditions of struggle; too many possible ways of action to choose among, and also too many differences of temperament and personal incompatibilities for a General Union, if taken seriously, not to become, instead of a means for coordinating and reviewing the efforts of all, an obstacle to individual activity and perhaps also a cause of more bitter internal strife.⁷

This is a markedly different approach to organization from the mass party model of Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, et al. It is certainly more in line with the autonomists’ “area of the party” theory, but are the assumptions it is based on sound? The experience of the Bolshevik party securing state power and defending the proletariat from white terror, the Communist Party of Vietnam’s triumph over colonialism, the continued resistance to neoliberal imperialism in Cuba, and other achievements of the mass party model seem to indicate otherwise. Petty personal disputes and geographic distance are no excuse to abandon unified efforts to build socialism. If we take a scientific approach and compare the results of party-building trials throughout history to the results of those like Malatesta who deny the party’s role, the pattern is self-evident.

Lessons of History

CounterPower’s essay does an excellent job of considering the experiences of a vast number of different historical communist groups. Unfortunately, they do so without an ounce of reflection or criticism. They ask us to look at rival groups with opposing political strategies and conclude that both were right, regardless of whether either group actually achieved its aims. They mention the experience of many parties and movements—the KAPD in Germany, Autonomia Operaia in Italy, the MIR in Chile, the FMLN-FDR in El Salvador, the URNG in Guatemala, the HBDH in Turkey and Kurdistan, and more. We’re given the impression that each of these groups consciously agreed with the autonomists’ many parties model, and that each of these groups were successful enough to teach us mainly positive lessons to emulate. Upon closer inspection, it turns out this is not at all the case. For the sake of brevity, we will look at three examples.

Let us begin with the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). This party could be accurately described as a sect based on its low membership, extreme sectarianism, and history of splits. Its complicated lineage is as follows—its members began in the SPD, then split into the ISD, which then joined the USPD, which then split into the KPD, and then finally split from there into the left-communist KAPD. It functionally existed for about two years before splitting again into separate factions. It was quite literally a split of a split of a split that ended up splitting. It had around 43,000 members at its height in 1921, which was minuscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of workers in the mass parties (and that number immediately declined after the factional split in 1922).

The roots of the KAPD’s separation from the KPD lie in the events of the Ruhr Uprising. In 1920, a right-wing coalition of military officers and monarchists attempted to overthrow the bourgeois-democratic government of Germany. In response, the government called for a general strike, which the workers’ parties heeded. In the Ruhr valley, these parties took the strike a step further by forming Red Army units and engaging right-wing forces in open combat. However, these socialist militias were divided between three different parties and could not coordinate their efforts as well as their enemies who had the benefit of a clear leadership structure. The uprising was ultimately crushed when the bourgeois government made a deal with the right-wing putsch leaders and sent their forces to slaughter the workers of the Ruhr.

What lessons did the left-communists learn from this? From their perspective, KPD leaders had given up on the struggle by agreeing to disband Red Army units after the fighting looked to be in the enemy’s favor. Because of this, a split was necessary so the workers could be led by the true communist militants that would see things through to the end. In other words, the already divided proletariat needed a fourth party to further complicate the coordination of future actions. Two years later, this fourth party would then split into two factions. Lenin had this to say about the KAPD:

Let the ‘Lefts’ put themselves to a practical test on a national and international scale. Let them try to prepare for (and then implement) the dictatorship of the proletariat, without a rigorously centralised party with iron discipline, without the ability to become masters of every sphere, every branch, and every variety of political and cultural work. Practical experience will soon teach them.⁸

Unfortunately, Lenin was overly optimistic. Rather than having time to learn from their mistakes, the divided forces of the working class were brutally crushed by the united forces of the right. The Nazis rose to power, and fascism reigned until the Soviets took Berlin in 1945. This does not mean there is nothing we can learn from the KAPD—quite the opposite is true. There may be some diamonds in the rough, but most of the lessons we can learn from the left-communists of Germany are examples of what not to do. Fortunately, in the updated version of their essay, CounterPower scrubbed any mention of the KAPD. Whether this was due to a genuine reassessment of their example or simple editorial limitations, the new version is much stronger without the ill-fated German sectarians.

Despite their positive appraisal of the KAPD, CounterPower is not a left-communist sect. They are autonomists, and in order to understand their answer to the party question we must take stock of their movement forebears. Autonomia Operaia was a workers’ movement in Italy during the period known as the “Years of Lead”. This period lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and was marked by violent clashes between right and left-wing paramilitary forces. It is worth noting that much of this violence was either planned, supplied, or encouraged by the CIA and its “Operation Gladio”, although that is not relevant to our discussion here. Autonomia Operaia was mainly active from ‘76 to ‘78, and was made up of many smaller socialist groups including Potere Operaio, Gruppo Gramsci, and Lotta Continua. Each group was strongly opposed to unifying into one party, preferring instead to maintain their autonomy and pursue different tactics to work towards their shared goal of social revolution.

In the end, this worked out in much the same way as it did for the sectarians in Germany decades earlier. Thousands of militants were arrested, hundreds fled the country, many were killed, and most of those who remained dissolved into terrorist groups like the Red Brigades and parliamentary parties like Democrazia Proletaria. Neither the autonomist terrorists nor the autonomist politicians were able to move beyond the failures of the earlier autonomist movement. In retrospect, the autonomists ended up replicating the sect form (albeit with some anarchist-influenced language) and suffered the familiar consequences of this organizing technique. It is worth noting that after misappropriating numerous mass parties (the Alabama chapter of CPUSA, the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg’s KPD) as successful examples of the “parties of autonomy” model, CounterPower leaves out any mention of Autonomia Operaia in the updated version of its essay. This is somewhat understandable as the movement collapsed within two years and failed to achieve its aims, but it is still dishonest. If failures are glossed over rather than rigorously examined, we are doomed to walk blindly into past mistakes. In this regard, CounterPower’s update to their essay does more to obfuscate the party question than answer it.

That said, Autonomia Operaia activists had valid criticisms of the Communist Party of Italy and could have created an alternative to lead the proletariat to victory. This is the positive lesson we can learn from them: when the “official” communist party of the nation abandons its principles, it can sometimes be worthwhile to build an alternative organization. However, they chose instead to create a loose collective of semi-aligned communist clusters which failed to coordinate their actions and create meaningful change. Had they taken on the arduous task of debating long-term strategy and forging programmatic unity, things may have turned out differently. This is the primary lesson we should learn from the Italian autonomists: a proletarian victory requires structure, democratic discipline, and unity of action.

Although not directly influenced by Autonomia’s answer to the party question, the FMLN-FDR of El Salvador could be theorized as an example of an “area of the party”. As CounterPower pointed out in their essay, this network was composed of five revolutionary parties and a number of mass organizations and civil society institutions who worked together in loose cooperation towards revolution. It ultimately failed, and CounterPower makes two interesting claims about its dissolution: that the failure was due primarily to the popular front reformism of the PCS (one of the five member parties) and that its downfall does not tarnish its status as a positive example of the area of the party in action. These claims do not fare well under the spotlight of historical scrutiny, particularly when shined on the brutal internecine violence that destroyed any semblance of unity within the movement by 1983.

CounterPower’s assessment of the FMLN identifies the PCS (Communist Party of El Salvador) as the weakest link in the chain, and the FPL (Farabundo Martí Liberation People’s Forces) as the strongest. In many ways, this is true, as the popular front strategy of the official communist parties has consistently ended in disaster the world over and the FPL was the most powerful and trusted party in El Salvador for a time. However, this is not the whole picture. Genuine political disagreements were often buried or papered over to maintain an artificial unity, and the ensuing tension was bound to boil over. While our autonomist comrades say the FMLN established a harmonious “mechanism of communication, coordination, and cooperation among the various politico-military organizations”, the reality is far grimmer. In its disagreement with other parties advocating negotiations with the Salvadoran government, the FPL resorted to gruesome assassinations to enforce its will on the rest of the FMLN. In April of 1983, FPL cadre Rogelio Bazzaglia murdered pro-negotiation leader Ana Maria with an ice pick, stabbing her 83 times. Although there was an attempt to blame the CIA or another party within FMLN, when presented concrete evidence of Bazzaglia’s guilt, FPL leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio promptly wrote a suicide note and shot himself in the head. With its most trusted leaders either disgraced, dead, or both, the FMLN lost steam after many members left the network in disgust. Along with this exodus of valuable cadre went all the legitimacy of the anti-negotiation faction, and so by 1989 even successful military offensives could do nothing more than bring the Salvadoran government to the negotiation table.⁹ The revolutionary potential of the FMLN died with Ana Maria, and her murder demonstrates how the “area of the party” approach only ends up recreating the problems of the sect form.

The Marxist Center

The US communist movement is essentially home to three different camps regarding the party question. Those who wish to see the movement divided into bureaucratic sects (with the belief that their particular sect is the One True Party) are on the right. Those who wish to see the movement divided into loosely aligned autonomist sects (with the beliefs outlined in CounterPower’s writing) are on the left. Those of us in the center are advocating a qualitative break with the sect form: the foundation of a mass party of organizers. This idea is often associated with a number of inaccurate claims—for instance, we are frequently lumped in with those who wish to replicate the worst aspects of the DSA model, where anyone can join the organization at any time for any reason without even committing to Marxist politics. We are also often accused of wanting to create a dogmatic bureaucracy of staunch Marxist-Leninists who will run the party as they see fit without input from membership. Neither of these claims are true.

In fact, what we desire is a party made and run by the masses themselves. Years of labor-intensive organizing will be necessary to make this happen, as the masses cannot be reached and welcomed into the socialist movement any other way. Tenant and workplace unions, unemployed councils, harm reduction efforts, solidarity networks, and other forms of “mass organizations” (in addition to independent electoral efforts) must be formed and rallied around a common political pole. In order for this pole to exist in the first place, the organizers engaged in mass work must debate and discuss until they articulate and agree on a comprehensive political program. In order for these debates and discussions to produce a clear program, the organizers have to see themselves as part of a common organization aimed at a shared goal. When each of these elements fall into place, something completely unique to the US left will be born: a mass party committed to praxis, programmatic unity, and democratic discipline.

By praxis, we understand a long-term commitment to building, growing, and maintaining the kinds of mass organizations detailed above. By programmatic unity, we mean collective acceptance of a comprehensive set of answers to long-term strategic questions, forged in an extended process of comradely debate and compromise. Ideally, this would take the form of a minimum-maximum program like those laid out and critiqued by Marx, Engels, and others in the first two Internationals.¹⁰ The minimum demands are structural reforms that communicate to the working class exactly how our efforts will improve their lives and empower them at the political level. Demands like guaranteed healthcare and housing, eliminating the Electoral College, Senate, and Supreme Court, disbanding the police and forming workers’ militias, ensuring union representation, and more would bring supporters into the fold and give us access to valuable comrades and organizers. They are chosen in such a way that when every demand is met, the proletariat has seized political power from the bourgeoisie and becomes the governing class of society.

With this done, the new workers’ government can focus on fulfilling the maximum demands, epitomized as communism, which would eradicate the last vestiges of capitalism and transition to a socialist mode of production. Establishing unity on long-term questions of strategy is far superior to enforcing a “party-line” on day-to-day issues and theoretical minutiae. It allows us to collaborate and exert the greatest possible combined strength of the working class in its diverse struggles without splitting over short-term tactical disagreements like “should we partner with this NGO on this tenant organizing project?” or subcultural arguments like “who was in the wrong at Kronstadt?” It also does not require agreement on “tendency” labels (such as Marxist-Leninist, anarchist, left-communist, etc). As our organizations grow, the need for a commonly accepted program will only increase. Finally, by democratic discipline, we refer to the old axiom “diversity of opinion, unity of action”.

These three principles are absolutely essential for the functioning of an effective and battle-ready proletarian party. As we have seen, the organizational forms of sectarians and autonomists (like the KAPD and Autonomia Operaia respectively) crumble under pressure whereas mass parties regularly weather brutal repression. No better example of this can be found in US history than that of the Alabama chapter of the CPUSA:

The fact is, the CP and its auxiliaries in Alabama did have a considerable following, some of whom devoured Marxist literature and dreamed of a socialist world. But to be a Communist, an ILD member, or an SCU militant was to face the possibility of imprisonment, beatings, kidnapping, and even death. And yet the Party survived, and at times thrived, in this thoroughly racist, racially divided, and repressive social world.¹¹

While other cases of this phenomenon (the Russian Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, and others) have been historically prone to corruption, preventative measures can be taken to ensure the party retains its mass character even after smashing the state and beginning socialist reconstruction. The most immediate step in this process is the collaborative drafting of and universal agreement on a party-wide Code of Conduct. This will facilitate the development of a comradely culture that balances rigorous critique and debate with an environment of pluralism and interpersonal care. In addition to understanding how to have a one-on-one organizing conversation, we should also strive to be well-versed in skills like listening, openly sharing feelings, assuming good faith in arguments, making sincere apologies, and offering support to comrades struggling with personal issues. None of these can be learned by accident in the alienated social spaces created by capitalism, so we must make a deliberate effort to establish these norms in our organization.

Another would be taking seriously the moral dimensions of Fidelismo’s contribution to Marxism. In stark contrast with both Stalin’s iron fist and Allende’s naive pacifism, Fidel Castro’s leadership of the Cuban revolution combined violent insurrection against the state with peaceful political maneuvering in the revolutionary movement. Over the course of protracted struggle on both fronts, the July 26th Movement was able to defeat the state militarily and construct a democratic mandate for political hegemony. Because Fidel and his comrades took the ethical implications of revolutionary struggle seriously, they were able to achieve victory without recourse to war crimes against the enemy or lethal violence against political competitors within the movement.¹² This commitment to moral conduct during violent struggle did not stop them from winning the war. In fact, it allowed them to win the peace. This strategy allowed Cuba to begin building socialism after national liberation without the deadly internecine conflicts that plagued other revolutionary movements (notably including the FMLN). It is crucial that we embrace this legacy by constructing an ethic of revolution for our time. More steps beyond these will of course be necessary, and their exact nature will become clear as we work towards the realization of a comradely culture together.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of the need for a mass party is the fact that the most advanced sections of the US labor movement are already calling for the establishment of a workers’ party. In its recent pamphlet Them and Us Unionism, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) wrote:

Throughout our history, UE has held that workers need our own political party. In the 1990s, UE worked with a number of other unions to found the Labor Party, under the slogan ‘The Bosses Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own.’ Although the Labor Party experiment was ultimately unsuccessful, UE members and locals have been active in numerous other efforts to promote independent, pro-worker alternatives to the two major parties.¹³

Other labor unions like ILWU and the Teamsters have produced leading organizers who share UE’s commitment to independent worker politics. People like Clarence Thomas, who helped organize the Juneteenth port shutdown on the West Coast earlier this year in solidarity with the George Floyd uprising, Chris Silvera, who chairs the National Black Caucus in the Teamsters, and many more can be found among them. These influential voices of the labor movement have united in Labor and Community for an Independent Party, stating:

We must build democratically run coalitions that bring together the stakeholders in labor and the communities of the oppressed, so that they have a decisive say in formulating their demands and mapping out a strategy. Most important, we need to put an end to the monopoly of political power by the Democrats and Republicans. The labor movement and the leaders of the Latino and Black struggles need to break with their reliance on the Democratic Party and build their own mass-based independent working-class political party.

While it is certainly possible that these efforts could lead to the establishment of a reformist labor party, it is precisely this possibility that behooves us to get involved. Any union that recognizes the need for independent proletarian political action outside the shop floor can be considered “advanced” compared to business unions aligned with the Democratic Party, and relationships with them should be built as part of a communist intervention in the labor movement. As Marxists, we have a duty not only to organize our class but to bring theoretical clarity to its most active champions. If we continue building strong proletarian fighting organizations and elaborate our vision in a comprehensive program, we will be positioned to guide labor and community leaders of all stripes to the creation of a truly communist political party.

Ultimately, the disparate sects within Marxist Center and the local chapters of the DSA must form tighter bonds and consider internal reforms that would allow us to build the party our class requires. In doing so, we should seek to unite as many far-flung collectives and mass work projects as we can in order to become a true threat to bourgeois hegemony. While staying divided in a loose federation may seem like a viable model to some, history shows that it is not. The autonomists and anarchists in our ranks are dedicated organizers doing valuable work, and we should be grateful for that. However, we would be doing ourselves and them a disservice if we did not offer a comradely critique of their organizational models.

Communists will always find strength in unity.

2019.07.22

Frauen und die rote Fahne: Gender and the Destruction of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschland

Stephen Boyce argues that the KPD’s failure was due to its inability to recruit women in the masses.

“The force of habit of millions and of tens of millions is a terrible force.” – V.I. Lenin

“Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder was one of Lenin’s most well known, studied, and cited works in the international communist movement. The above quote, however, was not as popular as those describing the “iron party steeled in the struggle” representing the best of the working class and which was “capable of watching and influencing the mood of the masses.”¹ During the 1920s and early 1930s, The Kommunistische Partei Deutschland (KPD) was the leading example of such an “iron party” and was the largest and most militant communist party in the world (outside the Soviet Union). Despite this, it failed utterly to stop the Nazi seizure of power and was then quickly destroyed as an effective political force. Observing these events, the French philosopher and political activist Simone Weill lamented “…the crushing and unopposed defeat of the German workers.”²

Why was KPD destroyed? What was it about the “the mood of the masses” that it did not see and could not influence? To ask these questions is to enter into the debate about the phenomena of Adolf Hitler and Nazism and thus contend with both popular culture mythology as well as the Cold War–derived fixation with “totalitarianism.” To pursue a gendered reconstruction of the KPD is also to confront the Historikerinnenstreit and make a judgment on the inclusion and participation of women in the furtherance of Nazism. The failure of KPD to win women was a key aspect in their defeat as a political party and their destruction as a social force. Conversely then, the ability of Nazism to gain the mass support of women was critically important for their ability to construct and operate the Third Reich. Each of these two theses is, in fact, the mirror image of the other.

It is one of the great ironies of women’s history that in Weimar Germany the communists, the party most adamant about women’s rights and most vocal in the call for women’s emancipation, would be an electoral failure among the majority of the nation’s women voters. The irony is compounded by the fact that “the only violently anti-feminist party in Weimar”, the National Socialists, would gain the mass support of women voters from 1930 on.³ Although it was not a uniform practice in Germany, votes were sometimes tabulated by gender, and from this data it can be shown that those parties that gained the most from women’s suffrage were (in order):

Center party (Catholic);

DNVP (Conservative);

DVP (Nationalist).⁴

In his analysis of the gendered vote in four cities from 1928 to 1933, W. Phillips Shively showed that the Nazis were gaining the most among women and that in 1933, they were capturing the highest percentage of the female vote in Protestant-majority cities.⁵ By contrast, in the crucial presidential campaign of 1932 when KPD leader Ernst Thälemann polled 15% of the vote nationwide (to Hitler’s 30%), the communist standard-bearer “received a smaller share of the total female vote than the of the total male vote in every district where men and women voted separately.”⁶

The statistics of the women’s votes are easy to obtain but the underlying reasons for this phenomenon are much harder to discern. Was it that the extensive list of feminist ideals in the party platform was not “systematically promoted” as alleged by Helen Boak?⁷ According to Julia Sneerington, there was no correlation between the emphasis on women’s issues and the support a party received from female voters. For most of the Weimar period women showed a remarkable consistency that favored religious parties first and, after that, the less radical option within the same “class milieu.” For the KPD it meant they were losing votes from proletarian women to the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD).⁸ This consistency persisted after the war, even in the Soviet zone of occupation where a revived KPD worked diligently to secure the electoral support of women. Their simple platform promised secularization, expropriation of Nazi property, and women’s equality. Once again women favored “moderate, and, especially religious candidates.”⁹

Robert Wheeler, in an article on women in the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) in the early ’20s, made an attempt at some tentative conclusions as to why the KPD had problems with women even among the left-wing activist base.¹⁰ His study focused on the debate over affiliation with the new Communist International, which eventually tore the USPD apart. The process of acceptance by Moscow included the strict acceptance of rules and a degree of external guidance which the most prominent women in leadership positions rejected; they then rallied a majority of the female rank and file to support them. Wheeler felt that the militarized rhetoric of the Bolsheviks and the image of the Red Army appealed to men whereas women were more anti-war.¹¹ Wheeler also felt that this whole debate injected a mood of intolerance and intense sectarianism absent from women socialists who continued to try and work across organizational boundaries. While much of this is speculative, he did advance a theory of “relative deprivation” as a model for why women came to such different conclusions than their male comrades. Conditioned by society to be patient and long-suffering, women tended to be more moderate and passive in their politics than men. This was not only true in society but also within the radical labor movement.¹²

If Wheeler was right then the dogmatic and militaristic leadership of the Communist International transformed German communism for the worse. Apart from the devastating impact on the ability to appeal to women, this has been the dominant judgment of historians on the KPD, whereby the party was a victim, first and foremost, of the Communist International. In this model, the KPD was so thoroughly Stalinized that there was no space for local adaptation or autonomous decisions.¹³ The failure of the party, then, derived from its lack of any agency with which to maneuver in response to German conditions. The main villain of this story was the Soviet hatred of social democratic parties and the shrill practice of categorizing these non-communist leftists as “social fascists. ” These sectarian attacks prevented unity on the left, thus ensuring Hitler’s triumph. For this critique, the overriding problem is that a communist party existed at all and by its existence caused the disaster that followed.

Did the fault of the KPD, and the source of it weakness among women, derive from the external source of the Comintern which was itself dominated by Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? A recent study by Norman LaPorte on Saxony has forcefully challenged the prevailing belief that the KPD was a bolshevized puppet lacking any autonomy in its local structures and political work.¹⁴ His conclusions are supported by earlier research on the Wedding District of Berlin by Eve Rosenshaft¹⁵ and Chris Bowlby as well as Richard Bodek’s examination of the communist theater groups in Berlin.¹⁶ As regards the Comintern’s 1928 policy towards “social fascism,” Bowlby showed that this divisive doctrine was actually downplayed by the KPD press until after the events of May 1-6, 1929, when the police, under the authority of the Social Democratic government in Berlin, gunned down workers and innocent bystanders in response to a May Day march.¹⁷

Locating the weaknesses of the KPD’s practice to an external cause shifted the blame to Stalin and Stalinism for the ultimate failure of the SPD and Weimar itself and ignored the other causes from within the German socialist tradition. It was Rosa Luxemburg who wrote the founding manifesto of the KPD, and in it she fundamentally underestimated the strength of the SPD government and its ability to employ the Freikorps to maintain itself in power.¹⁸ As the socialist saviors of capitalism and the enablers of a reactionary judiciary, an anti-democratic and militarized police, and an army independent of civilian control, the SPD did more to weaken itself and discredit its regime than anything the Communist party was capable of doing. Commenting on Weimar just before its collapse, Simone Weil wrote:

“The communists accuse the social-democrats of being the “quartermaster-sergeants of fascism’ and they are absolutely right. They boast that they are a party capable of fighting fascism effectively, and they are unfortunately wrong.”¹⁹

Communists were certainly incapable of mobilizing women to assist in that fight against fascism and it could well be that their insistence that “gender equality was a central part of its larger revolutionary agenda” was largely to blame.²⁰ If so then it must be acknowledged that this tradition also derived from Luxemburg and her demand that proletarian feminism was component of (and subordinated to) the class struggle. It was true, as further argued by Sneeringer, that the KPD

“…preached female equality as integral to a just society but because of their conviction that democracy was a sham, they constructed an image of the political woman who was less a citizen than a loyal fighter in the proletarian front.”²¹

It was equally true that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were the initial leaders of that front, and set the tone of struggle well before Lenin, and then Stalin, took control of the international communist movement. The KPD as a political party, and German communism as a social movement, drew its considerable strength from unskilled and semi-workers, the unemployed, and radicalized intelligentsia because of its uncompromising commitment to revolution. This commitment was also its biggest weakness for reasons that had nothing to do with the Communist International or the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy. The promise of revolution, which so inspired the poorest workers, also frightened the middle class and alienated women of all classes.

The weaknesses of communism existed simultaneously with the growing strength of the conservative, nationalist movement in Germany of which the Nazi Party was the most dynamic component.²²

To fully gauge the failure of one, it is necessary to look at the improbable success of the other. The ability of the Nazis to incorporate and use women on a national scale set them apart from the failure of the KPD to expand its base of support beyond proletarian men in the most industrialized regions of the country.²³

Hitler’s attitude towards women was ambivalent in that he did not rail against them in public but instead extolled motherhood and the family (while occasionally denouncing prostitutes). In private, the Führer’s misogyny was blatant as he described women as “petticoats” whom it was worthless to attack publicly.²⁴

From the very beginning, however, women were involved in the Nazi Party. According to the police report on the mass meeting where Hitler seized control of the NSDAP in 1922, there were 50 women in attendance (out of 350 total). As the party grew throughout the ’20s, William Burnstien’s analysis of the social origins of the NSDAP show that a disproportionate share of young, unmarried women from the middle and working class were joining the party and doing so at a much higher rate than young, unmarried men in the period 1925-1932.²⁵ He attributed this phenomenon to the party’s call for married women to leave the workforce which would benefit unmarried women already employed or living in areas of high unemployment. Small as a percentage of the population as party members were, the growing presence of women as members or supporters indicated an ability to make inroads into the larger society watching the Stormtroopers march. On these marches, women “cared for SA men, sewed brown shirts, and prepared food at rallies.”²⁶ Most importantly these women provided an “ersatz gloss of idealism” for those engaged in brutalizing their many enemies. These faithful auxiliaries included not just the members of the Nazi women’s organization, but also those outside the party including many whose husbands were members.²⁷ In this miniature version of the Volksgemeinschaft (the “people’s community”), the sexes dutifully played their separate roles as fighters in the racial front against communists, “international” socialists, and Jews.²⁸

What was the attraction of this contemptuous misogyny to the women who followed, voted for, and then supported a regime based on bigotry, discrimination, and racial nationalism? What attracted women to a party that epitomized hyper-masculinity and thuggish aggression? Of all the reasons that can be surmised, one constant was the fear of socialism and especially hostility to the Communist Party.

In her study of women in Germany, Claudia Kuntz described several activist women in the NSDAP ranks who exemplified this embrace of Nazism as protection against the “other.” For Elsbeth Zander, the first prominent female Nazi, the main dangers to Germany were “socialists and socialites.”²⁹ In the case of Irene Seydel, a successful organizer from the industrial region of Bielefeld, the NSDAP was the only political force that “would be strong enough to prevent a Communist overthrow.”³⁰ In her study of “women denouncers” who provided information to the Gestapo on enemies of the state, Joshi Vadana noted that most of those being denounced were Communists.³¹

For Koontz, Nazi women willingly embraced a subordinate position in a movement dedicated to the masculine exertion of a racial community in which women would be both protected and mobilized in their domestic sphere of home and family. For many of these women, what they most feared was the threat of socialist egalitarianism and a future in which the world was no longer organized according to sharply differentiated sexual poles. If the Nazi movement allowed some small space for women’s independent political activity (because the men considered their work so unimportant), this same movement reinforced a bi-polar world with absolute certainty as regarded the positions of male and female. In the words of the Hitler Youth Leader,

As boys aim to be strong, so girls aim to be beautiful…, something which the harmonious development of the body is intrinsic… They (girls) can dance and be happy, but they should understand that they will have no private lives; rather they will remain a part of their community and its exalted aims. Girls will willingly approach their future destiny as mothers of the new generation.³²

The willingness of the “girls” in the Bund Deutsche Mädel (BDM) was so ardent that the organization acquired an aura of sexual licentiousness, resulting in the mocking reference to its initials as standing for bübi druck mich. According to LeBor and Boyes, over a thousand of these young women returned pregnant from the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, thus fulfilling the Gertrud Scholtz-Klinks admonition that while “every woman can not get a husband, every woman can be a mother.”³³

While Wheeler’s theory of “relative depravation” may be seen as an explanation for women’s rejection of the Communist Party, it does not explain the allure of the Nazi Party. The explanations for that success are dominated by the notion of “seduction” and “totalitarianism” in which Hitler first seduced a nation by his charisma and then set up a police state which terrorized the population into continuing submission. What this model does not explain is the degree to which the Nazis maintained their popular support apart from the reliance on secret police and, by contrast, the failure of a very resilient communist underground to pose any real challenge to the regime. A look at the statistics of repression in Nazi Germany compared to the later German Democratic Republic shows that the weight of police surveillance was much less under the Nazis. There was only one Gestapo agent for every 2,000 people, whereas in East Germany the Stasi maintained one agent for every 166 people and ran a far larger group of informers. The point made by LeBor and Boyes is that,

“The East Germans could reckon with the strong possibility of an informer at every dinner party. The inhabitants of the Third Reich could, by and large, eat in peace .”³⁴

Further analysis of the relative ineffectiveness of the Gestapo by Mallman and Paul went into far more detail on the lack of manpower and the uncoordinated and inefficient system the Gestapo worked under. What is evident from their work is that it was certainly not a

…thoroughly rationalized mechanism of repression, in which one gear meshed precisely with the other, keeping the entire population under surveillance.³⁵

This inefficiency was particularly apparent in the failure of the Gestapo to destroy the communist underground organization, which was a primary target. While raids against the underground socialist and communist movements were widely played to the press, they never came close to terminating this network.³⁶ Official reports outlined frustrations in internal operations as well as the complete failure to infiltrate revolutionary émigré groups due to the communist counter-intelligence capability.³⁷ What the Gestapo was able to leverage was the willingness of people to voluntary inform of others, “above all women,” who sent their own husbands to concentration camps. The specific case cited in the study was of a working-class woman from Saarbrücken who turned in her husband, a former member of the KPD, for listening to foreign radio broadcasts (and to get rid of him for the sake of her lover).³⁸

The conclusions that can be reached from this information are two-fold. The first is that the Nazis relied on far more than police repression to maintain themselves in power. They had won an enormous amount of support from the population and were able to maintain this apart from their widespread use of torture and imprisonment. Within the home itself, the personal had become political through the agency of millions of women who supported a regime they saw as protecting and shaping the space which defined them as women. A most potent illustration showed the image of white-haired Catholic woman, in repose, with her rosary wrapped around her hands. Around her neck, she wore the “Mother’s Cross” with a swastika instead of a crucifix. Whether this was by her choice or that of her family is irrelevant. The weight of the “habit of millions” that Lenin warned against was now an integral component of German fascism.³⁹

The KPD, despite the mass arrests of their leadership in 1933 and 1934, were able to continually reform and maintain an underground existence. Despite this, they could not strike back against the regime because they did not have the mass support needed, even within their former strongholds. The brave words of their leadership just before the takeover that a triumphant Nazism would lead to a proletarian uprising were false because the KPD never had the capacity to fully engage the masses to overthrow any of the German governments since the collapse of the monarchy.⁴⁰ An American writer visiting Berlin at this crucial time observed the KPD and described

“…the thin, miserably clad, weak men, women, and children who marched in the biting wind to the Lustgarten to hear their speakers denounce capitalists, could not feel here any immediate threat to the capitalistic system. Theirs was the hatred not of rage, but of despair.”⁴¹

In his study of the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Comintern, Robert Wagner began by evoking a Europe on the brink of a revolution that did not happen. In advancing an explanation he challenged all previous scholarship which had ignored

… the failure of the revolutionary movement, except in Russia, to secure really significant support from a particular segment of the working classes, namely women. A more classic case of the historian’s tendency to accept sex as a constant, i.e., to operate in general as if only one sex the male sex exists, would be difficult to find.⁴²

The Kommunistische Partei Deutschland failed to win the support of working-class women in its own revolutionary struggle and in the process managed to provoke the enmity of German women across the class spectrum of Weimar. The disconnect between its revolutionary pronouncements and its actual capabilities was first rooted in its inability to gain the support of all the proletariat (much less the majority of the German people) because of its rejection by women. Even if it had gained this support and launched an uprising, the establishment of a revolutionary regime would have no doubt provoked a civil war. That the party could not win over women and a critical mass of the rest of the population to the necessity of a war between Germans resulted in the Holocaust instead. The KPD failed to overcome the habit of millions and so became their victim.

2019.01.072019.01.24

Fighting Fascism: Communist Resistance to the Nazis, 1928-1933

The failure of the German left to unite against Hitler is often used as a warning to those who fail to build unity with liberals in order to stop the far-right. Why did the German Communists and Social-Democrats not unite against the Nazis? John K argues not all blame can be placed on the Communists for their failure to build a proper united front, as their uneasy relationship with the Social-Democrats was based on the treacherous behavior of the Social-Democrats themselves. We publish this despite believing that the reductionist and ultra-left politics promoted by the Stalin-dominated Comintern deserve heavy critique and that ultimately the party made major strategic and political errors in leading the working class with its lack of democratic flexibility and exercise.

Meeting of the Roter Frontkämpferbund, or Red Front, a Communist paramilitary group in Berlin 1928.

On the night of February 27th, 1933 in Nazi Germany, not even one month after Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor, the Reichstag, home of Germany’s parliament, was destroyed in a fire. This fire, an act of arson, was a pivotal and tragic moment for the German left. In Hitler’s “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State,” issued the following day “as a defensive measure against Communist Acts of violence endangering the state,” the Communists were blamed for the terrorist act.¹

With this decree, Hitler began a process that effectively crushed any and all potential political resistance to the Nazi regime. The left, not just the German Communist Party, but also the German Socialist Party which had enjoyed national prominence during the Weimar Republic years, was silenced. In a matter of months following the decree, Germany’s political left was assaulted by the Nazi state, and its leaders sent to Concentration Camps or into exile. In the months and years leading up to the Nazi triumph over the left, a unified right developed in Germany while the left remained divided. In particular, the Communists ( the Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) was never willing to work in an alliance with the Social-Democrats ( the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD). While both parties drew on Marxism for their ideological platform, the more radical KPD considered the SPD to be a social fascist enemy. Thus, while the right was unifying behind the Nazis during the 1928-1933 period, the KPD devoted its resources to fighting both the Social-Democrats and the Nazis.

Why did the KPD adopt such a course of action? Many scholars, such as Beatrix Herlemann argue that the KPD had evolved, by the late 1920s, into a Stalinist party whose interests were subservient to the orders of the Communist International. As Herlemann argues, the KPD “followed without reservation the Comintern’s political line – namely the “social fascism” thesis launched in 1928 to 1929, by which the KPD directed its entire force toward the fight against social democracy and enormously neglected the growing danger of National Socialism.”² The view taken by Herlemann is not without merit. The KPD leadership did advocate action against the SPD, and even reached out to Nazi rank-and-file workers for an alliance against the SPD Union leadership.³

It is wrong, however, to assume that the KPD devoted all of its resources to a fight against the SPD and neglected the Nazi threat. On the contrary, most of the political violence practiced by the KPD during 1928-1933 was directed against the Nazis, not the Socialists. It is also incorrect to assume that the divide between the KPD and the SPD was entirely motivated by the orders of the Comintern. Certainly, the Comintern heavily influenced the KPD’s course of action, but deep divisions had existed between the KPD and the SPD from the very day that the KPD became a political entity. Further, the differences between the two parties were not merely ideological. KPD and SPD membership came from different economic spheres, they lived in different neighborhoods, and they experienced the Weimar Republic in different ways. The SPD, for much of the Republic’s existence, was one of the main parties of government. When the KPD accused the SPD of Social Fascism, they were not targeting another radical left party; they were focusing their criticisms on one of the most powerful political entities in the Republic. Related to this, the SPD had in its position of power pursued repressive tactics against the KPD. Thus, the KPD’s view of the SPD as social fascists was not merely the result of ideological dogmatism but was in fact shaped by the actual experience of the KPD in the Weimar Republic.

To fully understand the schism between the KPD and the SPD, one must turn to the fall of Imperial Germany at the end of the First World War in 1918, and the revolutionary period that followed, before turning to the formation of the Weimar Republic in 1919. Before the First World War, the Marxist left was united as the SPD. By the time the Great War began, the SPD was the most popular political party in Germany and had gained more seats than any other political party in the Reichstag. The unified SPD, however, was internally divided between those who wanted to achieve the party’s ideological goals through participation in the government and those who wanted to actively pursue Revolution. The tension between these two groups erupted after SPD delegates to the Reichstag, representing the more moderate wing of the party, voted unanimously in favor of Germany entering the First World War. The more radical elements of the party that opposed this action, who were eventually cast out of the SPD in 1917, became the genesis for the KPD.

As Revolution erupted in Germany once it became clear that the war was lost, the more radical group of Marxists, calling themselves Spartacus League, issued their November 26th Manifesto declaring that “the revolution has made its entry into Germany. The masses of the soldier, who for four years were driven to the slaughterhouse… and the masses of workers… have revolted.”⁴ While the Spartacus League declared a revolution, the majority of the SPD continued to work with the crumbling German State. The split between Germany’s left, apparent with the issuance of the Spartacus Leagues Manifesto, became final when Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg authored the “Founding Manifesto of the Communist Party of Germany, [KPD].” In the manifesto, Luxemburg declared “that it is time to shake ourselves [the KPD] free of the views that have guided the official policy of the German social democracy down to our own day, of the views that share responsibility for what happened on August 4, 1914.”⁵ Luxemburg further asserted that “what passed officially for Marxism [in the SPD] became a cloak for all possible kinds of opportunism, for persistent shirking of the revolutionary class struggle, for every conceivable half measure.”⁶

As can be seen, it was not simply the orders of the Communist International that spurred the KPD into opposing the SPD. The Party’s very birth came as a result of profound disagreements within the German left: disagreements that were not simply theoretical, but deeply political in the form of the more moderate elements of the SPD’s support for German involvement in the First World War. During the revolutionary period and the early Weimar Republic years, the KPD also experienced oppression and violence as a result of SPD actions. Historian Eve Rosenhaft notes that after the Weimar Republic was established, the radical left, including the KPD revolted, “demanding… socialist programmes…. Freikorps and paramilitary police under Social Democratic administration put down the disturbances in two months of bloody fighting.”⁷ Historian Eric D. Weitz similarly notes that “the SPD’s alliance with the police, the army, and the employers undermined its popular support, which redounded in part to the benefit of the KPD.”⁸ Of equal importance is Rosenhaft’s assessment that “the political division between the Communists and the Social Democrats that had emerged between 1917 and 1919 was reinforced by increasing divergences between the interests of different sections of the working class.” ⁹ The wealthier, more skilled proletariat joined the SPD while semi-skilled laborers became the rank-and-file members of the KPD. Thus, when one examines the later actions of the KPD’s declaration of the SPD as Social Fascists, one must understand that the reasoning did not suddenly develop as a result of the Comintern’s policy directives, but that the KPD had actually experienced oppression from the SPD. The KPD had evidence of the SPD working with the right and conceding fundamental goals of socialism, whereas it had yet to experience the far more brutal repression of the Nazis.

The 1929 Program of the Communist International, issued as the Nazis were beginning to gain significant national prominence, outlined the Social Fascism concept that would prevent the KPD from uniting with the SPD in opposition to the Nazis. The program detailed the attempts of the Proletariat to ferment revolution in the wake of the First World War, which led to the creation of the USSR but also the defeat of the Communist left in a number of other countries, such as Germany. The program declared that “these defeats were primarily due to the treacherous tactics of the social democratic and reformist trade union leaders” as well as the fact that Communism was just starting to become a popular political ideology.¹⁰ The Comintern further argued that “Fascism strives to permeate the working class by recruiting the most backward strata of workers to its ranks by playing upon their discontent, by taking advantage of the inaction of social democracy.”¹¹ The Comintern also asserted that “in the process of development social democracy reveals fascist tendencies which, however does not prevent it…[in other situations from operating as] an opposition party [to the bourgeois].”¹²

To further understand the position taken by the KPD against the SPD, Ernst Thälmann’s 1932 speech “The SPD and NSDAP are Twins” reveals how the KPD leadership envisioned its struggle against fascism in all forms. Thälmann’s incendiary speech declared that “joint negotiations between the KPD and the SPD… there are none! There will be none!.” ¹³ This was not to say that the KPD did not recognize the Nazi threat, as Thälmann articulated that “KPD strategy directs the main blow against social democracy, without thereby weakening the struggle against Hitler’s fascism; [KPD] strategy creates the very preconditions of an effective opposition to Hitler’s fascism precisely in its direction of the main blow against social democracy.”¹⁴ It is imperative to recognize, though, that the KPD only advocated the blow against the SPD leadership. As Thälmann argued, The KPD’s policy envisioned, the creation of a “revolutionary United Front policy… [that mobilized the masses from below through] the systematic, patient and comradely persuasion of the Social Democratic, Christian and even National Socialist workers to forsake their traitorous leaders.”¹⁵

KPD leader Ernst Thälmann gives a speech.

Thus, KPD invective was not aimed at the average member of the SPD, but at its leaders. The KPD was also not devoting resources to fighting Social Democracy instead of fighting Nazism. Rather, it was pursuing a strategy in which it believed that the defeat of Fascism would only be possible through the unification of the proletariat into one Revolutionary mass. This helps explains the KPD leadership’s focus on attacking the SPD rather than completely focusing its energies on Hitler. The KPD believed that what it viewed as a socially fascist SPD was dangerous because it claimed to advocate socialist policies while in reality, it subsumed a large portion of the proletariat into supporting a political entity that actually benefitted the bourgeois. This prevented the proletarian class from achieving true Marxist socialism. KPD leadership devoted its energies to attacking the SPD more so than the NSDAP because the Nazis were an overtly fascist group, whereas the SPD, in the KPD’s view, furthered fascism under the auspices of a claimed leftist ideology. To the KPD, the SPD was an insidious threat that needed to be exposed to all of the working class to see. The KPD did, in fact, want a united left or unified front to fight the fascists. It just did not want to unite with the leaders of the leftist parties. Instead it envisioned a United Front of the masses that would seek revolution to secure the goals of the proletariat, also termed a “united front from below”.

While the KPD leadership devoted much of its rhetorical attack towards the SPD rather than the Nazis, the same can not be said of the actions of the rank-and-file party membership. Between 1928-1933 the party primarily practiced non-violent opposition towards the SPD while political violence was reserved for the NSDAP and its paramilitary SA stormtroopers. Thus, Hearlmann’s contention that the KPD neglected the growing threat of Nazism only holds true if one relegates themselves to examining the documents of the KPD leadership and the Comintern. The reality is that during the 1928-1933 time period, as Eve Rosenhaft shows in her study of the KPD’s use of political violence during this period, the KPD pursued a “wehrhafter Kampf [against the SA] as a fight to maintain or recover actual power in the neighborhoods.”¹⁶ As stated before, the KPD and the SPD attracted different groups amongst the proletariat. In the harsh final years of the Depression-era Weimar, though, the Nazis and the KPD were fighting for the hearts and minds of the unemployed and unskilled segments of the proletariat. In cities such as Berlin, this translated to street-fighting between the KPD and SA over control of the neighborhoods these segments of the working class lived in. As Rosenhaft so eloquently puts it, “the terror of the SA… [was] a threat specifically directed against working-class radicalism, [that] evoked a response with the weapons familiar to the neighborhood [violence].”¹⁷ Historian Dirk Schumann largely concurs with Rosenhaft’s assessment of the KPD’s use of political violence, noting that “while Communists and Social Democrat’s hardly ever clashed in physical confrontations, both appeared on the scene as enemies of the right-wing groups.”¹⁸ Thus, while the KPD leadership advocated opposition to the SPD and the Nazis. The reality on the streets, where political violence served as a potent form of expression for the proletariat, was that the left devoted its energies to fighting the right rather than each other.

In the end, the policies of the KPD failed. What came about in 1933 was not the revolution of the proletarian masses, but rather the Nazi seizure of power and the twelve-year reign of Adolf Hitler. The united revolutionary front against the fascists never materialized and the KPD, along with the rest of the German left, was subjected to repression, exile, and imprisonment. Ernst Thälmann, when he gave his “The SDP and the NSDAP are twins” speech in 1932, did not have the benefit of knowing that twelve years later he would die in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the KPD leadership and the Comintern that helped shape its ideology and actions were unaware of what would soon occur. What the KPD did have, however, was the memory of its experiences during the Revolutionary period following Imperial Germany’s collapse, the everyday experience of an SPD that did not pursue revolutionary Marxist goals, and a party membership that was suffering under the hardships of the Weimar Republic, particularly during the depression years.

KPD propaganda poster. Reads “Only Communism saves you”

In hindsight, the Nazis were clearly the greater threat, but the KPD had experienced more than a decade of an SPD that had, from the Communist’s perspective, disregarded and undermined the Revolutionary goals of the party. The KPD may have made a terrible miscalculation in identifying its threats, but that miscalculation was not the result of ideological dogmatism, but rather experience. The idea that the KPD could have simply pursued a unified front with SPD leadership ignores the very circumstances and reasons for the party’s existence in the first place. Furthermore, the KPD did not devote all of its energy to combatting social fascism while ignoring the threat of the Nazis. The reality of the political violence experienced during the Weimar Republics final years demonstrates that the KPD and the SPD practiced violence, not against each other, but against the Nazis and the right.

Ultimately, the one form of political opposition -violence- which both the SPD and the KPD used against the NSDAP, in part led to the destabilization of the Weimar Republic, which allowed for the Nazis to be elected into office. As Dirk Schuman notes, “National Socialism stood in a tradition of bourgeois-national opposition to the Weimar Republic, which it radicalized so successfully against the backdrop of crisis that voters flocked to it in large numbers.”¹⁹ If the KPD and the SPD had presented a united front, would it have made much difference in the end? It was not the division between the left that caused the Depression or spurred the political violence of the SA. In light of the fact that both of these conditions would have existed even if the SPD and KPD had presented a truly united front against Nazism, it is worth questioning what this united front would have achieved. After all, the Nazis did not come to power in a violent revolution. Though violence surrounded their rise, the Nazis were democratically elected into office. Because of their ideology, the KPD and the SPD were permanently parties of the working class. A united left might have allowed for the KPD to devote its full energies to attacking Nazism, but in the end, the only ones that would have listened would have been the proletariat. Would this really have prevented the Nazi electoral victory?

In light of all this, how should KPD actions during 1928-1933 be judged? In terms of preventing fascism, the policy was an unequivocal failure. With regards to the KPD’s fight against what it perceived to be the social fascism of the SPD, though, the evidence suggests that this policy should not be judged too harshly. While it failed to recognize the events that would eventually occur, it was grounded in the KPD experience in Germany and was not simply the result of the dictates of the Comintern. KPD resistance to the SPD was elemental to the very existence of the party. Not only that, but the KPD had actually experienced repression from the SPD. Thus, while the policy failed to recognize the true threat of the Nazis, it should not be viewed as patently ridiculous. The failure of the left to form a United Front also did not prevent the KPD and the SPD from actively fighting the Nazis in the streets. While this political violence only increased electoral support for the Nazis, it was amongst groups such as the Bourgeois-Nationalists, that actively despised the left and everything it stood for.