7 Germany and Hungary—The United Front

At both the third and fourth congresses of the Communist International, delegates were confronted by the complicated situation in Germany. It was in the cauldron of the German revolutionary years, roughly from 1917 to 1923, that the tactic of the united front crystallized. In a comprehensive review of the recently published Toward the United Front, the complete proceedings of the Fourth Congress, Ian Birchall writes that “the central theme of the congress, which recurred under various headings, was the united front…. That meant unity in action with the reformist organisations that still retained the loyalty of the majority of workers in most countries.”1 Today, we might replace “united front” with “coalition-building”—a contemporary term for the politics of self-emancipation. One of the key events of the German revolutionary years was the event that came to be known as the March Action of 1921. A study of the March Action, together with the short-lived 1919 Hungarian revolution—linked to the German events through the person of Béla Kun, who played a leading role in both—brings into sharp relief the catastrophic consequences of not basing Left political strategy on serious and sincere coalition building. It also brings into sharp relief the insightful political theories of Paul Levi, whose contributions, in a way not dissimilar to those of Martov’s, have been, until recently, either ignored or denigrated.

The March Action

At the time of the March Action, the KPD, despite having more than four hundred thousand members at the time—a genuine mass party—nonetheless had the allegiance of only a small minority of the working class, and was thus far smaller and less influential than the traditional party of German labour, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was still many times the size of the KPD. Its minoritarian status notwithstanding, the KPD tried, in its own name, to call a general strike in March of 1921—what came to be known as the March Action. It was an attempt to “force” the German workers into revolution. David Morgan says that, “the essence of the March Action, as it was later described by an admirer, was that ‘the party went into battle without concerning itself over who would follow it.’ It was a classic attempt to create mass action by sheer act of will…. Rather than break off the contrived operation, the leadership increased the pressure on members and used all the means it could think of, including sabotage and faked bomb attacks on Communist property, to bring other workers out on strike.”2

According to Pierre Broué, between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers chose to participate.3 Tragically, the former figure is probably the more accurate one, as John Riddell notes in his introduction to the proceedings of the Third Congress. “In Session 5, Heinrich Malzahn of the German opposition estimated that strikers totalled only two hundred thousand—just over half the party’s pre-March membership—a figure not challenged in the congress.”4 Strikes are supposed to be actions of the working class, whose members far outnumber the small minority of that class that organizes itself into this or that political party. The fact that the March Action, a so-called general strike, involved at best half of the members of the party that called the strike, is powerful evidence of just how isolated from the mass of the working class the KPD was. Worse, the March Action was associated with numerous acts of violence by the small minority supporting the strike against the vast majority who had chosen not to follow the KPD’s call to action. “The strike took on the character of a fratricidal struggle,” writes Riddell. “Indeed, in many instances, Communists battled non-Communists among the workforce; in some cases workers were cleared out of the workplace by force.”5

The party paid an enormous price for its adventurism: it was, arguably, irreparably damaged. Thousands of party members were arrested: by early June, “there were already 400 sentenced to some 1,500 years hard labour, and 500 to 800 years in jail, eight to life imprisonment and four to death.”6 Tens of thousands left the party, many leaving politics altogether, with party membership plummeting from 450,000 to 180,443.7 Broué documents the very accurate analyses of the Luxemburgists Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi, who, just before the March Action, were absolutely clear that the German Left was in no position to challenge state power, and who were the first to openly oppose the ultra left-wing politics that had led to such a disaster.8 By contrast, the Comintern leaders—the members of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI)—pushed hard for the March Action and were proven completely wrong. Lenin and Trotsky, after the fact, provided extremely clear critiques explaining the failure of the March Action—critiques made available in the documents of both the third and fourth congresses. But hindsight is always 20/20, and during the decisive weeks in March, the ECCI’s key representatives in Europe were aggressive advocates for this very costly failure. The lessons from this catastrophe are codified in the politics of the united front (hence Riddell’s choice of title for the Fourth Congress proceedings, Toward the United Front), and in an orientation toward influencing the majority of the working class as opposed to confining left-wing politics to the corridors of small minority organizations (hence Riddell’s choice of title for the Third Congress proceedings, To the Masses).

The tragedy of the March Action was shaped by what came to be known as “the theory of the offensive.” This theory asserts that “offensive,” and sometimes insurrectionary, tactics are appropriate, even when communists constitute only a small minority of the working class and the oppressed. It was at the root of not just the 1921 political catastrophe in Germany but also the 1920 military catastrophe for the Russian state in its war with Poland, examined in detail in the previous chapter. In his introduction to To the Masses, Riddell links these two episodes.

the Red Army’s Polish offensive inspired an article by Nikolai Bukharin in the Comintern’s world journal, headlined “The Policy of the Offensive,” which drew on precedents from the French revolutionary wars of the 1790s to make the case that Soviet military advances could spark revolution beyond Soviet borders. In the run-up to the Third Congress, Bukharin’s formula was born to a new life in the theory developed by the German party’s majority leadership to justify its adventurist policy.9

Paul Levi and Béla Kun

A comparative analysis of Paul Levi and his nemesis, Béla Kun, can help bring the issues in question into focus. There is, today, much agreement that the March Action was an irresponsible adventure that shattered the party and isolated it from the mass of the German working class. However, around one key aspect of this experience—the role of KPD leader Paul Levi—there is little unanimity. Levi was clearly correct in opposing the March Action, yet he was expelled from the party on spurious charges of breaking discipline. He has been held in low esteem by many ever since. Those who examine Levi’s career will inevitably encounter “the traditional epithets and insults of ‘traitor’ and ‘renegade’” that permeate the bulk of the Stalinist-influenced scholarship on this period, writings that shamefully and inaccurately portray Levi “as no more than a ‘class enemy’ and a potential traitor, even when he was a leader of the KPD.”10 Levi’s “crime,” for which he was expelled, was to publish in the nonparty press a pamphlet critical of the party’s role in the March Action11—a pamphlet whose essential analysis has stood the test of time. Ian Birchall unhelpfully calls Levi’s action “political scabbing,” which only serves to heighten the emotion around the issue and lessen the possibility of reasoned political inquiry.12 The expulsion of Levi for the publication of a pamphlet is a sign of the degeneration not of Levi but of the KPD.

To the Masses gives us a tool with which to correct the historical record. Levi, having been expelled from the party, was not allowed to be present at the Third Congress. But in Riddell’s book, almost a century later, he returns in spirit. Some of the most exciting content of To the Masses can be found in the appendices, which include “Paul Levi Appeals to Third Congress.”13 A carefully worded condemnation of the tactics of the KPD leadership, this piece constitutes an indictment of the actions of the Comintern representative in Germany—the Hungarian Béla Kun. Another appendix contains “Resolution by Clara Zetkin on March Action,” a cogent defence of the “to the masses” united front approach.14

In a letter to Lenin, also in the appendices of To the Masses, we hear the chilling voice of Béla Kun unapologetically defending the March Action: “Beyond any question, the March Action has brought us great political and organisational successes and will bring us many more in the future.” This absurd statement flies in the face of the historical record. From Kun’s own words, we also gain insight into his use of slander and prevarication. “Levi and Zetkin are utter hysterics,” he writes, “and what they are saying in the German party right now consists of nothing but lying gossip. No one can believe it contains even a grain of truth.” Kun proclaims that Paul Levi is “universally recognised as dangerous.” On one occasion, says Kun, “Levi tried to conceal his swinishness and stupidity behind Radek’s authority.” But his worst venom is reserved for Levi’s close comrade, Clara Zetkin: “As for the statements of the aged comrade Zetkin, I would like to say only this: the old woman is suffering from senile dementia. She provides a living proof that Lafargue and his wife acted entirely correctly,” he writes, referring to the suicide of Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx.15

These words—characteristic not of a serious activist but of a petty, prejudiced bureaucrat—come from what was meant as a private letter to Lenin. Its preservation and publication give us insight into the character and methods of one of the key figures of the era. The impression formed is not flattering. Even worse, we now know that in slandering and denouncing Levi and Zetkin, Kun was attacking the two figures most closely associated with developing the united front/coalition-building method, which is the chief contribution of these congresses to the contemporary Left. Levi, Zetkin, and others developed their politics in that section of the German Left influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, who, from a position of deep respect for the Russian revolutionaries, knew that Bolshevik methods could not be applied without amendment to the very different circumstances of Germany. The Luxemburgist current in the German Left insisted that strategy and tactics shaped by the experience of the revolution in Russia had to be radically modified in order to fit the extremely different conditions prevailing in Germany.16

One example can illustrate why we should study Levi’s section of the Left and its unique approach to strategies and tactics. An early and important moment in the development of the united front method began with the metalworkers’ union in Stuttgart, which, in 1920, called for the uniting of the minority communist workers with the mass of noncommunist workers in “a joint struggle for concrete improvement in the workers’ living conditions.”17 This initiative inspired the issuing of an open letter from the KPD calling for the same approach on a national scale.

To the Masses makes available the full text of “Open Letter to German Workers’ Organisations,” the authors of which “appear to have been Paul Levi and Karl Radek.”18 The letter calls for workers’ organizations to work together to achieve various objectives: to “begin unified struggles for higher wages,” “raise all payments to victims of the War and pensioners in line with the demanded wage increases,” “grant the unemployed across the whole country uniform payments,” “distribute foodstuffs at reduced prices to all wage earners and those with low incomes,” “confiscate immediately all available habitable spaces,” and accomplish other very practical and realizable immediate reforms to improve the conditions of the poor and working-class populations of postwar Germany.19

The open letter originated in Stuttgart and illustrates the importance of developments in Germany. As Riddell tells us, “late in 1920, a meeting representing 26,000 Stuttgart metalworkers called for joint struggle for a list of basic demands; the appeal was published 10 December 1920. It was the first formulation of the united front policy that the Comintern was to adopt a year and eight days later.”20 The letter also highlights the central role of Levi and Zetkin. Levi, on returning from the war to Germany in 1918, made Berlin his centre of work, but he “maintained his connections with Stuttgart where Clara Zetkin lived, where the Spartacists had a majority among the local Independent Socialists (USPD), and where Levi helped organize deserters from the armed forces.”21

The open letter’s sensible, careful call for united action—for coalition building—was unfortunately rejected by the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the party to which the vast majority of politicized German workers adhered. However, this call was also met with derision from the “left” section of the communists in Germany, who denounced it as reformist. These “lefts” would shortly displace Levi and Zetkin and take the KPD into the catastrophe of the March Action.

If rejected by the SPD leaders and the communist Left, the open letter was greeted with enthusiasm at the base of the workers’ movement. As Clara Zetkin wrote, “the demands of the Open Letter had as their result that the masses organised in trade unions drove the union bureaucracy forward.”22 Heinrich Malzahn, a prominent shop steward and KPD member, said that the open letter allowed the KPD to “win a powerful influence before the March Action”:

This Open Letter, together with the slogan of a workers’ and employees’ united front against the employers’ general offensive, won for us the trust of the working class. The best measure of the extent of our trade-union influence is the fact that the union bureaucrats felt that their power was threatened and responded by dismissing union staffers and expelling Communists. That did not harm us, but rather contributed to increasing the party’s reputation and influence.23

After its publication on 8 January 1921, the KPD “called on the workers to organise democratic assemblies in order to impose their demands on their leaders, and to declare their will to undertake a general struggle to win them.”24 Meeting after meeting took place endorsing the letter’s call for unity in struggle.

On 11 January 1921, the delegate meeting of the workers in the Vulkan naval shipyard in Stettin took place, on 17 January, that of the production workers and office staff at Siemens in Berlin, in the Busch Circus, on the 19th that of the railwaymen in Munich, and in the days which followed, meetings of the metalworkers in Danzig, Leipzig, Halle and Essen, of the railwaymen in Leipzig, Schwerin, Brandenburg and Berlin, the national congresses of the saddle-makers and the carpet weavers, the meetings of the miners in Dorstfeld, and a large workers’ gathering in Jena, all fully endorsed the Open Letter, and called for a struggle to be organised around its demands.25

To the Masses reveals the uneven response from leading Russian communists to this very fine initiative. It was “quite artificial,” according to Zinoviev. “I do not believe that one can call on the workers to form an alliance with other workers’ parties.”26 Bukharin agreed, arguing that the open letter approach “does not correspond at all to Communist demands” and “is not revolutionary. After all, we want communism; we want the dictatorship of the proletariat…. But what the letter says is that we want the proletariat to live. That is bizarre. Are we living for a new capitalism?”27 These responses clearly demonstrate that an inability to understand the need for coalition building was not the preserve of irresponsible elements in the German party or of bureaucratic figures like Béla Kun, but went right to the top of the Russian party. Lenin, in contrast, sided completely with Zetkin and Levi and the open letter approach, putting himself in opposition to the German Left and to Zinoviev and Bukharin. In a letter to Zetkin and Levi, he called the open letter “an entirely correct policy (I have condemned the contrary opinion of our ‘Lefts’ who were opposed to the letter).”28 To the Masses also contains the text of Trotsky’s hour-long speech on strategy and tactics, a brilliant refutation of the ultra left-wing position and a defence of the united front/coalition-building approach.29 Even today, almost a century later, it retains its relevance.

But while there is much to learn from To the Masses and Toward the United Front, not all of these lessons are about “what to do,” but rather are warnings about “what not to do.” For example, a vote to endorse Levi’s expulsion from the congress was pushed through before the debate on the March Action. Surely, in a genuinely democratic organization, the debate on the March Action would have happened first, prior to any discussion of expulsion. Even worse, “Levi’s appeal to the congress demanding reversal of his expulsion was apparently not made available to the delegates.”30 Surely, in a genuinely democratic organization, the document of a former leading member, written to that organization, would have been made available to those passing judgment on his fate.

In the end, Levi remained outside the ranks of the KPD and the Comintern, even though his political positions were ultimately endorsed by those organizations. And Kun—whose political positions were thoroughly discredited and rejected—remained a treasured member of the Comintern’s leadership. This juxtaposition alone—the banning of Levi and the protection of Kun—indicates deep problems in the Comintern project. One year later, at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Zetkin and Kun made back-to-back speeches to mark the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.31 One can only imagine what Zetkin thought of her placement next to Kun.

The KPD in Germany had become a mass party through its fusion, in December 1920, with the left-wing section of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). At a USPD convention in Halle in October 1920, “a majority of the delegates voted to accept the Twenty-One Conditions and join the Comintern,” writes Riddell, going on to say that “Zinoviev gave the main speech in support of Comintern affiliation.”32 This is true, but incomplete. What we can now add is that the critical legwork had been done in the years preceding the Halle Congress by the KPD leadership under Levi. The party he inherited after the assassination of Luxemburg was riven with ultra-left, March Action–style politics. In 1919, he succeeded in separating from these elements through an expulsion of the most ultra-left section of the party, which, while it reduced the party from about one hundred thousand members to about fifty thousand, served to liberate it from what we might call the March Action section of the party. On that basis, he was able to begin negotiations with the left wing of the massive USPD and its eight hundred thousand members.33 As David Fernbach writes, “Levi approached the leaders of its left wing, who agreed to co-operate on a unifying tactic.”34 Zinoviev did indeed deliver an impressive speech at the Halle Congress, a speech that we now have in English, along with the riveting counter-position by the Russian antiwar Menshevik-Internationalist Iulii Martov.35 Ben Lewis’s comment that “the long hard work of Zinoviev and [the] Comintern yielded a good harvest” minimizes the role of the soon-to-be expelled Levi.36 Zinoviev’s speech would never have had an audience without the careful organizing of Levi in the preceding years.

Hungary 1919

Béla Kun’s politics were shaped by his experience in the Hungarian Revolution of 1918–19. On 21 March 1919, Hungary became a soviet republic. The new government “implemented a series of ultraleft measures,” writes Riddell, measures that included “refusing to give expropriated land to poor peasants and overhasty collectivisation,” and that led to the new republic’s increasing isolation.37 We now have new resources in English to add to our understanding of these events, specifically Paul Levi’s critique, written just days after the Communists took power in Hungary. Levi warned that the Hungarian soviet republic came not from proletarian strength but from capitalist weakness and that “the possibility for the dictatorship of the proletariat exists not when the bourgeoisie collapses but when the proletariat rises.”38 He reminded readers of the program of the Spartacists: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany.”39

Kun took power without anything like a majority in the working class. It was estimated that in Budapest, the Communist Party had ten to fifteen thousand members, while in rural Hungary, the membership numbered twenty to twenty-five thousand.40 This is a good beginning for a left-wing party, but it by no means makes it the mass instrument capable of leading a struggle for workers’ power.

In a confusing series of events in early 1919, Kun was jailed as a dangerous radical, but while still in jail, he emerged as the key figure in “unity” talks with his former opponents, the Social Democrats. Without question, the attraction of Kun, for the Social Democrats, was his association with the Russian state, from whom they hoped to receive military aid. Through diplomacy—not the mass action of the workers—Kun and the Social Democrats drafted a text proclaiming that “a new regime was to be set up on the Soviet model”—as if workers’ power can be established by diplomacy and decree. Kun did not stop at this. Béla Menczer tells us what happened next:

Decrees ordering the “socialisation” of all industrial, commercial and landed property employing over twenty persons were published. Also decrees to establish “Revolutionary Tribunals” to repress any action against the new order, to rename the armed forces and the Police “Red Army” and “Red Guard” and fixing the elections for “Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils” (in Russian: Soviets) for April 7th. The Socialist and Communist Parties were merged.41

A fledgling communist party that represents, at best, a small minority of the working class and that assumes “power,” not on the back of a mighty millions-strong movement, but through a back-room deal focused on issues of geopolitics and international relations that were negotiated in a prison cell, is clearly going to be in a very weak position. While both Karl Radek and Paul Levi recognized the weak position of the Hungarian communists, they drew completely opposite conclusions. Radek horrifyingly maintained that “the Communists should have maintained the gallows next to the government-buildings in order, if necessary, to demonstrate to their dear allies the concrete meaning of proletarian dictatorship.”42 Levi’s rejoinder was clear, accurate, and cutting:

To propose the gallows, at the moment of the establishment of soviet-power, as the method of unifying and amalgamating the proletariat; to undertake the organisation and consolidation of the proletariat not on the basis of the “clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletariat”, “its conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle” of the Communists (according to Rosa Luxemburg), but on the basis of mutual hangings, all this strikes me—I do not want to use strong words—as a very unfortunate method for the unification of the proletariat.43

Just 133 days after Kun’s “revolution,” Levi’s warnings against substitutionist methods—that is, the Left taking power without basing itself on the mass self-activity of the working class—proved tragically correct. The Hungarian communists, by now completely isolated, had to flee for their lives, ushering in years of right-wing dictatorship.

Two Perspectives

Let us return to events in Germany. Two books have been influential in shaping an understanding of the German revolutionary years, both with the March Action at their core: Chris Harman’s Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918–1923 and Pierre Broué’s Révolution en Allemagne: 1917–1923, available since 2006 in English translation as The German Revolution, 1917–1923. While these two books are, in many ways, very similar, they draw very different conclusions when it comes to the March Action of 1921.

Harman and Broué both agree that the March Action was an irresponsible adventure, shattering the party and isolating it from the mass of the German working class. However, around one key aspect of this experience—the role of KPD leader Paul Levi—they diverge sharply. Shortly after the March Action, as we have seen, Levi found himself outside the ranks of the party. Harman characterizes Levi’s actions as his “departure from the party,” a “resignation barely a week before the Action.”44 This is misleading. Harman is here conflating two quite different episodes. The first occurred on 22 February 1921, when Levi, Zetkin, and three others resigned—not from the party but from the party’s leading body.45 They resigned precisely over the related issues of adventurism and ultra-leftism, issues on which they felt isolated in the leadership; they believed, quite rightly, that they would be able to prosecute their positions more effectively as rank-and-file members. What Harman calls Levi’s “departure” from the party happened later, on 15 April, and it was not voluntary. Levi was expelled from the party by the very leading body he had left just weeks before.46 The verbal move from the highly charged (and accurate) term “expulsion” to the neutral and ambiguous term “departure” minimizes both the error of the KPD leadership and the destructive role of the pro-Russian leadership that took his place. It also seriously distorts Levi’s place in this story.

Harman’s emotionally charged dismissal of Levi makes it more difficult to assess accurately the political positions of the day. A key precursor to the united front approach—perhaps the key precursor—was the previously mentioned open letter, which called for unity in action of Social Democrats and Communists against the threat of the far Right. Levi’s role was central in the drafting of this letter, and he was without question its key advocate.47 According to Broué, the open letter “certainly expresses the political line which Levi had been defending for several months.”48

Broué devotes two chapters to an examination of Levi’s contribution to the German Left.49 In doing so, Broué usefully highlights the efforts—by Levi, Clara Zetkin, and others deeply influenced by Rosa Luxemburg—to develop an approach to activist politics that was meaningful to their own context. Again, this meant an insistence that strategy and tactics shaped by the experience of the revolution in Russia—a country with pockets of industry surrounded by a sea of peasants—had to be radically modified in order to fit the extremely different conditions prevailing in urban, industrialized Germany.50 Levi’s politics were shaped through years of involvement with the section of the German Left influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, a current that included Levi, Zetkin, and Karl Liebknecht, among others best known for their role in building “the Spartacists,” which originated as an antiwar group within the SPD after that party’s parliamentary group capitulated to German nationalism and supported the slaughter of the First World War. There is much to learn from these Luxemburgists.

By contrast, Harman says little more about Levi in the period after the March Action, except to indicate that he would end his political life “veering towards the left wing of Social Democracy.”51 Throughout his book, Harman consistently minimizes the role of Levi and all the Luxemburgists, underlining their inexperience, small size, and lack of roots. He completely ignores the scholarship of David W. Morgan, who argues that the Spartacists “had put their advantage as the first outspoken opponents of the war to good use, building themselves strong positions in the party organizations in Stuttgart, Braunschweig, and parts of Berlin … and achieving significant minority positions in Düsseldorf, Leipzig, and elsewhere. Spartacist influence was pre-eminent among the antiwar youth.”52 Of particular interest here is the identification of Stuttgart as one of the key bases for the Luxemburgists. This influence of the Luxemburgists—particularly in the person of Clara Zetkin—continued into the early 1920s, which helps us to understand why the open letter, the first big unity-in-action initiative in Germany, came out of Stuttgart in 1920, laying the basis for the united front method. In other words, the emergence of the united front approach from Stuttgart is not the result of Paul Levi’s efforts alone, but reflects the approach of an entire Luxemburgist current within the German Left, a current that included Clara Zetkin.

Morgan opens another area of inquiry with the critical observation that to properly understand the united front method, we must take seriously the other large formation on the German Left, the Independent Social Democratic Party. “The term ‘united front’ is historically associated with the Communist Party,” he says, but “in 1921 and 1922 the USPD was par excellence the party of united-front tactics. The explicit goal of party policy … was to find programs that would override ideological differences and bring the three parties [of the German Left] together in a struggle for the essential requirements of the German proletariat.”53

Harman’s work suffers from an inadequate engagement with some of the key literature on the German revolutionary years. In this chapter, I have sketched out the contributions of three scholars whose works were published before Harman began his research—Pierre Broué, Werner Angress, and David W. Morgan. Harman either ignores these three entirely or uses their research carelessly. Harman does not reference Morgan’s research at all. He critiques Angress for minimizing the strength of the KPD during the next great upheaval in class struggle in Germany, in the autumn of 1923.54 Harman does rely heavily on Broué; indeed, his book has a structure uncannily similar to Broué’s. Despite this similarity in structure, he draws completely opposite conclusions from those of Broué concerning Levi and the Luxemburgists. Broué engages with their work carefully and seriously; Harman, by contrast, is quite dismissive. Harman’s book is weaker because of his inadequate engagement with the work of these three intellectuals.

For activists in the twenty-first century, the importance of the united front method is, without question, the most meaningful insight from this entire period. The united front approach—what we now might call coalition building—is the way in which minority currents of politicized activists can gather around a defined set of demands and seek unity in action, despite adhering to different politics. The very opposite of the united front approach was exemplified by what came to be known as the March Action of 1921. We have many positive lessons to learn in this regard from Paul Levi, a pioneer of the united front/coalition-building method, and only negative lessons to learn from the ineffective and divisive approach of Béla Kun. Broué’s careful approach brings these points out carefully and clearly.

The Teacher–Student Binary

Trotsky in 1933, as we saw above, regarded the first four congresses as “unsurpassed” in their approach to political events of the day. In a 2012 review of Toward the United Front, Ian Birchall cautioned against taking such an evaluation too far, reflecting on the dangers of relying too heavily on the Comintern congresses:

Many years ago, when I was young, it was common to find orthodox Trotskyists who claimed they based their politics on “the first four congresses of the Comintern.” (You can probably still find such people in the remoter reaches of the Trotskyist blogosphere.) A position that made some sense in the 1930s, when Trotskyists were insisting that there was a clear break between Lenin and Stalin, became less and less relevant as both capitalism and the working class went through enormous changes.55

This is an important point. An uncritical reliance on the first four congresses inevitably leads to a simplistic understanding of the contrast between the “experienced Russian” leadership of the Comintern, and the “inexperienced, mistake-prone” leadership of the non-Russians. I have already highlighted the “inexperienced, mistake-prone” Russian and Comintern leadership in the March Action, the Hungarian soviet republic, and the invasions of Poland and Georgia. However, an approach to the first four congresses that blurs these mistakes is not limited to the “Trotskyist blogosphere,” as Birchall implies.

To illustrate, here is an excerpt from the 1985 history of the Comintern written by the late Duncan Hallas, a founder and, for many years, a central leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party in Britain, with which both he and Birchall were associated for decades: “On the main issues, on the central thrust of its political line, the Comintern leadership was right and all its opponents, in their different ways, were wrong. That is precisely why the heritage of the first four congresses, in principles, in strategy and in tactics, is so indispensable to revolutionary socialists today.”56

This perspective informs Hallas’s entire approach. In the introduction of The Comintern, he quotes Trotsky: “The International Left Opposition stands on the ground of the first four congresses of the Comintern.”57 He then argues that “the Socialist Workers Party, in Britain, also stands on this ground—which is why the emphasis of this book is on the Comintern’s revolutionary period, the period of the first four congresses and immediately after.”58 Two years after the publication of his book, Hallas went on a North American speaking tour to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In an interview published at the time, he spoke “of Bolshevism and of the Communist International in its early years after the Russian Revolution,” saying that for himself and others looking to find lessons from that era, “the whole complex of both ideas and experiences that were developed during this period of socialist history are what guide us.”59

Hallas’s book highlights the great accomplishments of the Comintern, including the creation of the united front method. He documents clearly the degeneration of the Comintern after the first four congresses, when it became little more than an extension of the foreign policy of the state-capitalist Soviet Union. And he critiques aspects of its work in the earlier period: “The perspective of the Red International of Labour Unions was mistaken and, by 1921, this should have been recognised and the necessary conclusions drawn.”60 But his overall emphasis is on the key role of the first four congresses and, in those congresses, the superiority of the Russian experience, the Russian political method, and the Russian leadership, all of which he contrasts with the inexperience and political confusion that existed outside of Russia. The March Action story, of course, strains this orientation considerably, and Hallas recognizes the terrible role of the Comintern leadership in that event. But he dilutes this by deflecting the blame toward the German Communist Party, emphasizing that the enthusiasm of the Executive Committee of the Communist International for this adventure was echoed loudly among leading members of the German party. That is true, but it is beside the point. With the evidence he presents, a story could be told of a far-seeing German cadre, trained by Rosa Luxemburg, who had a pretty good sense about what to do in Germany in the early 1920s, but who were muscled out of the way by a well-financed, well-staffed Comintern cadre, who had no sense about what to do in Germany in the early 1920s. We cannot schematically separate the “good judgment” of the experienced, well-trained ECCI from the “bad judgment” of the inexperienced, ill-trained German leadership. It is a frame that simply will not work.

Hallas does qualify his close identification with the Russian leadership and their political decisions during the first four congresses, saying, “We cannot simply apply these lessons mechanically without thought to different situations.”61 But an overdrawn portrait of the virtues of the Comintern and the Russian party’s leadership makes it difficult to identify and analyze the sometimes serious errors that they made. The Comintern leadership, in the period of the first four congresses, was not always right on the main issues. The invasions of Poland and Georgia and the March Action in Germany were not small, tactical blunders; they were mistakes that had historic, and tragic, consequences. Birchall is right: an angular perspective maintaining that “on the main issues … the Comintern leadership was right and all its opponents … were wrong” does open the door to difficulties. But these words and the framework are from Hallas, a central theoretician of Birchall’s former party, not someone from the “Trotskyist blogosphere.”

Birchall is aware of the limitations of Hallas’s book. In his biography of Tony Cliff, Birchall argues that Hallas’s work and certain other Trotskyist histories “are valuable in that they defend what was best in the early years of the Comintern … while sharply contrasting that early period to the later Stalinist horrors. Yet they remain essentially defensive.” He contrasts Hallas’s perspective with that of Tony Cliff, who “drew on a different tradition, the work of Alfred Rosmer and Victor Serge, which combined a total commitment to the basic aims and ideals of the Comintern with a recognition of its limitations in practice.”62

In fact, some of Cliff’s criticisms of the actions of the Comintern leadership are very harsh. He says that the March Action, “unlike other defeats,” was “not brought about by misdeeds of the local national leadership, but by the adventurist policy imposed on the German party by the leadership of the Comintern.”63 Even worse, this mistake was only partially confronted: the Comintern leaders responsible for the disaster—Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, and Kun—were barely reprimanded. Paul Levi—in Cliff’s words, “the talented former leader of the KPD, who had been wronged by the central leadership of the Comintern”—would end up expelled and outside the party.64 With good reason, then, Cliff calls this chapter of his biography of Lenin “The Great Cover-Up.”

But remember that Cliff writes about the March Action as an isolated exception to a general rule. That event, he says, was “unlike other defeats.” In his four-volume biography of Lenin, the 1920 invasion of Poland—much more serious than the March Action, certainly in terms of lives lost and probably also in terms of its impact on the Russian state—is not even mentioned. He does deal with it in his biography of Trotsky, agreeing that “Lenin’s policy turned out to be wrong and costly.”65 But this seriously understates the scale of the catastrophe. The overwhelming emphasis in the bulk of Cliff’s many writings on the Russian Revolution is on the superiority of the Russian leadership—of Lenin in particular—when compared with the leaders of the Left outside of Russia. Cliff, in the spirit of Hallas, paints a picture of an experienced, wise Russian leadership interacting with an inexperienced, sometimes foolish non-Russian Left that was prone to errors and mistakes needing to be corrected through a deep study of Russian Bolshevik history. Cliff makes this point very sharply in his biography of Trotsky: “The Congresses of the Comintern were schools of strategy and tactics, and at them Lenin and Trotsky played the part of teachers, while the leaders of the young Communist Parties were the pupils.”66

This approach is not helpful. The error of the March Action was not a single moment in an otherwise unblemished record. The 1920 catastrophe in Poland was equally destructive to the revolutionary process and equally the result of the “teachers”—in that case, Lenin—making an error of enormous proportions. This error was not a minor, accidental one, but one that exposed crucial flaws in Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ very conception of revolution. As already noted, Lenin outlined the most serious of these flaws in his 1920 speech, examined in the previous chapter, in which he made the case for “probing with bayonets” to discover “whether the social revolution of the proletariat had ripened in Poland.”67 This is a shocking position. The attempt to export the revolution through military invasion is the antithesis of the notion of self-emancipation that underlies any meaningful progressive politics and that was the essence of the Soviet experience at the core of the Russian Revolution.

The invasion of Poland was not just an episodic mistake. On 23 July 1920, “Lenin wrote to Stalin raising the possibility of a thrust through Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary with the aim of staging a revolution in Italy. In his reply, Stalin agreed that ‘it would be a sin’ not to try.”68 This approach was taken up and codified by Tukhachevsky in a theory of the “revolutionary offensive war”—an explicit argument that socialism could be advanced through force of arms.69 Trotsky furiously combatted these deeply substitutionist notions of socialist transformation; his opposition to these notions, according to Isaac Deutscher, ran “like a red thread through his writings and speeches of this period.”70 In a critique of Tukhachevsky, Trotsky openly links the Russian invasion of Poland in 1920 with the German attempt at a revolution in Germany in 1921. “Since war is a continuation of politics by other means, must our policy be offensive?” he asks. He goes on to answer this question: “This was a very great and criminal heresy, which cost the German proletariat needless bloodshed and which did not bring victory, and were this tactic to be followed in the future it would bring about the ruin of the revolutionary movement in Germany.”71

If the teacher–student binary is taken to an extreme, the conclusions can be not just wrong but dangerous. In 1978, writing while the Labour Party was in office in the United Kingdom, Cliff wrote: “In our times there is not a single issue which can be decided by ballots. In the decisive class battles bullets will prevail. The capitalists count the machine guns, the bayonets, the grenades at their disposal, and so does the proletariat.”72 These strange and shocking words were embedded in a four-volume biography of Lenin that for a while had some influence in the British and, to some extent, the international Left. It is one thing for Lenin and Tukhachevsky to have mistaken the twentieth century for the eighteenth century. Russia was a kind of hybrid society that did in fact combine premodern rural forms of life with modern twentieth-century industry and science. But when socialists in the West try to draw a straight line from Lenin in 1920 to strategy and tactics in the advanced capitalist world, the results, when not tragic, are embarrassing.

The teacher–student binary is similarly misleading as a framework with which to understand the very core of the Fourth Congress and the key term in the title of the Fourth Congress proceedings, “the United Front.” As Birchall pointedly notes: “The united front was not spun out of the skulls of the Comintern’s leaders. It was born of the experience of workers in Germany.”73 Let us return to the central role of the Stuttgart workers in the emergence of a united front in Germany. According to Riddell:

The ongoing need for such a united front was posed by an assembly of Stuttgart’s metalworkers in December 1920, acting on the initiative of local KPD activists who were strongly influenced by Zetkin. The metalworkers adopted a resolution calling on the leadership of their union, and of all unions, to launch a joint struggle for tangible improvements in workers’ conditions…. Although the Social-Democratic leaders rejected this appeal, the Communist campaign in its favour won wide support from union councils.

A month later, in January 1921, the KPD as a whole made a more comprehensive appeal for united action to all workers’ organisations, including the Social Democrats. This “Open Letter” reflected the views of party co-chair Paul Levi, working in collaboration with Radek.74

It is very significant that it was workers in Stuttgart, Germany who were the first to arrive at the united front approach. As Riddell indicates, it is Stuttgart where Clara Zetkin had her base and where she had influence. As outlined earlier, this base had been built over years by Zetkin, Luxemburg, and the Spartacists. The united front/coalition-building approach thus emerged out of the experience of the German workers themselves—out of the work, in particular, of the politicized workers around Zetkin and the other Luxemburg-influenced members of the KPD. The united front approach was momentarily generalized into the German movement through the open letter, which was, in large part, the initiative of another German leader, Paul Levi. But this open letter encountered almost universal opposition from the representatives of the Comintern working in Germany, and its whole united front/coalition-building approach was tragically derailed through the March Action catastrophe. It was only after this catastrophe that the united front approach was generalized as a method within the Communist International as a whole.

It is true that during both the Third and Fourth Congresses, Trotsky clearly outlined the key principles of the united front, and in this sense, he was the teacher, lecturing to pupils at a school of strategy and tactics. It is true that he articulated a clear opposition to Lenin in the run-up to the Polish invasion and did his best to “teach” the Bolsheviks of their mistake in the months that followed. But it won’t help to replace Lenin with Trotsky and retain the frame of “teacher–student” to understand the dynamics of the Comintern. To paraphrase the young Karl Marx, circumstances are changed by human beings, and educators must themselves be educated.75 The emergence into consciousness of the need for the crucial united front orientation came from the experience of the German workers and was at first argued for publicly by key German socialists such as Zetkin and Levi. It was in the active, organizing experience on the ground, in which serious socialists interacted with advanced workers, that the educators became educated.

The proceedings of the Third and Fourth Congresses published in Toward the United Front and To the Masses—along with the earlier volumes published by Riddell—complete the record of the early years of the Cominterns and make possible a rounded assessment of the work of these congresses and of the entire era of the Russian Revolution, an assessment that embraces the successes and the failures—the constructive positions that were taken as well as the catastrophic and destructive ones. One of the striking aspects emerging from these volumes is the light they shed on the deep humanity of the participants. As Birchall notes, “these delegates were tough women and men who had lived through an exceptionally demanding decade.”76 A close examination of these proceedings and those of the early congresses enhances the reputation of some militants of that era whose politics reflected a commitment to self-activity (Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi, for instance) and diminishes that of others whose politics were imbued with substitutionism (Grigory Zinoviev and Béla Kun, to name two). That is all to the good. To properly assess the lessons of the past, we need all the information from that past, and on the basis of that information, we can draw our own conclusions about how best to use this history in our own work in the twenty-first century.