Communist Party of Switzerland

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Swiss Communist Party was founded in 1921 and banned in 1940. The Communist Party merged with the Socialist Federation of Switzerland in 1943 to form the Labor Party (PdA) . Its first president was Franz Welti .

history

The Communist Party of Switzerland (KPS) was founded against the resistance of the Social Democratic Party (SP). The SP refused to join the Comintern in 1919 and 1920, thus provoking the split of the party left under Franz Welti. At a unification congress of the Socialist Left on March 5 and 6, 1921 in Zurich , it was decided to merge Welti's group with the «Old Communists», the first communist party founded under Jakob Herzog in 1918, and to found the KPS. At that time the party had around 6,000 members.

The KPS was a member of the Comintern and adopted its ideological standpoint, which brought it under the influence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the course of the “Bolshevization” of the communist parties in Europe . Since the SP also developed from its traditional democratic-evolutionary line in a Marxist-revolutionary direction after 1918, problems of demarcation arose. Subsequently, the KPS differed from the SP mainly in its assumption of Leninist and Stalinist positions and its Bolshevik party structure.

The KPS was particularly widespread in German-speaking Switzerland , with a focus on Zurich , Schaffhausen and Basel . In the canton of Schaffhausen she succeeded in almost completely ousting social democracy and at times gaining 26% (1928) share of the vote. In Basel, too, the KPS was at times stronger than the SP, so that in 1929 it won 25 seats in the Grand Council with 19.7% of the vote .

Internal political struggles between Stalinists and Trotskyists led to a decline in membership. In 1928 the KPS decided to take an aggressive course against the SP, which it accused of social fascism . The radicalization led to the replacement of the previous party leadership under Franz Welti in 1929, who was accused of having taken a right course up to now. The Schaffhausen workers' leader Walther Bringolf was expelled in 1930 under similar accusations . This then founded the “ Communist Party of the Swiss Opposition ” with his cantonal section and in 1935 joined the SP.

Since the seizure of power of Adolf Hitler in Germany, there was in the SP and the KPS efforts, both workers' parties in a "united front" to unite, and the KPS gave her social fascism thesis. The ideological rifts were too deep, however, especially because the SP tended to move away from radical class struggle positions. In 1935 the KPS offered the SP the establishment of a so-called Popular Front based on the French model and gained sympathy in the left wing of the SP. However, since the SP was moving towards an alliance in the political center as part of the guideline movement, no popular front came about in Switzerland. Under the impression of the emerging war and the ideological turnaround of the Comintern after the Hitler-Stalin Pact , the KPS lost massive support and supporters in German-speaking Switzerland.

On August 6, 1940, the Federal Council decided to prohibit the KPS from doing anything. In response to an appeal against this Federal Council decision, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ruled that communist propaganda was only forbidden because it was working towards a violent overthrow, not because of the idealistic goals that “can also be found in the teachings of other movements and parties, e. B. in Plato's philosophy, in the Christian religion and in the program of the Social Democrats. " On November 26, 1940, the Federal Council tightened the measures and declared the KPS dissolved. He also decreed that communists were not allowed to belong to any federal, cantonal or communal authorities. Four years later, on February 27, 1945, the Federal Council lifted the party bans on left and right-wing extremist organizations.

The Communist Party had been banned in Geneva as early as 1937. The Geneva SP party chairman Léon Nicole then accepted the members of the KPS into his section of the SP. When he was also excluded from the SP in 1939 because of his acceptance of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he founded the Socialist Federation of Switzerland , which most members of the KPS joined on May 30, 1943. The union with the SP that Nicole and the then President of the KPS, Jules Humbert-Droz , strived for did not materialize, however, because the latter refused a collective admission to the Socialist Federation of Switzerland and insisted on individual admission of all communists. After the failure of the merger negotiations with the SP, the Labor Party (PdA) was founded in 1944 as a new communist rallying movement.

Important members

Communist newspapers in Switzerland

Edition of the "Fighter" from Aug. 4, 1923

See also

literature

  • Heinz Egger: The emergence of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth Association of Switzerland . Zurich 1952.
  • Hans Ulrich Jost : Left radicalism in German Switzerland 1914-1918 . Bern: Stämpfli 1973.
  • André Rauber: Histoire du mouvement communiste Suisse . (Suisse - Evénements. Collection diri-gé par Michèle et Michel Baettig). Genève: Slatkine 1997.
  • Peter Stettler: The Swiss Communist Party, 1921–1931. A contribution to Swiss party research and the history of the Swiss labor movement within the framework of the Communist International . (Helvetica Politica, Series B, Vol. XV). Bern: Francke 1980.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Interpellation 98.3613: Historical analysis of the prohibition policy from 1940 - 1945 against communist and left-wing socialist parties and rehabilitation of the victims of this policy. Parlament.ch, December 17, 1998, accessed on August 9, 2015 .
  2. BGE 68 IV 145 PDF
  3. When the Federal Council even banned political parties, NZZ of November 27, 2014. Retrieved on August 9, 2015 .