United Communist Party of Germany

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United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) was an additional term used for almost two years from December 1920 for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), after the large left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which was politically relatively influential shortly after the November Revolution Communist International (Comintern) had joined and thus joined their German section, the KPD.

Political and historical background

The VKPD came into being through the union of the revolutionary wing of the USPD, which was split off from the SPD in 1917 as a result of opposition to the peace policy, with the KPD, which had existed since January 1, 1919. As a result, the USPD , which initially existed under the chairmanship of Georg Ledebour , was decisively weakened. The moderate wing of the party reunited with the majority social democracy in 1922 and tried to give it a more left, Marxist profile. The remaining part of the USPD continued as a splinter party . In 1931 the rest of the USPD was absorbed into a new, left-wing SPD split, the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD).

Paul Levi, elected KPD chairman in March 1919, VKPD chairman until 1921 (photograph around 1920)

In contrast, the number of members of the KPD, which until 1920 had no parliamentary influence due to its refusal to participate in the Weimar National Assembly, grew from 70,000 to over 300,000 due to the accession of the left wing of the USPD. It thus gained a mass base. A decisive basis for the unification of the VKPD was the participation of the KPD in the Reichstag election in 1920 (June 6, 1920), which had been enforced by the chairman Paul Levi , who had been in office since March 1919, against a party majority. In this election the KPD received only 441,000 votes (= 2.1% of the electoral vote) and only two seats (for Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi). But the party's move was a signal of the tendency towards recognition of parliamentary conditions after it had tried to use the resistance against the right-wing extremist Kapp Putsch for a left-wing revolutionary uprising in the Ruhr area in March 1920 . The step to participate in the Reichstag election was the prerequisite for the conversion of the USPD majority to the KPD. The USPD had received 17.9% in the same Reichstag election - a success that it owed above all to its participation in the general strike against the Kapp Putsch just three months earlier.

But even after the KPD expanded to become the VKPD, the party remained tainted by internal wing fighting. Levi's party leadership was controversial within the party. However, with Clara Zetkin, for example, he had influential supporters of his line in the party. When the so-called “offensive strategy”, which he and Zetkin had rejected as “putschism”, prevailed in the party with the support of the Comintern, Levi resigned from the party chairmanship in February 1921. After he had openly spoken out against the Central German uprising of March 1921, Levi was expelled from the KPD or VKPD at the instigation of the majority of the Comintern leadership around Grigori Zinoviev , as he expressed his criticism of the leadership of the (V) KPD and the Comintern did not want to revise. Overall, at the beginning of the 1920s, the (V) KPD fluctuated between its role as a leader party in various revolutionary attempts at revolt, for example in Thuringia and Vogtland on the one hand, and on the other hand in participating in government coalitions with the SPD in individual countries such as 1923 in Saxony and Thuringia.

Levi, originally one of the co-founders of the KPD alongside Rosa Luxemburg , Karl Liebknecht and others, founded the Communist Working Group (KAG), which existed for a short time , with a few others who had been excluded or left the party (including Ernst Däumig ), which then became part of the USPD, which he joined a little later. In 1922, when there was another split in the USPD, Levi followed a large part of the USPD, which had again been weakened, back into the SPD. During this time, the VKPD also returned to its actual name KPD.

Further development of the KPD

→ Main article: Communist Party of Germany

After Lenin's death in the Soviet Union and the change of power there to Josef Stalin , the KPD also increasingly followed the course of “ Stalinism ” from 1924 , which was consolidated from 1925 under the chairmanship of Ernst Thalmann .

In spite of her often critical stance towards the Comintern leadership and the KPD leadership, Clara Zetkin remained in the KPD, for which she was represented as a member of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic (from 1920) until the National Socialists came to power (1933) . Despite her ideologically negative attitude towards the “ revisionist ” social democracy, she became one of the best-known and most important critics of Stalin's social fascism thesis within the KPD, but remained in a minority position, since the party under Thälmann's leadership was aligned in its guidelines to the Stalinist doctrine .

Footnotes

  1. ^ Günther Nollau : The International. Roots and manifestations of proletarian internationalism. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne et al. 1959, p. 63.
  2. ^ Hanno Drechsler : The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD). A contribution to the history of the German labor movement at the end of the Weimar Republic (= Marburg treatises on political science, vol. 2). Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1965, p. 139.
  3. ^ Hermann Weber : Introduction. In: Ossip K. Flechtheim : The KPD in the Weimar Republic. Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1969, pp. 5-68, here pp. 35 f.
  4. ^ Ossip K. Flechtheim: The KPD in the Weimar Republic. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1969, p. 152.

Web links

  • Our way. Against putschism . Paul Levi's detailed argument against “putschism” in the (V) KPD at the beginning of the 1920s (links to the individual chapters).