http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=840

In response to Ben Lewis (Letters, October 28), I would say that if the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) had been formed before 1917, during an earlier phase in the revolutionary period, then its existence could have been more justifiable.

German workers did look to the Russian Revolution as a model, but did they look to the Bolsheviks or the Menshevik Internationalists? Along with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the MIs won the soviet elections in 1918, which the Bolsheviks – having lost majority political support from the working class – reacted to with Milrevcom takeover substitutions, gangster-style shutdowns and Cheka arrests. In short, there were Bolshevik coups, but not in 1917.

The insulting slogan, ‘Moscow dictatorship’, was quite valid. I don’t have extensive information on all the figures of the Independent Social Democracy (USPD) centre, just that the likes of Theodor Liebknecht and Georg Ledebour were hostile to both the Social Democratic Party and the KPD/Comintern. They were consistent realos.

To say that the USPD was “an outstanding role model for left politics today” actually says more about today’s situation than the more revolutionary situation back then. On the left, the participatory economists have called for a Participatory Socialist International, but let us not forget the call from Hugo Chávez for a Fifth Socialist International (damn delays) and, more importantly, the potential for a new workers’ international in between the two proposals (ie, ideologically positioned like the International Working Union of Socialist Parties) as a result of bold initiative on the part of Die Linke’s international commission, headed by Oskar Lafontaine.

In a blog series on internationals, Louis Proyect said: “The German Communist Party would have been much better off if the Comintern had simply left it alone.” I’ll go further than what he said or what Lenin wrote, considering that he didn’t truly appreciate Kautsky’s framework for what a revolutionary period was and what it wasn’t.

The German worker-class movement would have been better off if the ultra-left KPD hadn’t been formed in the first place – at the expense of “an outstanding role model for left politics today” that, through its own state within a state, “paid attention to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics” (to quote Die Linke’s Dietmar Bartsch).

‘Leftwing’ communism did not contain the one key suggestion that was needed to counter that infantile disorder that was German Spartacism: dissolve the KPD itself into a majority tendency of the USPD to counter the rightwing, SPD ass-kissing renegades in that party’s leadership.

Conrad conveniently forgets that the USPD had a centre tendency as well as a right and a left. This tendency, which was hostile to both the SPD and the Comintern, consisted of ‘Realisten’/‘Realos’ (yes, I am using Die Linke language here, but I distinguish between real Realo-ism and the pseudo-Realo-ism of the Die Linke right wing): Theodor Liebknecht, Arthur Crispien, Wilhelm Dittman, Georg Ledebour, Tony Sender, etc.

There should have been a united party-movement comprised of the ‘Realisten’/’Realos’ that were the USPD center, the USPD left, the ultra-left sectarians who formed the KPD in the first place, and the further-ultra-left majority who were booted from the KPD itself and who went on to found the KAPD. However, this was already in place: the USPD itself.

Internationally, this means that the Comintern itself should have folded into the International Working Union of Socialist Parties, the closest organisation to a proper third worker-class international (between communist left sectarianism and reformist labour internationals).