Left communism
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Left Communism is a term describing a whole range of communist viewpoints which oppose the political ideas of the Bolsheviks from a position which is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views held by the Communist International after its first two Congresses. Mainly represented by Council Communism in front, Left Communism is also sometimes referred to as the Communist Left.
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Introduction
Two major traditions can be observed within Left Communism, the Dutch-German tradition and the Italian tradition. Their political positions have little in common except for a shared opposition to what is termed frontism, but there is an underlying commonality at a level of abstract theory. Crucially, Left Communist groups from both traditions tend to identify elements of commonality in each other.
The historical origins of Left Communism can be traced to the period before the First World War, but it only came into focus after 1918. All Left Communists were supportive of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, but retained a critical view of its development. Some, however, would in later years come to reject the idea that the revolution had a proletarian or socialist nature, asserting that it had simply carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution by creating a state capitalist system.
Left Communism first came into being as a clear movement in or around 1918. Its essential features were: a stress on the need to build a Communist Party entirely separate from the reformist and centrist elements who were seen as having betrayed socialism in 1914, opposition to all but the most restricted participation in elections, and an emphasis on the need for revolutionaries to move on the offensive. Apart from that, there was little in common between the various wings. Only the Italians accepted the need for electoral work at all, and the German-Dutch and Russian wings both opposed the "right of nations to self-determination", which they denounced as a form of bourgeois nationalism.
Russian Left Communism
Russian Left Communism began as a faction in the Russian Communist Party in 1918, logically named the Left Communists, which opposed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany. The Left Communists wanted international Proletarian Revolution across the world. The leader of this faction, in the beginning, was Bukharin. They stood for a revolutionary war against the Central Powers; opposed the right of nations to self-determination (specifically in the case of Poland, since there were many Poles in this communist group and they did not want a Polish capitalist state to be established); and they generally took a voluntarist stance regarding the possibilities for social revolution at that time.
They began to publish a newspaper, Kommunist, which offered a critique of the direction in which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was heading. They argued against the over-bureaucratisation of the state, and further argued that nationalisation should proceed at a quicker pace than Lenin desired.
The Left Communists faded as Lenin proved too strong a figure to argue against. They also lost Bukharin as a leading figure, since he moderated his own position and eventually came to agree with Lenin. Being defeated in internal debates, they dissolved. A few very small Left Communist groups surfaced within the RSFSR in the next few years, but later fell victim to repression by the state. In many ways, the Left Communist faction's positions were inherited by the Workers Opposition faction.
Italian Left Communism to 1926
The Italian Left Communists were named Left Communists at a later stage in their development, but when the Communist Party of Italy was founded they were actually the majority of Communists in that country. This was a result of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) being in advance of other sections of the PSI in their realisation that a separate Communist Party had to be formed which did not include reformists. This gave them a great advantage over the sections of the PSI who looked to figures such as Serratti and Gramsci for leadership. It was a consequence of the revolutionary impatience common at a time when revolution, in the narrow sense of an insurrectionary attempt at the seizure of power, was expected to develop in the very near future.
Under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the Left was to control the PCd'I (Communist Party of Italy) until the Lyons Congress of 1926. In this period, the militants of the PCd'I would find themselves isolated from reformist workers and from other anti-fascist militants. At one stage this isolation was deepened when Communist militants were instructed to leave defense organisations that were not totally controlled by the party. These sectarian tactics produced concern in the leadership of the Communist International and led to a developing opposition within the PCd'I itself. Eventually these two factors led to the displacement of Bordiga from his position as first secretary and his replacement by Gramsci. By then, Bordiga was in a fascist jail and he was to remain outside organised politics until 1952. The development of the Left Communist Fraction was not the development of the Bordigist current (as it is often portrayed).
The year 1925 was a turning point for the Italian left as it was the year that the so-called Bolshevisation took place in the sections of the Communist International. This plan was designed to eliminate all social democratic deviations from the Comintern and develop them on Bolshevik lines or at least along the lines of what Zinoviev, the secretary of the International, considered Bolshevik lines. In practice, this meant top-down bureaucratic structures in which the members were controlled by a leadership approved of by the Comintern's International Executive Committee. In Italy this meant that the leadership which had formerly been in the hands of Bordiga was given to a body that came into being when the Serrati-Maffi minority of the PSI joined the PCd'I, although Bordiga's group were in a majority. The new leadership was supported by Bordiga, who, as a centralist, accepted the will of the International.
Nevertheless, Bordiga fought the IEC from within, only to have an article of his which was favourable to Trotsky's positions on the disputed Russian questions suppressed. Meanwhile, sections of the left motivated by Onorato Damen formed the Entente Committee. This committee was ordered to dissolve itself by the incoming leadership, led now by Gramsci who only then opposed Bordiga's positions, which had gained prestige after a successful recruitment campaign. With the party Congress of 1926 held in Lyons, crowned by Gramsci's famous Lyons Theses, the left majority was now defeated and on course to becoming a minority within the party. With the victory of fascism in Italy, Bordiga was jailed and when he opposed a vote against Trotsky in the prison PCd'I group, he was expelled from the party in 1930. He took a stance of non-involvement in politics for many years after this. The victory of fascism also meant that the Italian left would enter into a new chapter in its development - this time in exile.
German-Dutch Left Communism to 1933
The German-Dutch tradition of Left Communism was so named because the movement in both countries was very closely connected. Among the leading theoreticians of the more powerful German movement were Pannekoek and Gorter (for example) and German activists found refuge in the Netherlands after 1933. This current could trace its origins back before World War I, since in the Netherlands a revolutionary wing of Social Democracy had broken from the reformist party even before the war and had built links with German activists. After the beginning of the German Revolution in 1918, a leftist mood could be found among sections of the Communist Parties of both countries. In Germany this led directly to the foundation of the Communist Workers Party (KAPD) after its leading figures were expelled from the Communist Party (KPD) by Karl Levi. This development was mirrored in the Netherlands and on a smaller scale in Bulgaria, where the Left Communist movement was to mimic that of Germany.
When it was founded, the KAPD included some tens of thousands of revolutionaries. However, within a few years, it had broken up and practically dissolved. This was because it was founded on the basis of revolutionary optimism and a purism that rejected what became known as frontism. Frontism was seen as the idea of working in the same organisations as reformist workers. Such work was seen by the KAPD as unhelpful at a time when the revolution was thought to be an imminent event, and not merely a goal to be aimed at. This led the members of the KAPD to reject working in the traditional trade unions in favour of forming their own revolutionary unions. These unionen, so called to distinguish them from the official trade unions, had 80,000 members in 1920 and peaked in 1921 with 200,000 members, after which they declined rapidly. They were also organisationally divided from the beginning, with those unionen linked to the KAPD forming the AAU-D, and those in Saxony around Otto Ruhle who opposed the conception of a party in favour of a unitary class organisation being organised as the AAU-E.
The KAPD was unable to reach even its founding Congress prior to suffering its first split when the so-called National Bolshevik tendency around Wolffheim and Laufenburg appeared (it should be noted that this tendency has no connection with modern political tendencies in Russia which use the same name). More seriously, the KAPD lost most of its support very rapidly as it failed to develop lasting structures. This also contributed to internecine quarrels and the party actually split into two competing tendencies known as the Essen and Berlin tendencies to the historians of the Left. The recently established Communist Workers International (KAI) split on exactly the same lines as did the tiny Bulgarian Communist Workers Party. The only other affiliates of the KAI were the Communist Workers Party of Britain led by Sylvia Pankhurst, the KAPN in the Netherlands and a group in Russia. The AAU-D split on the same lines, and it rapidly ceased to exist as a real tendency within the factories.
Left Communism and the Communist International
As discussed above, the Left Communists initially rallied to the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and to the new Communist International. In fact, they controlled the first body formed by the Comintern to coordinate its activities in Western Europe, the Amsterdam Bureau. However, this was little more than a very brief interlude and the Bureau never functioned as a leadership body for Western Europe as was originally intended. The Vienna Bureau of the Comintern may also be classified as Left Communist, but its personnel were not to evolve into either of the two historic currents that made up Left Communism. Rather, the Vienna Bureau adopted the ultra-left ideas of the earliest period in the history of the Comintern.
Left Communists supported the Russian Revolution, but did not accept the methods of the Bolsheviks. Many of the German-Dutch tradition adopted Rosa Luxembourg's criticisms, as outlined in her posthumously published essay entitled "Marxism or Leninism?". In this essay, she rejected the Bolshevik position on distribution of land to the peasantry, and their espousal of the "Right of nations to Self Determination" which she rejected as historically outmoded. The Italian Left Communists did not at the time accept any of these criticisms and both currents would evolve, as we shall see, over the course of the coming years.
To a considerable degree, Lenin's well known polemic 'Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder [1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm) is an attack on the ideas of the emerging Left Communist currents. However, it would be incorrect to see it exclusively in such a narrow focus, as the pamphlet also contained polemics against other currents such as the De Leonists Socialist Labor Parties, the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, the KAPD and Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers Socialist Federation. His main aim was to polemicise with currents moving towards pure revolutionary tactics by showing them that they could remain based on firmly revolutionary principles while utilising a variety of tactics. Therefore Lenin defended the use of parliamentarism and working within the official trade unions.
As the Kronstadt Rebellion occurred at a time when the debate on tactics was still raging within the Comintern, it has been wrongly seen as being Left Communist by some commentators. In fact, the Left Communist currents had no connection with the rebellion - although they did rally to its support when they learned of it. In later years, the German-Dutch tradition in particular would come to see the suppression of the revolt as the historic turning point in the evolution of the Russian state created after October 1917.
Italian Left Communism 1926-1939
After 1926, Italian Left Communism took shape in exile and without the participation of Bordiga. Contacts between the Italians and the Germans had been made and were developed in France, but the Italian Left saw the KAPD's stress on factory organisation as being similar to the ideas of Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo and therefore rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group around Karl Korsch also failed. The Left Fraction of the PCd'I was formally established in July 1927 by a number of young militants. This new group had members in France, Belgium and the USA and published a review entitled Prometeo. It was estimated in 1928 that it had at most 200 militants, but it would seem that while it never had more than 100 militants active at any one time its influence was actually far greater. The control of the PCd'I apparatus by the Stalinists, however, meant that attempts to reach other exiles was almost impossible and they were driven back into small circle work.
The Italian Left Fraction was for the rest of the 1930s led by Ottorino Perrone, although it was fiercely opposed to the cult of the personality which was developing in the Comintern around Stalin in these years and resisted similar pressures in its own organisation. The Fraction had members in France, Belgium and the USA; how many in Italy looked to it cannot be ascertained (since all communist activities there had been driven underground by the fascist government). The main activity of the Fraction through these years was the publishing of its press, which consisted of the paper Prometeo and the journal Bilan. With its establishment as a group, the Fraction also looked for international co-thinkers. Seeing the International Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, as central to the non-Stalinist Communist movement, they sought contact with it. These contacts were to be severed when agreement on basic principles proved impossible (see note below).
The political distance between the Fraction and other communist currents would deepen throughout the 1930s as the Fraction declared itself opposed to the tactics adopted by the Left Opposition to broaden its support (i.e. the Fraction affirmed its opposition to fusion with centrist groups, opposition to entryism, etc.) Always opposed to the United Front tactic of the Comintern, the Fraction now declared itself firmly opposed to the Popular Front after 1933. Like the Trotskyists, it saw the failure of the Communist Party of Germany in the face of fascism as its historic failure and ceased to consider itself a fraction of the Communist Party from the date of its 1935 Congress, held in Brussels.
Isolated, the Left Fraction sought to discover allies within the milieu of groups to the left of the Trotskyist movement. Typically these discussions came to nothing, but they were able to recruit from the disintegrating Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes (LCI) in Belgium, a group which had broken from Trotskyism. A loose liaison was also maintained with the Council Communist groups in the Netherlands and in particular with the GIK. However, these discussions were pushed into the background as the attempted fascist coup in Spain led to revolution and civil war.
Immediately after the civil war began, a minority emerged within the Left Fraction whose members sought to participate in the events in Spain. This minority, including long time members of the fraction, numbered some 26 militants mainly belonging to the Parisian federation of the Fraction. They traveled to Barcelona to enlist in the workers militias and after a fruitless meeting in September with a delegation from the Fraction back home, they were expelled. The problem for the Fraction was that the military support given to the Republican forces by this minority was accompanied by political support (in that the minority wished to halt strikes among loyalist workers in the name of military victory against fascism). According to the Fraction, no support could be given to a bourgeois state, even in a struggle against fascism.
The question of Spain forced the Belgian LCI to clarify its positions and a split ensued as a result of debate within its ranks. At its February 1937 conference a minority of the LCI led by Mitchell defended the positions of the Italian Left and were expelled. Although less than ten in number, they formed a Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left. It was at this point that the Italian Left learned of a group called the Grupo de Trabajadores in Mexico with very similar positions to their own. It was led by Paul Kirchoff and had left the Mexican Trotskyist movement. Kirchoff had formerly been a member of the KAPD in Germany, then a Trotskyist in the USA but his tiny group would seem to have disappeared at the outbreak of war in 1939. In early 1938 the Italian and Belgian Fractions formed an International Bureau of the Left Fractions which published a review called Octobre.
During this period the Italian Left also reviewed a number of positions which it thought had become outdated. They rejected the idea of national self determination and began to develop their views on the war economy and capitalist decadence. Much of this was carried out by Vercesi, but Mitchell from the Belgian Fraction was also a leading figure in the work. Perhaps most dramatically they also reviewed their understanding of the Russian Revolution and the state that had emerged from it. Eventually they came to argue that the Russian state was by the late 1930's state capitalist and was not to be defended. In short, they believed there was need for a new revolution.
Left Communism 1939-1945
Many small currents to the left of the mass Communist Parties collapsed at the beginning of the Second World War and the Left Communists were initially silent too. Despite having foreseen the war more clearly than some other factions, when it began they were overwhelmed. Many were persecuted by either German Nazism or Italian fascism. Leading militants of the Communist Left like Mitchell, who was Jewish, were to die in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Meanwhile, in Germany the final council communist groups had disappeared in the maelstrom and in the Netherlands the International Communist Group (GIK) was moribund. The former "centrist" group led by Henk Sneevliet (the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, RSAP) transformed itself into the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front. But in April 1942 its leadership was arrested by the Gestapo and killed. The remaining activists then split into two camps, on the one hand some turned to Trotskyism forming the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists (CRM) while the majority formed the CommunistenBond-Spartacus. The latter group turned to council communism and was joined by most members of the GIK.
In 1941 the Italian Fraction was reorganised in France and along with the new French Nucleus of the Communist Left came into conflict with the ideas which the Fraction had propagated from 1936: of the social disappearance of the proletariat and localised wars, etc. These ideas continued to be defended by Vercesi in Brussels. Gradually the Left Fractions adopted positions drawn from German Left Communism. They abandoned the conception that the Russian state remained in some way proletarian and also dropped Vercesi's conception of localised wars in favour of ideas on imperialism inspired by Rosa Luxemburg. Vercesi's participation in a Red Cross committee was also fiercely contested.
The strike at FIAT in October 1942 had a major impact on the Italian Fraction in France, which was deepened by the fall of Mussolini's regime in July 1943. The Italian Fraction now saw a pre-revolutionary situation opening in Italy and prepared to participate in the coming revolution. Revived by Marco in Marseilles, the Italian Fraction now worked closely with the new French Fraction, which was formally founded in Paris in December 1944. However in May 1945 the Italian Fraction, many of whose members had already returned to Italy, voted to dissolve itself so that it's militants could integrate themselves as individuals into the Internationalist Communist Party. The conference at which this decision was made also refused to recognise the French Fraction and expelled Marco from their group.
This led to a split in the French Fraction and the formation of the Gauche Communiste de France by the French Fraction led by Marco. The history of the GCF belongs to the post-war period. Meanwhile the former members of the French Fraction who sympathised with Vercesi and the Internationalist Communist party formed a new French Fraction, which published the journal L'Etincelle and was joined at the end of 1945 by the old minority of the Fraction who had joined L'Union Communiste in the 1930's.
One other development during the war years merits mention at this point. A small grouping of German and Austrian militants came close to Left Communist positions in these years. Best known, to those few who know of them, as the "Revolutionary Communists", these young militants were exiles from nazism living in France at the start of World War II and were members of the Trotskyist movement but they had opposed the formation of the Fourth International in 1938 on the grounds that it was premature. They were refused full delegates' credentials and only admitted to the founding conference of the Youth International on the following day. They then joined Hugo Oehler's International Contact Commission for the 4th Communist International and in 1939 were publishing Der Marxist in Antwerp.
With the beginning of the war, they took the name Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD) and came to define Russia as state capitalist, in agreement with Ante Ciliga's book The Russian Enigma. At this point they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a Degenerated Workers' State). After the fall of France, they renewed contact with militants in the Trotskyist milieu in Southern France and recruited some of them into the Communistes Revolutionnaires in 1942. This group became known as Fraternisation Proletarienne in 1943 and then L'Organisation Communiste Revolutionnaire in 1944. The CR and RKD were autonomous, and clandestine, but worked closely together with shared politics. As the war ran its course, they evolved in a councilist direction, while also identifying more and more with Rosa Luxemburg's work. They also worked with the French Fraction of the Communist Left and seem to have disintegrated at the end of the war. This disintegration was speeded no doubt by the capture of a leading militant, Karl Fischer, who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was to participate in writing the Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald when the camp was liberated.
Left Communism 1945-52
The closing stages of the Second World War marked a watershed in the history of Left Communism, as was true for every other political tendency. Left Communists, like the Trotskyists, expected the war to end with at least the beginnings of a revolutionary wave of struggle similar to that which had marked the end of the First World War. Therefore strikes in Italy from 1942 onwards were of intense interest to them. Many Left Communists formerly in exile, in jail or simply inactive due to repression returned to active political activity in Italy. This had the result that new organisations identifying with Left Communism came into being and older ones dissolved themselves. We look at these organisations and in particular at the Internationalist Communist Party below.
If for the Italian Left the end of war marked a new beginning, for the German-Dutch Left it also marked something of a revival. Although in Germany it was the case that the Communist Left tradition was all but extinguished (surviving only in the form of a few scattered groups holding councilist views). France, by comparison, saw an interesting development with the beginning of a conscious attempt to develop a synthesis of the two strands of Left Communism in the form of the Gauche Communiste de France, which built on pre-war contributions.
Left Communism 1952-1968
The year 1952 signaled the definitive end of any remaining mass influence on the part of Italian Left Communism, as its sole remaining representative, the Internationalist Communist Party, split in two sections. By coincidence, the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) also dissolved in the same year. Left Communists entered a period of constant decline from this point onwards, although they were somewhat rejuvenated by the events of 1968.
Left Communism 1968-present
To be written.
A Note on Left Communism and the Left Opposition
Following his exile from Russia, Leon Trotsky and his supporters formed the International Left Opposition as an external tendency of the Communist International, aiming to reform it. This has caused some commentators to confuse the Left Opposition with Left Communism. However, the difference between them is quite significant: the Trotskyist Left Opposition is a branch of Leninism (they clearly defined themselves as the heirs of Lenin and the Old Bolsheviks who had been purged by Stalin), while Left Communism has always opposed Leninism (in fact, as discussed above, Left Communism was formed as an opposition to Leninism within the Communist movement).
See also
Further reading
Outside the pages of the publications of modern day Left Communist groups, which are obscure, there is very little avaiable on this political tradition. However the International Communist Current (http://www.internationalism.org), itself a Left Communist grouping, has in recent years produced a series of stuiudies of what it views as its own antecedants. The book on the German-Dutch curent in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.
- The Italian Communist Left 1926-1945
- The Dutch-German Communist Left
- The Russian Communist Left, 1918-1930
- The British Communist Left, 1914-1945
Also of interest is volume 5 number 4 of Spring 1995 of the journal Revolutionary History. This volume may be usefully read in conjunction and for reasons of chronology after the ICC book referred to above.
- Through Fascism, War and Revolution: Trotskyism and Left Communism in Italyet:vasakpoolne kommunism