Reich union headquarters

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Reichsgewerkschaftszentrale ( RGZ for short ) was the central organ for coordinating the trade union activities of the Communist Party of Germany from the end of 1920 .

Forerunner and foundation

The RGZ was set up at the end of 1920 after the unification of the USPD and KPD to form the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD). The first head was Richard Müller , former head of the Executive Council of the Greater Berlin Workers 'and Soldiers' Councils. The first members of the headquarters, selected by Müller, came from the environment of this Executive Council and the Revolutionary Obleute . The direct forerunner of the RGZ was the Berlin works council headquarters , a coordination body in the tradition of the council movement, which was supposed to bundle the works councils as a political force independently of the trade unions. At the first Reich Congress of Works Councils, however, it was decided to subordinate works councils to the trade unions, and the concept of the Berlin works council headquarters could not prevail.

When the remaining representatives of the council movement turned to the KPD in the course of the split in the USPD, the works council headquarters was converted into an organ of the KPD. Their task was to build up and coordinate communist factions within the trade unions and to promote entry into the Red Trade Union International (RGI), which sympathized with Soviet Russia .

The policy of the RGZ was based on the so-called "open letter" until 1921, an invitation by the KPD to the members of the SPD and other parties to join forces with class struggle. Its demands were:

  1. Initiation of uniform wage wars, increase in all pensions for war victims and social pensioners, uniform regulation of unemployment benefits.
  2. Measures to make food cheaper.
  3. Measures for the provision of food etc. Consumer goods.
  4. Immediate disarmament and dissolution of the bourgeois self-protection organizations. Creation of proletarian self-protection organizations. Amnesty for all political offenses, establishment of diplomatic and trade relations with Soviet Russia.

Although the RGZ made progress in union work, it did not succeed in gaining a majority within any of the major unions. The reason for this was not least an arbitrary change of course like in March 1921.

March action

In 1921 the tactics of the KPD changed away from the united front policy of the open letter towards an ultra-left orientation towards immediate revolutionary action. The result was the March campaign , an unsuccessful attempt at revolution in what was then the Central German industrial area around Halle / Leuna / Merseburg. The rejection of this act, perceived as a coup, by the workers destroyed the organizational work of the RGZ. Richard Müller criticized the policy of the KPD leadership first internally, later publicly as adventurism, which would ruin the influence of the KPD on that of a sect. He refused to spread any more strike calls for Berlin when the failure of the action in central Germany was foreseeable. Müller was then removed from his post. Although Müller was rehabilitated at the founding congress of the RGI in Moscow in the summer of 1921, he did not return to head the RGZ. after the conflict broke out again, he left the KPD in January 1922.

End of the RGZ

The trade union policy of the RGZ between 1921 and 1933 was subject to repeated fluctuations between the united front and the ultra-left course. In 1924 the KPD obliged all its members to work in the free trade unions and gave up their previous sympathy with counter-foundations, only to turn around 180 degrees around 1928 with the establishment of the RGO, the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition . The RGO was an explicit counter-foundation to the free trade unions, which were insulted as reformist and later "social-fascist". The RGZ, which was oriented towards increasing influence within the free trade unions, had lost its meaning.

literature

  • Hermann Weber : The change in German communism. The Stalinization of the KPD in the Weimar Republic . 2 volumes. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
  • Ralf Hoffrogge : Richard Müller. The man behind the November Revolution . Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02148-1 , ( History of Communism and Left Socialism 7).
  • Axel Weipert : The Berlin Works Council Center 1919/1920 - A forgotten chapter of the German council movement , in: Axel Weipert (ed.): Democratization of Economy and State - Studies on the Relationship between Economy, State and Democracy from the 19th Century to the Present , NoRa Verlag , Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86557-331-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ August Thalheimer: How does the working class create the united front against fascism
  2. ↑ On the March campaign, see Stefan Weber, Ein Kommunistischer Putsch ?, Berlin 1991
  3. ↑ See Ralf Hoffrogge, Richard Müller - The Man Behind the November Revolution, Berlin 2008.
  4. ↑ See Hermann Weber, Die Wandlung des Deutschen Kommunismus, Frankfurt a. M. 1969