Left radicalism

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Left radicalism , left radicalism or radical left denote different currents of the political left . The expression combines the content- related directional indication "left", which comes from the French Revolution of 1789, with the formal characteristic of " radicality " ( etymologically from Latin radix for " root "). What is meant is a policy that aims to eliminate the causes of bondage, inequality, oppression and exploitation through a fundamental, revolutionary change in the capitalist social order . Since the 19th century, however, the left has always been controversial about which policies can achieve this.

In early social democracy and Leninism , other leftists were more often criticized as “left radicals”. Since the 1960s, "left-wing radicalism" has been used in the German-speaking area as an indefinite self-term and (often derogatory) external name for a large number of different left-wing political approaches. There is no single definition of the term.

In the narrower sense, since the 1968 movement , it has been understood as the undogmatic New Left , which also describes itself as such.

Germany from 1840

Since the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, "radicalism" had already become common as a name for itself and others for far-reaching political democratization goals. In Germany, around 1840, a discussion about the term arose among the Young Hegelians : While Ludwig Feuerbach , Bruno Bauer and others understood it primarily to mean a public commitment to atheism , demands for some civil rights and an inappropriate lifestyle, Karl Marx wanted from criticism of religion to become one Criticism of Political Economy Comprehensive Social Criticism . As a result of this dispute, he and his ally Friedrich Engels separated from the Young Hegelians.

In 1844 Marx programmatically described his understanding of radicalism as the result and repeal of the left Hegelian criticism of religion: “To be radical is to get to the root of the matter. But the root for man is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, that is, of its practical energy, is its departure from the decisive positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being for man, i.e. with the categorical imperative to overturn all conditions in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being. "

However, Marx and Engels did not call their own “scientific communism ” or other left positions “radical left”. They criticized the radicalism of the Young Hegelians as mere theoretical and abstract idealism , the early socialism of other radical democrats as moral utopism and the anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon , Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin and others as individualistic voluntarism .

After the Socialist Law was repealed in 1890 and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was allowed, a long-smoldering internal party conflict over their relationship to parliamentarism broke out openly. The “young”, an educated elite mostly made up of bourgeois intellectuals, protested against the reformism and the legality strategy of the SPD leadership. They saw themselves as true and authentic interpreters of revolutionary Marxism . Like Wilhelm Liebknecht (1869), they rejected the institutions of the then state as a means of class rule . As a result, they saw attempts to improve the situation of the workers through parliamentary work in the Reichstag as an illusion, denying the leadership of the SPD parliamentary group in the Reichstag and the strict party discipline. Liebknecht and Engels, however, distanced themselves from them. The SPD chairman August Bebel ensured her exclusion at the Erfurt party conference in 1891. The association of independent socialists that was subsequently founded by the “young” split up into an anarchist and a revisionist wing (turned away from Marxism) as early as 1893 and remained largely ineffective for SPD policy. This anti-parliamentary opposition in the SPD is considered to be the forerunner of later left-wing extremist movements. One of its continuous features was the criticism of historical determinism , according to which socialism would assert itself out of economic laws. In contrast, the “boys” insisted that workers should intervene in the course of history, independent of party hierarchies.

The 1905 Russian Revolution was followed by years of mass strike debate in the SPD . The left wing of the party around Rosa Luxemburg understood spontaneous mass strikes with political goals as a necessary form of the revolutionary class struggle. The SPD in Bremen adopted this view and called for political strikes on various daily political occasions. Because the SPD executive committee also rejected mass strikes against the Prussian three-class suffrage, the Bremen SPD formed the independent group of Bremen left-wing radicals in 1910 . Their representative Anton Pannekoek , like Rosa Luxemburg, criticized the fact that the SPD executive committee around Karl Kautsky was only theoretically oriented towards Marxism, but practically followed Eduard Bernstein's reformism and affirmed political strikes as a defensive measure at best. Kautsky made the mechanical self-preservation of the party organization instead of practical cohesion with the proletarian masses as the ultimate goal. Revolutionary mass actions are, however, indispensable because of the imperialism of the time and the danger of war it contained.

Kautsky, in turn, criticized the Bremen left-wing radicals as the “youngest radicalism”, that is, as a new edition of the “boys” from 1890. Like Engels then, he criticized their position as “ vulgar Marxism ”, which only generalized the class antagonism between capital and labor, without the other antagonisms , To take into account power relations, situations and moods in society. As a result, the radicals overestimated the revolutionary potential of the masses and underestimated the need for the hierarchical SPD organization to protect the trade unions, whose revolutionary significance would increase considerably in the future. It is not parliamentarism itself that is the obstacle to social progress, but the majority and power relations in parliament. With extra-parliamentary mass actions, the radical left attempted to unite social democracy with anarchism and syndicalism .

At the SPD party congress of 1913, the left wing of the SPD found a relatively high level of support for a mass strike resolution, but was limited to individual, separate local and regional associations that were at odds on other issues. On August 4, 1914, the SPD parliamentary group in the Reichstag, contrary to their pre-war resolutions , agreed to the truce policy and war credits, thus supporting the First World War and causing the Socialist International to collapse. As a result, the split-up left-wing socialists tried to come to terms with the SPD's failure under conditions of war, imprisonment and censorship and to form an anti-war opposition. In the course of the war, the International group around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht developed into the Spartakus group (from 1915), the Bremen radicals around Pannekoek, Johann Knief , Paul Frölich and Karl Radek into the group Internationale Sozialisten Deutschlands (ISD, from December 1915). When opponents of the war, excluded from the SPD, founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in April 1917 , the Spartacus group joined them. On the other hand, the ITS stayed away and joined Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's demands at the Zimmerwald conferences (1915/1916). It was not until the November Revolution of 1918 that the now Reich-wide Spartakusbund and ISD, now as International Communists of Germany (IKD), came closer together and on January 1, 1919, they jointly founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The German labor movement was organizationally divided into reformist-social-democratic and revolutionary-communist parties.

Weimar Republic

The KPD was shaped by the experience that a social mass movement had forced the end of the war, overturned the monarchy and military rule, and made a comprehensive democratization of all areas of society tangible with the council movement . A majority of members expected the consequent continuation of this revolution and therefore refused to participate in parliaments and existing trade unions. The Spartacus leaders, on the other hand, affirmed this cooperation in order to gradually convince the mostly social democratic workers of the KPD program. The founding program written by Rosa Luxemburg precluded a seizure of power through a coup . After the failure of the January uprising and the murder of Liebknecht, Luxemburg (January 1919) and Leo Jogiches (March 1919), Luxemburg's close confidante Paul Levi became KPD chairman. He was committed to her program. In 1919, however, many KPD regional associations decided to withdraw from the existing trade unions, demanded the abandonment of parliamentary seats by outmatched MPs and rejected a tighter, centralized party organization. When the party executive decided this in October 1919, around 38,000 members resigned from the KPD. In 1920 part of it founded the General Workers 'Union (AAU) and the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD). In 1921 the AAU and KAPD split again over organizational issues and lost a large part of their members. But in the rest of the KPD, too, an anti-union and anti-parliamentary tendency remained present.

Lenin criticized this tendency in Western Europe, especially in the KPD and the Communist Party of Great Britain , in his work "Left Radicalism as a Childhood Disease of Communism" from 1920. He noted five typical features of this attitude:

  1. political impatience and inclination to putsch in order to introduce communism directly without taking into account the social balance of power;
  2. strong mistrust of one's own party leadership, which is unreflectedly compared to the “mass” as the “leader”;
  3. Rejection of bourgeois parliamentarism and participation in elections,
  4. Rejection of non-communist unions, described as “social-chauvinist”, “reactionary” and “counterrevolutionary” such as those of the ADGB ;
  5. Rejection of any cooperation with non-communist parties. Left-wing communists advocate this rejection in principle, not just because of a particular historical situation.

Historians such as Arthur Rosenberg ( History of the Weimar Republic , 1935), Hans Manfred Bock ( History of Left Radicalism , 1976), Otto Langels ( The ultra-left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic , 1984) and Marcel Bois ( Communists against Hitler and Stalin , 2014) took up Lenin's typification and understood “left-wing radicalism” as a special, anti-authoritarian trend aimed at the earliest possible social revolution in the early phase of communist parties, when they were not yet tightly organized. Bois avoids their polemical devaluation as "ultra-left", which was common in the Comintern , and emphasizes that the radical left came from the same tradition as other communists and also invoked the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Detlef Siegfried also understands "left radicalism" as the revolutionary social milieu of the early Weimar Republic . He emphasizes that it comprised workers, artists and intellectuals and was partly organized in left-wing parties and partly unorganized. There was cross-party sympathy for council communism , syndicalism and left-wing socialism . All these currents set themselves apart from the reformism of the SPD and the centralism of the KPD.

After a general strike ended the Kapp Putsch of the anti-democratic military and the SPD-led Reich government had violently suppressed the Ruhr uprising (March 1920), the anti-parliamentary wing in the KPD gained new support. His representatives Hugo Eberlein and Ernst Meyer strictly rejected the toleration of a workers' government proposed by the SPD and USPD, which was considered by the previous party executive, and were elected to the new party executive. They received a boost from the merger of the KPD with the left wing of the USPD (December 1920) and then planned an uprising in central Germany in accordance with their “offensive strategy”. This March action of 1921 was quickly put down. Hundreds of KPD supporters were killed in the process, around 4,000 workers were given long prison sentences, four of whom were sentenced to death. By November 1921, the KPD had lost more than half of its members. Paul Levi was expelled from the KPD after harsh criticism of the March action. At the third Comintern World Congress that followed, Lenin and Leon Trotsky confirmed Levi's position that the KPD must first win a majority of the working class, also through cooperation with social democrats. After the Comintern decided on this united front policy for the subsequent period, the left on the KPD executive committee also took this new line. Unlike the left-wing radicals who had previously resigned, they affirmed Lenin's centralism. The KPD successfully tested the united front policy in mass protests against right-wing extremist murders and in the railroad strike and thus regained its reputation among German workers and its former membership by the end of 1923.

Federal Republic of Germany

While the " New Left " that emerged in England has been strongly oriented towards the labor movement or with reference to the Communist Parties since 1956, but rejected the policy of the Soviet Union, a new one emerged with the student movement in Europe and the USA since the mid-1960s Generation of left radicalism.

During the 1968 movement , radical left-wing anti -authoritarian movements grew stronger , and there was also a wave of new traditional cadre organizations (" K groups ") being founded. However, the political potential was severely weakened in the following decades due to fragmentation. In addition to various Marxist and councilist- oriented as well as operaist groups, an autonomous, situationist and anarchist scene developed from the 1970s , which received a boost in the 1980s in particular. Since the West German APO in the 1960s, anti-authoritarian leftists ( spontaneous , autonomous and others) have referred to themselves as radical left or left-wing radicals (see also Daniel Cohn-Bendit : "Linksradikalismus ...", 1968).

The West German constitution protection originally described all non-reformist sections of the left as left- wing radicalism ; since the early 1980s he has referred to it as " left-wing extremism ". This pure foreign name goes back to the totalitarian theory and is rarely used in politics and history .

GDR

As early as 1945, the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism sees a break between left-wing radicalism and the labor movement in which it originated:

“1945 marked a break. Variants of the L since then referred to the various currents of the L in the labor movement, e.g. Karl Korsch and Arthur Rosenberg , Bordiga or Nikolai Bukharin. However, they were less supported by the workers, but expressed themselves as youth revolts with socialist demands, but a heterogeneous class situation - an expression of the dissolution of the proletarian millieus that has progressed since the 1950s with a simultaneous increase in the proportion of wage earners. "

- HKWM - Volume 8/2, Col. 1200

According to the HKWM, the term “primarily in the social spectrum of the labor movement, communism and socialism” describes a form of political criticism and practice that claims to get to the root (lat. Radix). Proponents of left-wing radicalism claim an unconditionally revolutionary, fundamental criticism that is preferable to moderate social criticism that is reduced to systemic reform goals. "

Switzerland

The tradition of left-wing radicalism in Switzerland goes back to the libertarian socialism and anarchism of the Jura Federation of the 1st International , here the supporters of “liberal socialism” around Bakunin had their stronghold. During the First World War, the rejection of the truce policy in Switzerland and the opposition to the war gave rise to various left-wing extremist movements within and alongside the social democratic parties, from the religious-social circle to the anarchist context around Fritz Brupbacher and communists around Jakob Herzog . In times of social unrest, this socio-political tendency acquired a disproportionate importance due to its strongly activist behavior and the projection of bourgeois fears of revolutionary upheavals. The libertarian ideas of left radicalism were pushed into the background by Marxism-Leninism, for example . Between the two world wars, only a few occurrences of left-wing radicalism can be observed outside the major parties of the labor movement, for example the break-away of the anti- Stalinist wing of the Communist Party in Schaffhausen in 1930 .

literature

  • Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. 2nd edition, Klartext, Berlin 2016 (especially 3rd left- wing radicalism in the early KPD : pp. 101–168)
  • Ulrich Peters: Indomitable and resistant. The radical left in Germany since 1989/90. Unrast, Münster 2014, ISBN 978-3-89771-573-8 .
  • Peter Friedrich, Norbert Madloch: Left radicalism: Left radical forces in social disputes. Dietz, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3320013564
  • Walter Fähnders, Martin Rector: Left radicalism and literature. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1985, ISBN 3-499-25052-7 .
  • Hans Manfred Bock : History of the "left radicalism" in Germany. One try. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 3-518-00645-2 .
  • Richard Albrecht: Marxism - bourgeois ideology - left radicalism. On the ideology and social history of Western European left radicalism. In: M. Buhr (Ed.): On the critique of bourgeois ideology , Volume 55. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin (East) 1975

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jonathan Sperber: Karl Marx: His life and his century. Beck, Munich 2013, p. 97
  2. ↑ Andreas Fisahn: Reign in Change: Reflections on a Critical Theory of the State. PapyRossa, 2008, ISBN 3894383917 , p. 19; Karl Marx: Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. MEW Volume I, p. 385.
  3. ↑ Reinhold Sellien (Ed.): Gablers Wirtschafts-Lexikon. Springer, Wiesbaden 1980, ISBN 978-3-322-87453-5 , p. 130 ; Hans-Ulrich Ludewig: labor movement and uprising. Matthiesen Verlag, 1978, ISBN 3786814325 , p. 18
  4. ^ Wolfgang Durner: Anti-parliamentarianism in Germany. Königshausen & Neumann, 1997, ISBN 3826012704 , pp. 82-85
  5. ↑ Ulrich von Alemann, Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Hans Hecker, Bernd Witte (eds.): Intellectuals and social democracy. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2000, ISBN 978-3-322-93209-9 , p. 69 f.
  6. ↑ Hans Manfred Bock: History of "left radicalism" in Germany , Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 76-80
  7. ↑ Hans Manfred Bock: History of "left radicalism" in Germany , Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 26-29
  8. ↑ Hans Manfred Bock: History of "left radicalism" in Germany , Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 81–83
  9. ↑ Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin , Berlin 2016, pp. 106 and 536
  10. ↑ Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin , Berlin 2016, pp. 107–119
  11. ↑ Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin , Berlin 2016, pp. 103-105
  12. ↑ Detlef Siegfried: The radical milieu: Kiel November Revolution, social science and left-wing radicalism 1917 - 1922. Springer, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 978-3-322-93468-0 , p. 12 f.
  13. ↑ Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin , Berlin 2016, pp. 119-134
  14. ^ Horst Heimann: Left-wing radicalism and left-wing extremism. In: Lexicon of Socialism. Bund-Verlag, Cologne 1986, p. 40.
  15. ↑ Gero Neugebauer : extremism - right-wing extremism - left-wing extremism: some comments on terms, research concepts, research questions and research results. In: Wilfried Schubarth, Richard Stöss (ed.): Right-wing extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany - A balance sheet. Opladen 2001, p. 6 ff. ( Pdf excerpt from December 4, 2003 ( Memento from February 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ))
  16. ↑ Left radicalism. In: HKWM. Volume 8/2, Sp 1200.
  17. ^ Ralf Hoffrogge : Left radicalism. In: Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism. Volume 8 / II, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg 2015, column 1193–1207, here: column 1193.