Communist Workers' Party of Germany
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The Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) was a communist party during the Weimar Republic that represented left-wing , anti-parliamentary and councilor communist positions.
history
The KAPD was on 4./5. Founded April 1920 by members of the left wing of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), who had been expelled at the Heidelberg party conference of the KPD (October 20-23, 1919) by the central leadership under Paul Levi . Many of them were active in the group of International Communists in Germany before the KPD was founded . Its main objective was the immediate abolition of bourgeois democracy and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat , rejecting a dictatorship of a party based on the Russian model. Unlike the KPD, the KAPD particularly rejected the Leninist organizational form of so-called democratic centralism , participation in elections and participation in reformist trade unions. The Dutch communist theorists Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter played an important role for the KAPD. They founded the KAPN on the model of the KAPD in the Netherlands , which of course never achieved the significance of the sister party in Germany.
The background to the founding of the KAPD was the Kapp Putsch . In the opinion of the left wing in the KPD, he had shown that the behavior of the KPD party leadership was tantamount to giving up the revolutionary struggle, since the KPD adopted a repeatedly changing position on the general strike and, in the Bielefeld Agreement of March 24, 1920, disarmed the Red Ruhr Army had agreed. The Berlin district group called on April 3, 1920 a congress of the left opposition. There it was decided to constitute the "Communist Workers' Party of Germany". According to estimates, the delegates represented 80,000 KPD members. The newly founded party advocated the rejection of parliamentary activity and the active struggle against the bourgeois state. She subsequently worked closely with AAUD . The strongholds of the party were in Berlin , Hamburg , Bremen and East Saxony, where a large number of KPD members joined the new party.
In August 1920, the Hamburg founding members Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim , who had represented national Bolshevik ideas, were excluded . Two months later, founding member Otto Rühle was also excluded. From 1920 to 1921 the KAPD was a co-opted member of the III. International .
In 1921 the KAPD again cooperated with the KPD in the March campaign . This was triggered by the march of troops from the Weimar Republic into the central German industrial area, with the KAPD and KPD fearing that the military wanted to occupy the factories.
At the end of 1921 there was another split when parts of the AAUD around Rühle, Franz Pfemfert and Oskar Kanehl separated from the KAPD and founded the AAUE .
After 1921, when the KAPD still had 43,000 members, the party lost more and more importance and in 1922 split into the "Berlin direction" and the "Essen direction" around Alexander Schwab , Arthur Goldstein , Bernhard Reichenbach and Karl Schröder . The main reason was the refusal by the Essenes to take part in day-to-day fighting in a situation that was considered to be revolutionary.
The founding of a Communist Workers International (KAI) in 1922 by the KAPD of the "Essen direction" (the "Berlin direction" rejected this step as premature), together with the groups around Herman Gorter in the Netherlands, around Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain and other groups in Belgium, Bulgaria and among exiles from the Soviet Union was not very successful. The KAI, whose secretariat was dominated by the German section, disintegrated by 1925.
In 1926/1927 the KAPD (Berlin direction) merged with the decided left around the MPD Ernst Schwarz, who had been excluded from the KPD . This merger led to a further split within the KAPD, as Schwarz did not resign from his parliamentary mandate, as demanded by a minority of members who, after leaving, grouped around the magazine Vulkan .
Resistance groups against National Socialism , which were in the tradition of the KAPD, were the Red Fighters and the Communist Council Union in the Braunschweig area. There were genuine KAPD resistance groups in the Ruhr area , in Leipzig (where the local KAPD group also produced materials for other resistance groups in their printing plant), in Königsberg and in Memel, Lithuania .
Other well-known members of the KAPD were the writers Franz Jung , Adam Scharrer and Friedrich Wendel , the artist Heinrich Vogeler , the press photographer John Graudenz , the anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff , the leaders of armed communist partisan groups 1920/1921 Max Hölz and Karl Plättner , the councilor communist theorists and Activists Fritz Rasch , Paul Mattick and Jan Appel as well as August Merges , who was briefly president of the Socialist Republic of Braunschweig in 1918/1919 .
See also
literature
- Hans Manfred Bock : Syndicalism and Left Communism from 1918–1923. On the history and sociology of the Free Workers' Union of Germany (Syndicalists), the General Workers' Union of Germany and the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (= Marburg Treatises on Political Science. Vol. 13, ISSN 0542-6480 ). Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1969 (at the same time: Marburg, University, dissertation, 1968).
- Hans Manfred Bock: History of the "left radicalism" in Germany. An attempt (= Edition Suhrkamp 645). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 3-518-00645-2 .