Council Communism - History

History

As the Second International decayed at the beginning of World War I, socialists who opposed nationalism and supported proletarian internationalism regrouped. In Germany, two major communist trends emerged. First, the Spartacus League was created by the radical socialist Rosa Luxemburg. The second trend emerged amongst the German rank-and-file trade unionists who opposed their unions and organized increasingly radical strikes towards the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. This second trend created the German Left Communist movement that would become the KAPD after the abortive German Revolution of 1918–19.

As the Communist International inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia formed, a Left Communist tendency developed in the Comintern's German, Dutch and Bulgarian sections. Key figures in this milieu were Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle and Herman Gorter. In the United Kingdom, Sylvia Pankhurst's group, the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International), also identified with the Left Communist tendency.

Alongside these formal Left Communist tendencies, the Italian group led by Amadeo Bordiga is often commonly recognized as a Left Communist party, although both Bordiga and the Italian Communist Left disputed this and qualified their politics as separate, distinct and more in line with the Third International's positions than the politics of Left Communism. Bordiga himself did not advocate abstention from the unions, although later Italian Left currents developed a critique of the "regime unions", positing that most or all unions had become tools of capitalism by submitting themselves to bourgeois interests and were no longer viable as organs of class struggle. Nevertheless, those "Bordigists" who put forward this critique still held out the necessity of "red unions" or "class unions" re-emerging, outside and against the regime unions, which would openly advocate class struggle and allow the participation of communist militants.

These various assorted groups were all criticized by Vladimir Lenin in his booklet "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

Despite a common general direction, and despite sharing the criticism of Lenin, there were few politics held in common between these movements. An example of this divergence is that the Italians supported the Right of Nations to Self Determination, while the Dutch and Germans rejected this policy (seeing it as a form of bourgeois nationalism). However, all of the Left Communist tendencies opposed what they called "Frontism". Frontism was a tactic endorsed by Lenin, where Communists sought tactical agreements with reformist (social democratic) parties in pursuit of a definite, usually defensive, goal. In addition to opposing "Frontism", the Dutch-German tendency, the Bulgarians and British also refused to participate in bourgeois elections, which they denounced as parliamentarism.

In Germany, the Left Communists were expelled from the Communist Party of Germany, and they formed the Communist Workers Party (KAPD). Similar parties were formed in the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Britain. The KAPD rapidly lost most of its members and it eventually dissolved. However, some of its militants had been instrumental in organising factory-based unions like the AAUD and AAUD-E, the latter being opposed to separate party organisation (see: Syndicalism).

The leading theoreticians of the KAPD had developed a new series of ideas based on their opposition to party organisation, and their conception of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as having been a bourgeois revolution. Their leading figures were Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter and Otto Rühle. Rühle later left the KAPD, and was one of the founders of the AAUD-E. Another leading theoretician of Council Communism was Paul Mattick, who later emigrated to the USA. A minor figure in the Council Communist movement in the Netherlands was Marinus van der Lubbe, who was accused of the Reichstag arson in 1933 and consequently executed by the nazis after a show trial that marked the beginning of the persecution of socialist and communists in Nazi Germany.

The early councilists are followed later by the Group of Internationalist Communists, Henk Meijer, Cajo Brendel and Paul Mattick, Sr. There was a resurgence of councilist groups and ideas in the New Left of the 1960s, through the Situationist International, Root and Branch in the United States, Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, and Solidarity in the UK.

Alongside and sometimes connected to the councilists were the early Hegelian Marxists, György Lukács (a council communist himself from 1918–21 or 22) and Karl Korsch (who turned to council communism in the 1930s).