- Communism in Germany Under the Weimar Republic, by Ben Fowkes, MacMillan: 1984.
The history of German communism in the period 1918–33 is rich with lessons for revolutionaries today. During this period the German Communist Party (KPD) grew from a handful around Luxemburg and Liebknecht into the largest CP outside the USSR.
Between 1918 and 1923, Germany was engulfed in revolutionary crises and in the years up to 1933 the KPD had, and then lost, the opportunity to smash Nazism.
Hitherto there has been little material on these years in English. Ben Fowkes’ book is therefore welcome. The book deals with events between 1918 and 1933. Communist policy in the face of Hitler’s rise to power is given somewhat cursory treatment, while the book concludes with a factually interesting section on the sociology, organisational structures and international relations of the KPD.
Fowkes has limited his history to the activity of the party’s leaders, ‘saying little of the middle cadres, let alone the ordinary members’. This is a pity, since it leaves us developed in conflict with the Communist International and its agents. In other words, he lights upon the familiar theme that Stalinism is merely a continuation of Leninism.
In the German party the development of democratic centralism resulted, in December 1920, in the creation of a real leading body or ‘Zentrale’. Fowkes complains ‘this was a clear move towards the Leninist conception of an elite party’ (p. 185). This move away from the federal organisation inherited from Luxemburg went hand-in-hand with the KPD becoming ‘bound to the Comintern’ (p. 192).
According to Fowkes, the connection between these organisational measures and the party’s political failures is that they robbed the party of people like the rightist Paul Levi. People who for Fowkes enshrine something he counterposes to political correctness—’independence of judgement and deeply-held humanistic values’ (p. 201). In siding with Levi, and seeing his resignation as ‘a decisive moment in the internal history of the KPD’ (p. 62), Fowkes reveals much about his own politics.
[Reconstructed — check against original] Instead of uniting in action with SPD workers to fight the reaction, the KPD argued against a general strike and claimed that the proletariat ‘would not lift a finger for the democratic republic’. Despite changing its line when the mass of the working class went on strike against Kapp, the KPD maintained a sectarian stance towards the SPD’s mass base.
The Third and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern (1921 and 1922) ratified the united front policy, and stimulated in turn a move away from the pro-united-front KPD of 1920. By this time the KPD had fused with the left wing of the USPD (October 1920), and had in effect become a mass party. It had regained members and influence after the ill-fated March Action of 1921; it issued a largely unheeded call for a general strike and to arms! It had also thrown out the right-opportunist grouping around Paul Levi, who publicly broke ranks in denouncing the March Action.
Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann, the KPD implemented the united front tactic with considerable skill and success. Fowkes records that through their work around strikes, in which they united with non-communists, they were able to significantly expand their influence in the trade unions. For example, at the 10th ADGB Congress, the KPD had seven delegates, while at the 11th Congress in June 1922, they had 90 delegates (p. 81).
Despite these successes, a strong left within the party, around Ruth Fischer and Arkady Maslow, was ever ready to return the united front policy. Fowkes shows the way in which the failed revolution of 1923, associated with Heinrich Brandler’s opportunist use of the united front, workers’ government tactics in Saxony, enabled this left to secure control of the party in 1924–5. Once again the united front was abandoned.
Even before the Brandler/Thalheimer leadership had been ousted, the new course was evident in the call for the united front only from below, and ‘a life and death struggle’ was announced against the ‘Social Democratic accomplices of fascism’ (p. 114). The disastrous policy of ‘social fascism’ was born. After a short list to the right (1925–1927), the KPD under the new leadership of Stalin’s man Ernst Thälmann, lead the party through the ‘Third Period’ and towards destruction at the hands of the Nazis. The failure to internalise the lessons and limitations of the united front was a decisive factor in the collapse of the KPD.
In demonstrating this, Fowkes’ book is effective and informative. In explaining it, it is politically flawed. His thesis boils down to a critique of Bolshevik organisational methods and the influence (usually malign, as he sees it), of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and its agents.
In detecting only the evil influence of an ‘outside force’ distorting the KPD’s development, Fowkes fails to distinguish between the vital, positive role played by the Comintern in the early 1920s, especially through Lenin and Trotsky’s united front policy, and its negative, destructive role in the period of its degeneration—especially Zinoviev’s bureaucratic leftism and Stalin’s ‘social fascism’ policy. Fowkes records the mistakes made by the German party accurately. To learn from them, however, we must dispense with his all-pervasive anti-Cominternism, and predilection for ‘independent’ opportunists of the Paul Levi stripe.
