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The KPD After January 1919

From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement

The Weimar Republic took shape in the first six months of 1919, as Gustav Noske's Freikorps suppressed the revolution.

The bourgeois parties of Weimar

In the elections for the Constituent Assembly on January 19th, 1919, the large corporate groups of German capital financed and steered the political forces. The four major banks alone contributed at least 30 million marks to the election funds of the various parties. At the head of the bourgeois forces were the great electricity magnates Walther Rathenau of AEG and Carl Friedrich von Siemens for the Democrats; Karl Helfferich of Deutsche Bank and Alfred Hugenberg of Krupp for the far-right nationalists; and major industrialists such as Hugo Stinnes for Gustav Stresemann's People's Party.

The SPD emerged as the leading party, with 11.5 million votes out of 30 million voters. The governing coalition formed on February 13th consisted of the SPD, the German Democratic Party (5.6 million votes), and the Catholic Centre Party (5.9 million). As Pierre Broué comments in The German Revolution: The barons of heavy capital were the real masters of Germany. They dictated their conditions to a parliamentary coalition which had no course other than to bow before them. [...] The mass of the German people were paying for the crushing cost of the war.

The Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles imposed humiliating conditions on defeated Germany. Beyond degrading its power, the goal was to erect a bulwark against Bolshevism, both on the domestic front and against Russia. Thomas Mann had the courage to write in Fiorenza, with candour: The Russian Revolution shook me. There was no doubt in my mind of the historical superiority of its principles over those of the powers which set their foot on our necks. For German revolutionaries, and for the International, the conditions of the Versailles peace were an expression of imperialist brigandage, just as the world war had been.

The treaty also constituted a strengthening nationalism and Pan-Germanist tendencies in Germany. Revanchist sentiment rose against foreign imperialism and against those branded as their accomplices on the home front – starting with the revolutionaries, blamed for the stab in the back.

Initially, on May 12th, 1919, Philipp Scheidemann indignantly refused to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In a speech at the University of Berlin, he denounced the terrible Shirt of Nessus intended to reduce a great people into the fate of pariahs: May the hand wither that chains itself and us with these shackles. Later, however, faced with the inflexibility of the Entente powers, the Social Democrats were forced to retreat. Scheidemann resigned and, in order to take responsibility for signing the treaty, the Majority Social Democrats returned to the position of the right wing of the USPD, expressed by Kautsky and Hilferding, who were more explicit in supporting ratification.

On June 28th, the new Bauer cabinet, taking execution a week earlier, signed the treaty at the Palace of Versailles, in the same Hall of Mirrors where Bismarck had proclaimed the founding of the German Reich.

Versailles and Brest-Litovsk

In the debate leading up to ratification, the KPD, speaking from a class-based standpoint, rejected what it called the false choice between signing or not signing. In contrast to the USPD, which justified signing the treaty by invoking the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk, the KPD emphasised in a manifesto the difference between the two situations: At that time, the situation was as follows: Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann were threatening the very existence of the young Russian Republic; the German armies were at the gates of St Petersburg, the stronghold, the most steadfast revolutionary citadel. The Russian Revolution needed a respite to regain its strength. That is why the Russians signed, to buy time for the revolution. If the Germans sign today, they will indeed obtain a truce, but a truce to the advantage of the German counter-revolution; a truce during which German imperialism – lurking like a spider in its web – will watch for an opportunity to gain an advantage for itself in the coming world revolution, and will offer its Noskes and its White Guard to the world's gendarmes to strike the proletarian revolution. For these reasons, the German communists took a stand against the ratification of the treaty.

Lenin had described the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as an unfortunate, extraordinarily severe, infinitely humiliating peace, yet necessary to secure even a brief respite for the work of organisation: By preserving Soviet power we are rendering the best, the most powerful support to the proletariat of all countries. The separate peace was an outcome of the victorious revolution: Trotsky was right when he said: the peace may be a singly unfortunate peace, but the peace ending this hundred-fold obscene war cannot be an obscene, disgraceful, dirty peace. This was February 1918, with Lenin still looking towards a European revolution: the German imperialists plundered had, in Lenin's words, besieged us, oppressed and humiliated us – we are capable of enduring all these burdens. We are not alone in the world. We have friends, supporters, very loyal helpers. They are late [...] but they will come. Let us work to organise, organise, and yet again organise!. Lenin resolved to accept the German terms for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk because the interests of socialism, of world socialism, are higher than national interests.

A difficult strategic assessment

The KPD's arguments also highlighted the difference between the Russian and German revolutions in terms of timing: the former, having seized power, advocated a peace that – albeit at a high price – brought an end to the imperialist war with the proletariat and peasants under arms; the latter, operating from a position of minority and internally divided, had to confront a peace imposed by the victorious imperialist powers, with the world war already over. Thus, the KPD's position also began to reflect the immense difficulty, at that juncture, of assessing the ebb of the revolutionary wave and the onset of a new phase, where the end of the war and the retreat of struggles in Europe increasingly demanded a long-term strategy, abandoning the illusion inherent in a rising world revolution. It certainly remained true that the latter was the only possible perspective, but the difficult question concerned the timing and the capacity for a strategic vision for the new phase that was unfolding.

This was the central issue of the debate within the Communist Party after January 1919. Following the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Leo Jogiches, the leadership of the KPD was taken over by Paul Levi. A refined intellectual and the son of a banker from Hechingen, he joined the SPD at a very early age. Attending Rosa Luxemburg, he sided with the revolutionaries who voted against the war loans in 1914. Mobilised to the front in April 1915, he succeeded in obtaining a medical discharge the following year. Having settled in Switzerland, he came into contact with Karl Radek and Vladimir Lenin and joined the Zimmerwald Left. In 1917, he declared himself in favour of a break with the centrists and opportunists. At the founding of the KPD, he opposed the extremist majority, inclined towards putschist and Blanquist adventures. Levi was convinced of the need to correct this majority tendency within the KPD, reorienting it with long-term work aimed at organising and developing the party, including through the parliamentary platform and the trade unions.

Radek's theses

Levi's battle against extremism was, at this moment, shared by Radek, who from prison set forth his views in the essay The Future of the World Revolution. In it, he argued that the victory of the proletariat cannot be the result of a brief struggle, neither in individual countries nor on an international level, but only of a long period of struggles in which defeats and victories will alternate. Since the deceptive hope of a rapid victory, which leads to erroneous tactical measures, is the result of a false transposition of the experience of the Russian Revolution onto the world revolution, Radek focuses on the differences between the October Revolution and the European revolution. In addition to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie compared to the Western bourgeoisie, the revolutionary role of the Russian peasants – which finds no counterpart in the property-owning spirit of their European counterparts – and the phenomenon, advanced in Europe, of imperialist corruption of the strata of the labor aristocracy, Radek observed that the Russian proletariat, carrying out the revolution in the midst of war, managed to seize power with arms in hand. The Western proletariat, on the other hand, once the war was over, had to surrender its arms during demobilisation, while the bourgeoisie formed its mercenary Freikorps to subjugate it. Even after the peace imposed by the Entente, the clauses of Versailles required Germany to reduce its armed forces to a professional army of 100,000 men – insufficient for waging war, but effective in a civil war.

In opposition to extremist tendencies, Radek therefore called for a long and gradual process to develop the party and concluded his pamphlet with these words: Think in terms of continents, Joe Chamberlain advised the British imperialists. Think in terms of continents and centuries – this is the Communist International's appeal to the proletariat.

The Heidelberg Congress

Meanwhile, Paul Levi had become convinced of the impossibility of bringing the extremist wing back under party discipline and therefore decided to provoke a split. At the Second Congress of the KPD, which opened on October 20th, 1919, in Heidelberg, he presented his Theses on Communist Principles and Tactics Against the Syndicalists. Levi argued that the world revolution is an extremely slow process in which more than one defeat must be expected. [...] Revolution is not the result of a single blow, but of a long and tenacious struggle by a class [...] nor standard concessions of its task and its strength [...] and therefore subject to a process of rise and fall, of ebb and flow. The Levi-extremist faction, unwilling to align itself with these theses and driven as it was by its autonomous impatience, was expelled. As a result, the party was halved, especially in Hamburg and Berlin. In the following April, the expelled members founded the Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Communist Workers' Party of Germany, KAPD).

Radek and Lenin did not agree with this drastic decision by the KPD Central Committee; Radek, while supporting Levi's arguments, regretted that a significant number of his old comrades and supporters from Hamburg and Bremen were among those expelled from the party.

Lenin also shared Levi's position, but in a Letter to the Central Committee of the German Communist Party Regarding the Split, he urged the restoration of unity among German communists. Lenin considered expulsion excessive in the case of very gifted propagandists, inexperienced and young. He continued: If the split was inevitable, efforts should be made not to deepen it, but to approach the Executive Committee of the Third International for mediation and to make the Lefts formulate their differences in theses and in a pamphlet. Restoration of unity in the Communist Party of Germany is both possible and necessary.

Translated from the original work by , published in Lotta Comunista, , p. 9.

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