Left communism
Encyclopedia
Left communism is the range of communist
viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolshevik
s at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist
and proletarian
than the views of Leninism
held by the Communist International
after its first and during its second congress.
Left Communists see themselves to the left of Leninists (whom they tend to see as 'left of capital', not socialist
s), anarchist communists
(some of whom they consider internationalist socialists) as well as some other revolutionary socialist tendencies (for example De Leonists
, who they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in limited instances).
Although she died before left communism became a distinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg
has heavily influenced most left communists, both politically and theoretically. Proponents of left communism have included Amadeo Bordiga
, Herman Gorter
, Anton Pannekoek
, Otto Rühle
, Karl Korsch
, Sylvia Pankhurst
and Paul Mattick
.
Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Party
, the International Communist Current
and the Internationalist Communist Tendency.
and the Italian tradition
. The political positions those traditions have in common are a shared opposition to what is termed frontism
, many kinds of nationalism
and thus national liberation movement
s (although, it must be stressed that Bordiga and many Bordigist groups have positions that some left-communists consider supportive of national liberation) and parliamentarianism
. There is an underlying commonality at a level of abstract theory and more 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 October Revolution
in Russia
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 for a very short period of time, which they later vehemently opposed, attracting the wrath of Lenin attacking Bordiga in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm, the German-Dutch and Russian wings opposed the "right of nations to self-determination" which they denounced as a form of bourgeois nationalism
, the Italians did not have a clear position on national determination however.
within the Russian Communist Party
named the Left Communists, which opposed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty
with Imperial Germany. The Left Communists wanted international proletarian revolution across the world
. The leader of this faction, in the beginning, was Nikolai 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 http://www.marxists.org/glossary/periodicals/k/o.htm, which offered a critique of the direction in which the Bolsheviks were heading. They argued against the over-bureaucratisation of the state and further argued that full state ownership of the means of production should proceed at a quicker pace than Lenin desired.
The Left Communists faded as the world revolutionary wave died down in militancy; Lenin had shifted to a more right-wing position and proved too strong a figure. They also lost Bukharin as a leading figure, since his position became more right-wing until he eventually came to agree with Lenin. Being defeated in internal debates, they then 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 positions of the Left Communists were inherited by the Workers Opposition faction and Gabriel Myasnikov's Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party and to some extent by the Decists.
(PCd'I) was founded, its members actually represented the majority of communists in that country. This was a result of the Abstentionist Communist Faction 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 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 Faction 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 Italian fascism
also meant that the Italian left would enter into a new chapter in its development - this time in exile.
(for example) and German activists found refuge in the Netherlands after the Nazis came to power in 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 of Germany
(KAPD) after its leading figures were expelled from the Communist Party of Germany
(KPD) by Paul 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 entailed 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 union
s 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 Rühle
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 Fritz Wolffheim
and Heinrich Laufenberg
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 Communist Workers Party of Bulgaria
. The only other affiliates of the KAI were the Communist Workers Party of Britain led by Sylvia Pankhurst
, the Communist Workers Party of the Netherlands
(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.
, 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 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm is an attack on the ideas of the emerging left communist currents. 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 after October 1917.
and therefore rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group around Karl Korsch
also failed. The left faction
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 faction was for the rest of the 1930s led by Ottorino Perrone (also known with the pseudonym
Vercesi), 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 faction 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 faction 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.
The political distance between the faction and other communist currents would deepen throughout the 1930s as the faction declared itself opposed to the tactics adopted by the Left Opposition to broaden its support (i.e. the faction 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 militia
s 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 strike
s 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 Kirchhoff
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 1930s state capitalist and was not to be defended. In short, they believed there was need for a new revolution.
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 1930s.
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 Communist Organisation, 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 Fourth (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.
below.
If for the Italian Left the end of war marked a new beginning, it also did so for the German-Dutch Left. 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.
, which continues today. The Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) also dissolved in the same year.
Left Communists entered a period of almost constant decline from this point onwards, although they were somewhat rejuvenated by the events of 1968.
Prominent post-1968 proponents of Left Communism have included Paul Mattick
and Maximilien Rubel
. Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Party
, International Communist Current
and the Internationalist Communist Tendency.
In addition to the left communist groups in the direct lineage of the Italian and Dutch traditions, a number of groups with similar positions have flourished since 1968, such as the workerist
and autonomist movements in Italy; Kolinko, Kurasje, Wildcat
and Krisis in Germany, Solidarity
, Big Flame
, Subversion and Aufheben
in England; Théorie Communiste and Echanges & Mouvements in France; TPTG, Blaumachen in Greece; The 70s Collective in China; Kamunist Kranti in India; Collective Action Notes, Paul Mattick Jr., and Loren Goldner in the USA.
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
s at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
and proletarian
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
than the views of Leninism
Leninism
In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...
held by the Communist International
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
after its first and during its second congress.
Left Communists see themselves to the left of Leninists (whom they tend to see as 'left of capital', not socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
s), anarchist communists
Anarchist communism
Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
(some of whom they consider internationalist socialists) as well as some other revolutionary socialist tendencies (for example De Leonists
De Leonism
De Leonism, occasionally known as Marxism-Deleonism, is a form of syndicalist Marxism developed by Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader of the first United States socialist political party, the Socialist Labor Party of America....
, who they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in limited instances).
Although she died before left communism became a distinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...
has heavily influenced most left communists, both politically and theoretically. Proponents of left communism have included Amadeo Bordiga
Amadeo Bordiga
Amadeo Bordiga was an Italian Marxist, a contributor to Communist theory, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy, a leader of the Communist International and, after World War II, leading figure of the International Communist Party.- Early life :Bordiga was born at Resina, in the province of...
, Herman Gorter
Herman Gorter
Herman Gorter was a Dutch poet and socialist. He was a leading member of the Tachtigers, a highly influential group of Dutch writers who worked together in Amsterdam in the 1880s, centered around De Nieuwe Gids .Gorter's first book, a 4,000 verse epic poem called "Mei" , sealed his reputation...
, Anton Pannekoek
Antonie Pannekoek
Antonie Pannekoek was a Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist. He was one of the main theorists of council communism .- Biography :...
, Otto Rühle
Otto Rühle
Otto Rühle was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars, and a founder with along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others of the group and magazine Internationale, which posed a revolutionary internationalism against a world of warring...
, Karl Korsch
Karl Korsch
-Biography:Korsch was born in Tostedt, near Hamburg, to Carl August Korsch, a secretary at the cantonal court and his wife Therese. In 1898 the family moved to Meiningen, Thuringia and Korsch senior attained the position of a managing clerk in a bank...
, Sylvia Pankhurst
Sylvia Pankhurst
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English campaigner for the suffragist movement in the United Kingdom. She was for a time a prominent left communist who then devoted herself to the cause of anti-fascism.-Early life:...
and Paul Mattick
Paul Mattick
Paul Mattick Sr. was a Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions...
.
Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Party
International Communist Party
The International Communist Party is a left communist international political party which is often described by outside observers as Bordigist, due to the contributions by longtime member Amadeo Bordiga...
, the International Communist Current
International Communist Current
The International Communist Current is an international centralised left communist organisation which was formed in 1975 and which has sections in France, Great Britain, Mexico, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, Brazil, Sweden, India, Italy, USA, Switzerland, Philippines and...
and the Internationalist Communist Tendency.
Early history and overview
Two major traditions can be observed within left communism: the Dutch-German traditionCouncil communism
Council communism is a current of libertarian Marxism that emerged out of the November Revolution in the 1920s, characterized by its opposition to state capitalism/state socialism as well as its advocacy of workers' councils as the basis for workers' democracy.Originally affiliated with the...
and the Italian tradition
Amadeo Bordiga
Amadeo Bordiga was an Italian Marxist, a contributor to Communist theory, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy, a leader of the Communist International and, after World War II, leading figure of the International Communist Party.- Early life :Bordiga was born at Resina, in the province of...
. The political positions those traditions have in common are a shared opposition to what is termed frontism
Common front
In politics, a common front is an alliance between different groups, forces, or interests in pursuit of a common goal or in opposition to a common enemy...
, many kinds of nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and thus national liberation movement
Liberation movement
A liberation movement is an organization leading a rebellion against a colonial power or national government, often seeking independence based on a nationalist identity and an anti-imperialist outlook.-See also:*Anti-imperialism...
s (although, it must be stressed that Bordiga and many Bordigist groups have positions that some left-communists consider supportive of national liberation) and parliamentarianism
Parliamentary system
A parliamentary system is a system of government in which the ministers of the executive branch get their democratic legitimacy from the legislature and are accountable to that body, such that the executive and legislative branches are intertwined....
. There is an underlying commonality at a level of abstract theory and more 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
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, but it only came into focus after 1918 . All left communists were supportive of the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
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
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
revolution by creating a state capitalist
State capitalism
The term State capitalism has various meanings, but is usually described as commercial economic activity undertaken by the state with management of the productive forces in a capitalist manner, even if the state is nominally socialist. State capitalism is usually characterized by the dominance or...
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
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
entirely separate from the reformist
Reformism
Reformism is the belief that gradual democratic changes in a society can ultimately change a society's fundamental economic relations and political structures...
and centrist elements who were seen as having betrayed socialism in 1914, opposition to all but the most restricted participation in elections
Election
An election is a formal decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy operates since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the...
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 for a very short period of time, which they later vehemently opposed, attracting the wrath of Lenin attacking Bordiga in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm, the German-Dutch and Russian wings opposed the "right of nations to self-determination" which they denounced as a form of bourgeois nationalism
Bourgeois nationalism
Bourgeois nationalism is a term from Marxist phraseology. It refers to the alleged practice by the ruling classes of deliberately dividing people by nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion, so as to distract them from possible class warfare...
, the Italians did not have a clear position on national determination however.
Russian left communism
Russian left communism began in 1918 as a factionPolitical faction
A political faction is a grouping of individuals, such as a political party, a trade union, or other group with a political purpose. A faction or political party may include fragmented sub-factions, “parties within a party," which may be referred to as power blocs, or voting blocs. The individuals...
within the Russian Communist Party
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
named the Left Communists, which opposed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918, mediated by South African Andrik Fuller, at Brest-Litovsk between Russia and the Central Powers, headed by Germany, marking Russia's exit from World War I.While the treaty was practically obsolete before the end of the year,...
with Imperial Germany. The Left Communists wanted international proletarian revolution across the world
World revolution
World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class...
. The leader of this faction, in the beginning, was Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
. They stood for a revolutionary war against the Central Powers
Central Powers
The Central Powers were one of the two warring factions in World War I , composed of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria...
; opposed the right of nations to self-determination
Self-determination
Self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference...
(specifically in the case of Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, 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
Social revolution
The term social revolution may have different connotations depending on the speaker.In the Trotskyist movement, the term "social revolution" refers to an upheaval in which existing property relations are smashed...
at that time.
They began to publish a newspaper, Kommunist http://www.marxists.org/glossary/periodicals/k/o.htm, which offered a critique of the direction in which the Bolsheviks were heading. They argued against the over-bureaucratisation of the state and further argued that full state ownership of the means of production should proceed at a quicker pace than Lenin desired.
The Left Communists faded as the world revolutionary wave died down in militancy; Lenin had shifted to a more right-wing position and proved too strong a figure. They also lost Bukharin as a leading figure, since his position became more right-wing until he eventually came to agree with Lenin. Being defeated in internal debates, they then dissolved. A few very small left communist groups surfaced within the RSFSR in the next few years, but later fell victim to repression
Political repression
Political repression is the persecution of an individual or group for political reasons, particularly for the purpose of restricting or preventing their ability to take political life of society....
by the state. In many ways, the positions of the Left Communists were inherited by the Workers Opposition faction and Gabriel Myasnikov's Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party and to some extent by the Decists.
Italian left communism until 1926
The Italian left communists were named "left communists" at a later stage in their development, but when the Communist Party of ItalyCommunist Party of Italy
The Communist Party of Italy was a communist political party in Italy which existed from 1921 to 1926. That year it was outlawed by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. In 1943, the name was changed to the Italian Communist Party.-Foundation:The forerunner of the party was the Communist Faction...
(PCd'I) was founded, its members actually represented the majority of communists in that country. This was a result of the Abstentionist Communist Faction of the Italian Socialist Party
Italian Socialist Party
The Italian Socialist Party was a socialist and later social-democratic political party in Italy founded in Genoa in 1892.Once the dominant leftist party in Italy, it was eclipsed in status by the Italian Communist Party following World War II...
(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
Giacinto Menotti Serrati
Giacinto Menotti Serrati was an Italian communist politician. He was born in Spotorno, near Savona and died in Asso, near Como....
and Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
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
Amadeo Bordiga
Amadeo Bordiga was an Italian Marxist, a contributor to Communist theory, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy, a leader of the Communist International and, after World War II, leading figure of the International Communist Party.- Early life :Bordiga was born at Resina, in the province of...
, the left was to control the PCd'I 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 Faction 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
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
lines or at least along the lines of what Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
, 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
Onorato Damen
Onorato Damen , was an Italian left communist revolutionary who was first active in the Communist Party of Italy. After being expelled, he worked with the organized Italian left, became one of the leaders of the Internationalist Communist Party, commonly known by their paper Battaglia Comunista...
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
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
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 Italian fascism
Italian Fascism
Italian Fascism also known as Fascism with a capital "F" refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian...
also meant that the Italian left would enter into a new chapter in its development - this time in exile.
German-Dutch left communism until 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 Anton Pannekoek and Herman GorterHerman Gorter
Herman Gorter was a Dutch poet and socialist. He was a leading member of the Tachtigers, a highly influential group of Dutch writers who worked together in Amsterdam in the 1880s, centered around De Nieuwe Gids .Gorter's first book, a 4,000 verse epic poem called "Mei" , sealed his reputation...
(for example) and German activists found refuge in the Netherlands after the Nazis came to power in 1933. This current could trace its origins back before World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, 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
German Revolution
The German Revolution was the politically-driven civil conflict in Germany at the end of World War I, which resulted in the replacement of Germany's imperial government with a republic...
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 of Germany
Communist Workers Party of Germany
The Communist Workers Party of Germany was an anti-parliamentarian and council communist party that was active in Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic. It was founded in April 1920 in Heidelberg as a split from the Communist Party of Germany...
(KAPD) after its leading figures were expelled from the Communist Party of Germany
Communist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned in 1956...
(KPD) by Paul Levi
Paul Levi
Paul Levi was a German Jewish Communist political leader. He was the head of the Communist Party of Germany following the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919.-Early years:...
. This development was mirrored in the Netherlands and on a smaller scale in Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
, 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 entailed 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 union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
s 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
Saxony
The Free State of Saxony is a landlocked state of Germany, contingent with Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with of Germany's sixteen states....
around Otto Rühle
Otto Rühle
Otto Rühle was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars, and a founder with along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others of the group and magazine Internationale, which posed a revolutionary internationalism against a world of warring...
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 Fritz Wolffheim
Fritz Wolffheim
Fritz Wolffheim was a German communist politician and writer. He was a leading figure in the National Bolshevism tendency that was briefly influential in Germany after World War I.-Early life:...
and Heinrich Laufenberg
Heinrich Laufenberg
Heinrich Laufenberg was a leading German communist and was one of the first to develop the idea of National Bolshevism...
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
Communist Workers International
The Communist Workers' International or Fourth International was a council communist international. It was founded around the Manifesto of the Fourth Communist International, published by the Communist Workers' Party of Germany in 1921....
(KAI) split on exactly the same lines as did the tiny Communist Workers Party of Bulgaria
Communist Workers Party of Bulgaria
Communist Workers' Party of Bulgaria was a council communist party in the Kingdom of Bulgaria. It was founded in September 1921, and was modelled after the Communist Workers' Party of Germany. It was founded at a conference in the city of Slivnu, a centre of the textile industry, January 7-January...
. The only other affiliates of the KAI were the Communist Workers Party of Britain led by Sylvia Pankhurst
Sylvia Pankhurst
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English campaigner for the suffragist movement in the United Kingdom. She was for a time a prominent left communist who then devoted herself to the cause of anti-fascism.-Early life:...
, the Communist Workers Party of the Netherlands
Communist Workers Party of the Netherlands
The Communist Workers' Party of the Netherlands was a council communist party in the Netherlands. It was founded in September 1921, and was modelled after the Communist Workers' Party of Germany. It was however far smaller than its German counterpart. At most, in late 1921, it had 8 sections with...
(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 EuropeWestern Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
, 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
Polemic
A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm is an attack on the ideas of the emerging left communist currents. 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
Kronstadt rebellion
The Kronstadt rebellion was one of many major unsuccessful left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War...
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 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 NuovoL'Ordine Nuovo
L'Ordine Nuovo was a weekly newspaper established in 1919 in Turin, Italy, by a group, including Antonio Gramsci, Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Togliatti, within the Italian Socialist Party. The group were admirers of the Russian Revolution and strongly supported the immediate creation of soviets in...
and therefore rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group around Karl Korsch
Karl Korsch
-Biography:Korsch was born in Tostedt, near Hamburg, to Carl August Korsch, a secretary at the cantonal court and his wife Therese. In 1898 the family moved to Meiningen, Thuringia and Korsch senior attained the position of a managing clerk in a bank...
also failed. The left faction
Political faction
A political faction is a grouping of individuals, such as a political party, a trade union, or other group with a political purpose. A faction or political party may include fragmented sub-factions, “parties within a party," which may be referred to as power blocs, or voting blocs. The individuals...
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
Prometeo
Prometeo is a 150-minute opera by Luigi Nono, written between 1981 and 1984 and revised in 1985. Here the word "opera" carries the generic Italian meaning of "work," as in work of art, and not its usual worldly meaning. Indeed, Nono scornfully labels "Prometeo" a "tragedia dell'ascolto," a tragedy...
. 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 faction was for the rest of the 1930s led by Ottorino Perrone (also known with the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Vercesi), 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 faction 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 faction 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
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, 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.
The political distance between the faction and other communist currents would deepen throughout the 1930s as the faction declared itself opposed to the tactics adopted by the Left Opposition to broaden its support (i.e. the faction affirmed its opposition to fusion with centrist groups, opposition to entryism
Entryism
Entryism is a political tactic by which an organisation or state encourages its members or agents to infiltrate another organisation in an attempt to gain recruits, or take over entirely...
, etc.) Always opposed to the United Front
United front
The united front is a form of struggle that may be pursued by revolutionaries. The basic theory of the united front tactic was first developed by the Comintern, an international communist organisation created by revolutionaries in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.According to the theses of...
tactic of the Comintern, the Fraction now declared itself firmly opposed to the Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
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
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
.
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
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
, a group which had broken from Trotskyism. A loose liaison was also maintained with the Council Communist groups in the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
and in particular with the GIK. However, these discussions were pushed into the background as the attempted fascist coup in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
led to revolution and civil war
Civil war
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation state....
.
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
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
to enlist in the workers militia
Militia
The term militia is commonly used today to refer to a military force composed of ordinary citizens to provide defense, emergency law enforcement, or paramilitary service, in times of emergency without being paid a regular salary or committed to a fixed term of service. It is a polyseme with...
s 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
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
forces by this minority was accompanied by political support (in that the minority wished to halt strike
Strike action
Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...
s 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
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
with very similar positions to their own. It was led by Paul Kirchhoff
Paul Kirchhoff
Paul Kirchhoff was a German-Mexican anthropologist, most noted for his seminal work in defining and elaborating the culture area of Mesoamerica, a term he coined....
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
War economy
War economy is the term used to describe the contingencies undertaken by the modern state to mobilise its economy for war production. Philippe Le Billon describes a war economy as a "system of producing, mobilising and allocating resources to sustain the violence".Many states increase the degree of...
and capitalist decadence
Decadence
Decadence can refer to a personal trait, or to the state of a society . Used to describe a person's lifestyle. Concise Oxford Dictionary: "a luxurious self-indulgence"...
. 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 1930s state capitalist and was not to be defended. In short, they believed there was need for a new revolution.
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, such as 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
Henk Sneevliet
Hendricus Josephus Franciscus Marie Sneevliet, known as Henk Sneevliet or the pseudonym Maring , was a Dutch Communist, who was active in both the Netherlands and the Dutch East-Indies...
(the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, RSAP
Revolutionary Socialist Party (Netherlands)
The Revolutionary Socialist Party was a Dutch socialist political party.-Predecessors:The oldest predecessor of the Revolutionary Socialist Party is the Revolutionary Socialist Union , a group of dissidents from the Communist Party Holland led by Henk Sneevliet...
) transformed itself into the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front
Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front
The Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg-Front was a resistance movement founded by Henk Sneevliet, Willem Dolleman and Ab Menist, some months after the German invasion of the Netherlands on 10 May 1940...
. But in April 1942 its leadership was arrested by the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
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
Council communism
Council communism is a current of libertarian Marxism that emerged out of the November Revolution in the 1920s, characterized by its opposition to state capitalism/state socialism as well as its advocacy of workers' councils as the basis for workers' democracy.Originally affiliated with the...
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
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
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
Internationalist Communist Party
The Internationalist Communist Party was a Trotskyist political party in France. It was the name taken by the French Section of the Fourth International from its foundation until a name change in the late 1960s....
. 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 1930s.
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 Communist Organisation, 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
Fourth International
The Fourth International is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky , with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism...
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
Hugo Oehler
-Biography:An active trade unionist, Oehler joined the Communist Party USA in its early days, and by 1927 was a district organizer for the party in Kansas...
's International Contact Commission for the Fourth (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
Degenerated workers' state
In Trotskyist political theory the term degenerated workers' state has been used since the 1930s to describe the state of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in or about 1924...
). 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.
1945–1952
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 International Communist PartyInternational Communist Party
The International Communist Party is a left communist international political party which is often described by outside observers as Bordigist, due to the contributions by longtime member Amadeo Bordiga...
below.
If for the Italian Left the end of war marked a new beginning, it also did so for the German-Dutch Left. 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.
1952–1968
The year 1952 signaled the end of mass influence on the part of Italian Left Communism, as its sole remaining representative, the Internationalist Communist Party, split in two sections; the group led by Bordiga took the name International Communist PartyInternational Communist Party
The International Communist Party is a left communist international political party which is often described by outside observers as Bordigist, due to the contributions by longtime member Amadeo Bordiga...
, which continues today. The Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) also dissolved in the same year.
Left Communists entered a period of almost constant decline from this point onwards, although they were somewhat rejuvenated by the events of 1968.
Since 1968
The uprisings of May 1968 led to a small resurgence of interest in left communist ideas. Various small left communist groups emerged around the world, predominantly in the leading capitalist countries. A series of conferences of the communist left began in 1976, with the aim of promoting international and cross-tendency discussion, but these petered out in the 1980s without having increased the profile of the movement or its unity of ideas.Prominent post-1968 proponents of Left Communism have included Paul Mattick
Paul Mattick
Paul Mattick Sr. was a Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions...
and Maximilien Rubel
Maximilien Rubel
Maximilien Rubel was a famous Marxist historian. He was educated in law and philosophy in Vienna and Chernivtsi before moving to France to take German studies at the Sorbonne, from which he received his Licence-dès-lettres in 1934...
. Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Party
International Communist Party
The International Communist Party is a left communist international political party which is often described by outside observers as Bordigist, due to the contributions by longtime member Amadeo Bordiga...
, International Communist Current
International Communist Current
The International Communist Current is an international centralised left communist organisation which was formed in 1975 and which has sections in France, Great Britain, Mexico, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, Brazil, Sweden, India, Italy, USA, Switzerland, Philippines and...
and the Internationalist Communist Tendency.
In addition to the left communist groups in the direct lineage of the Italian and Dutch traditions, a number of groups with similar positions have flourished since 1968, such as the workerist
Workerism
Workerism is a name given to different trends in left-wing political discourse, especially anarchism and Marxism. In one sense, it describes a political position concerning the political importance and centrality of the working class. Because this was of particular significance in the Italian...
and autonomist movements in Italy; Kolinko, Kurasje, Wildcat
Wildcat
Wildcat is a small felid native to Europe, the western part of Asia, and Africa.-Animals:Wildcat may also refer to members of the genus Lynx:...
and Krisis in Germany, Solidarity
Solidarity (UK)
Solidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to council communism in its prescriptions and was known for its emphasis on workers' self-organisation and for its radical...
, Big Flame
Big Flame (political group)
Big Flame was "a revolutionary socialist feminist organisation with a working-class orientation" in the United Kingdom. Founded in Liverpool in 1970, the group initially grew rapidly, with branches appearing in some other cities. Its publications emphasised that "a revolutionary party is necessary...
, Subversion and Aufheben
Aufheben
Aufheben or Aufhebung is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", or "to sublate"...
in England; Théorie Communiste and Echanges & Mouvements in France; TPTG, Blaumachen in Greece; The 70s Collective in China; Kamunist Kranti in India; Collective Action Notes, Paul Mattick Jr., and Loren Goldner in the USA.
See also
- Anarchist communismAnarchist communismAnarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
- AutonomismAutonomismAutonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist communism...
- Council communismCouncil communismCouncil communism is a current of libertarian Marxism that emerged out of the November Revolution in the 1920s, characterized by its opposition to state capitalism/state socialism as well as its advocacy of workers' councils as the basis for workers' democracy.Originally affiliated with the...
- Left Communism in ChinaLeft Communism in ChinaIn the People's Republic of China since 1967, the terms "Ultra-Left" and "left communist" refers to political theory and practice self-defined as further "left" than that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the GPCR . The terms are also used retroactively to describe some early 20th...
- Libertarian socialismLibertarian socialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production...
- List of left communist internationals
- List of left communists
- LuxemburgismLuxemburgismLuxemburgism is a specific revolutionary theory within Marxism, based on the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. According to M. K...
- Ultra-leftism
Further reading
- Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (includes texts by GorterHerman GorterHerman Gorter was a Dutch poet and socialist. He was a leading member of the Tachtigers, a highly influential group of Dutch writers who worked together in Amsterdam in the 1880s, centered around De Nieuwe Gids .Gorter's first book, a 4,000 verse epic poem called "Mei" , sealed his reputation...
, PannekoekAntonie PannekoekAntonie Pannekoek was a Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist. He was one of the main theorists of council communism .- Biography :...
, PankhurstSylvia PankhurstEstelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English campaigner for the suffragist movement in the United Kingdom. She was for a time a prominent left communist who then devoted herself to the cause of anti-fascism.-Early life:...
and RühleOtto RühleOtto Rühle was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars, and a founder with along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others of the group and magazine Internationale, which posed a revolutionary internationalism against a world of warring...
), Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8 - The International Communist Current, itself a Left Communist grouping, has produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedents. The book on the German-Dutch current, which is by Philippe Bourrinet (who later left the ICC), in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.
- The Italian Communist Left 1926–1945 (ISBN 1897980132)
- The Dutch-German Communist Left (ISBN 1899438378)
- The Russian Communist Left, 1918–1930 (ISBN 1897980108)
- The British Communist Left, 1914–1945 (ISBN 1897980116)
- Also of interest is volume 5 number 4 of Spring 1995 of the journal Revolutionary HistoryRevolutionary HistoryRevolutionary History is a British journal dedicated to the history of the far left. It was founded in 1988 by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson and has maintained an editorial board representing many strands of British Trotskyism. In its articles, it also covers other anti-Stalinist communist...
: "Through Fascism, War and Revolution: Trotskyism and Left Communism in Italy". - In addition, there is a good deal of material published on the Internet in various languages. A useful starting point is the Left Communism collection published on the Marxists Internet ArchiveMarxists Internet ArchiveMarxists Internet Archive is a volunteer based non-profit organization that maintains a multi-lingual Internet archive of Marxist writers and other similar authors...
. - A book on the Dutch-German Left was published by Philippe Bourrinet.