Association of Independent Socialists

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socialist books, issue 11, 7th year, November 1968

The Association of Independent Socialists (VUS) was a West German left-wing socialist association that was founded in 1960, but gradually dissolved again from 1961 in connection with the establishment of the German Peace Union (DFU).

Organizational background

The people who united in the VUS came less from the old left-wing socialist contexts of the Weimar Republic , they were more likely to be social democrats who were dissatisfied with the development of the SPD into a people 's party or who had been excluded for violating the party line. After the Godesberg SPD party congress, they founded a central committee of the excluded and resigned Social Democrats (ZA). The VUS emerged from a ZA congress in November 1960. The group, now defamed as “crypto-communist” by the SPD, demanded hardly more programmatically than the SPD had proclaimed a few years earlier. Some of the VUS activists saw the organization as a transition form to an independent social democratic party. Such hopes vanished when the DFU was founded in the run-up to the 1961 federal election. After serious conflicts and accompanied by resignations, a line prevailed within the VUS according to which the DFU should be supported. The best-known VUS member, Viktor Agartz , resigned in 1961 and retired into private life.

From 1961 to around 1969, Albert Berg published the socialist magazines on behalf of the VUS board of directors , in which theoretical topics were reported on association life.The overall editing was done by Karl A. Otto , Bielefeld. After the magazine was discontinued, the subscribers were provided with the Marxist papers from May 1969 .

The last VUS Congress (5th Federal Assembly) took place on October 27, 1968 in Hamburg . In the central committee was u. a. Gerhard Gleißberg , Lorenz Knorr and Artur von Behr were elected. A small group of former VUS members organized themselves in the initiative committee to found a Socialist Party , but remained ineffective on the fringes of political events.

Individual evidence

  1. Not to be confused with the SPD spin-off Association of Independent Socialists (VUS) of 1891.
  2. ^ Arno Klönne , Left Socialists in West Germany , in: Christoph Jünke , Left Socialism in Germany: Beyond Social Democracy and Communism? , VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, pp. 90-105, here p. 94.
  3. Gregory Kritidis: Left Socialist opposition in the Adenauer era. A contribution to the early history of the Federal Republic of Germany . Offizin, Hannover 2008, p. 381.
  4. ^ "Legacy of the Four" , Der Spiegel , 47/1968.
  5. ^ Arno Klönne , Left Socialists in West Germany , in: Christoph Jünke , Left Socialism in Germany: Beyond Social Democracy and Communism? , Hamburg 2010, pp. 90-105, here p. 95.
  6. Socialist Hefts No. 3/4, March / April 1969, p. 116
  7. ^ Socialist books, No. 11, Hamburg November 1968, reports, p. 642
  8. The "Initiative Committee for the Establishment of a Socialist Party" materials for analyzing the opposition in the 1960s
  9. ^ Arno Klönne , Left Socialists in West Germany , in: Christoph Jünke , Left Socialism in Germany: Beyond Social Democracy and Communism? , Hamburg 2010, pp. 90-105, here p. 95.