The KAPD's Theory of the Party
talk for The Workers' Council: From the Commune to Autonomy (session 3)
The KAPD’s Theory of the Party
The German Revolution traces the steps that Luxemburg lays out in “The Mass Strike.” From 1916, a strike wave sweeps through the German war industry, spreading to the soldiers and sailors and the rest of the economy. The political expression of this mass strike is Luxemburg’s Spartacist League, comprising the left wing of the Independent Social Democrats, who had broken with the SPD. Parallel to this, is the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (Revoutionaere Obleute) movement, a clandestine organization of factory delegates that grew to several thousand by 1918, capable of mobilizing vast sections of the working class. The Obleute anticipate the factory groups (unionen) that would emerge in 1919 and 1920 but also resemble the soviets of 1905, likewise built to conduct the mass strike. The militarization of the economy and conscription had decimated the trade unions, and the Obleute provided organizational structures for the young, poor, hungry workers who manned the late German war economy. Militarization also collapsed the political into the economic and directed all struggle toward the state, now the main employer.
In 1918, this mass strike surpasses the 1905 Russian Revolution and joins the 1917 one, toppling the German Empire. A chief difference between 1905 and 1917 or 1918 is that soviets form in the military ranks as well. When the mass strike spreads to the barracks or the ships it by necessity turns to the formation of councils for the simple reason that sailors can’t go anywhere and, by refusing command, effectively dissolve the state for themselves where they are. Every insubordinate ship or barracks is already a soviet. As the mass strike develops, ending the war and bringing down the state in the process, councils form in the ranks of the military and also wherever the Obleute are strongest, in Berlin especially and in the shipyards and munition plants in Hamburg and Bremen. The German Empire collapses and control over the economy rests in the hands of an armed working class, in some places now organized independently of the SPD and the trade unions. In much of the country, however, especially where the trade unions still retain control, the situation is uncertain. In the days after the revolution, revolutionary marines spread through the country, declaring the republic and instructing workers to elect councils, the composition of which varies wildly, and may include professionals, municipal staff, or trade union representatives.
Fate came at the councils fast, with the Berlin councils forced to act as representative of the councils at large in holding off the reconstitution of the state and military under the leadership of the SPD, who were from the first day busy coordinating with Entente powers and liberals to form new ministries. By December, delegates had been elected from all the councils and, through the substitutionist and arithmetic manipulation of trade union and SPD officials and to the great dismay of the newmade partisans of the council, voted to cede power to the Ministries of the German liberal state in waiting and to call for a constituent assembly. But the situation was by no means under control for the simple reason that the workers were in possession of vast numbers of arms and the soldiers and sailors were organized into revolutionary units.
The Spartacist uprising of January, in consequence of which Luxemburg was murdered, was an attempt to forestall the SPD consolidation of power and particularly the reconstitution of the German army and the police. The battle was for the Berlin military barracks and for control over the press and the police; defeat of the Berlin proletariat would essentially end the revolution there. Elsewhere, however, the proletariat remained armed, especially in the Ruhr mining region where in 1919 workers struck repeatedly to demand socialization of the industry and workers’ control. The Ruhr uprising of 1920 developed from the organizational structures of 1919, and particularly the new “factory-groups” like the anarchist FAUD. These factory groups responded to the manipulation of the councils at 1918 Congress by the trade unions by organizing parallel workplace organizations—organizations that were both political and economic at once, unitary organizations, oriented toward revival of the councils and the creation of a councilar society.
The Ruhr uprising is probably the farthest the German Revolution went in producing communism. It is an example, a rare historical example, of a process of communization in its earliest days. The rapidity of its progress is astounding, inspiring, and is for me a continual reminder of the uncountable, unpredictable powers of self-organization. In less than 24 hours, a hundred thousand proletarians armed themselves, disarmed the police and military, and lay claim to the central means of production of German industry, its coal, iron, and steelworks. They did so without pre-planning or coordination, forming “armies” that were not really armies in the sense that they lacked anything like a central command or discipline. This allowed, however, for pseudo-representatives to sign agreements with the state and army on their behalf. This was an “army” with divided objectives; in some places workers wanted to establish councilar control, and in others simply to prevent their massacre by the freikorps, and to restore the status quo ante. Dauve locates the beginning of antifacism here, with the pro-democracy counter counter-revolution beating back the putsch but cedings its autonomy—a kind of Spanish civil war in miniature. One thing that is notable is the dislocating character of the armed units, which by necessity ranged widely across the terrain of the Ruhr valley, and were often disconnected from workplace organizations. They were thus put in the role of catalysts---calling for the election of new councils, whose condition they would determine. The theory of the KAPD and Jan Appel begins here.
Organized communists appear to have played little role in the Ruhr rising, except in crushing it. The KAPD had not been formed—that would happen the next month, in April, and the AAUD, the communist factory groups, would be formed in February. Appel says he was in the Ruhr then, and we know that the KAPD sent him, after it was formed, to represent them in Moscow at the second congress of the Comintern, to which he arrived, in true communist fashion, by stealing a boat and maneuvering around the British blockade. The text we are reading today is the speech he gave a year later, when he returned to Moscow, by legal means, to represent the KAPD at the Third Meeting of The Communist International, slowly before that group was expelled. At issue in that speech and at the meeting is the comportment of the KAPD during the 1921 March Action, which followed upon the Ruhr rising by about a year. Both the KPD and KAPD expected a repeat of the Ruhr rising, a spontaneous rising of the class in response to the threat of disarmament, which loomed throughout the year. They both organized in order to push this offensive to the point where it would topple the state, but from there they had very different ideas about how to organize. The March Action was therefore the first action in which organized communists explicitly dedicated to councilar revolution participated.
Both Karl Radek, who speaks for the Comintern, and Appel/Hempel, who speaks for the KAPD is assess the March Action similarly. It failed because it was not broad or sustained enough, and there was little to no coordination among rebellious workplaces and the armed units. But Radek and Hempel have radically different ideas about the role that organized communists might have played and should have played. The speech which Appel gives is a reflection of the theory which informed that participation, a theory of the party, of organization, and of self- organization, that is radically different than that of the Bolsheviks. Appel agrees with Radek that the Ruhr rising and the March failed for lack of organization but draws a red line between the organizations of the old workers’ movement—trade unions, parliamentary party—and the organizational forms of the revolution itself, chiefly the councils.
In Russia, in Germany, in Italy, “the form of organization adopted by the fighting proletariat has been that of the Soviets.” The old organizations of the working class—trade unions, parliamentary parties—only sufficed for a period in which the working class struggled to improve its position within capitalism but not to overcome it. When millions of workers declare for revolution, however, such mechanisms and the persons attached to them are by their very nature an impediment, and revolutionary workers will naturally seek other means. It is “for that reason,” Appel tells the Comintern, “we declare that the workers must organise themselves in accordance with the selfsame example which the revolution itself, in the course of its development has shown us, and in which, when struggle is placed on the agenda, we Communists should play the leading role.”
The work of the communist party is exemplification. Communists learn from and lead by example. A council is not just a council, but in a revolutionary conjuncture it is also a commune, the future form of communism made present in a fragment of now. It spreads through imitation and exemplification, through a spontaneous adoption whose contagiousness solves, on its own, some of the dilemmas posed by Ruhr rising. Winning the masses to the side of revolution was not enough, nor would the formation of a dedicated cadre of professional leaders be. Rather the workers must be directly given the means by which to exert power. The party for Appel is neither a quantitative form, swelling with an influx of the masses, or a qualitative one, deepening with discipline, but a catalyst, a transitional and vanishing mediator that gives way to direct workers’ power. The goal of the KAPD, then, as it distinguished itself from the Spartacists in the KPD, was strictly the revitalization of councilar power and the destruction of all those who stood in its way, specifically the SPD-affiliated trade unions, who by the end of 1919 had locked themselves into the delegate structure of the councils.
To this end, militants in the KAPD focused on the formation of unionen, or factory-groups, structures parallel to the councils but oriented toward them, that might agitate for councilar power both within and beyond the councils. Rather than seek to organize above the councils, communist should organize alongside them: “Communists must now form themselves into a hard core, must now form a framework which the proletariat can adopt as its own, when the very development itself impels it into struggle.” This is also the reflection of an example which the KAPD learned from the FAUD, and the struggle in the Ruhr. This notion of the party of communists as framework is markedly different from that of Luxemburg or the Bolsheviks, for whom the party is an educator or leader. Here it is simply a framework, like the factory groups, a model of a structure, like the councils, which the proletariat not only can take up but, in fact, must take up “because the trades unions will no longer provide a structure adequate to promote those struggles.”
At the time, Appel and his comrades thought a party of organized communists was necessary in addition to the factory groups—this is because he recognized the centrality of struggles among the unemployed, who would not find a revolutionary role within the factory at the worksite, but who could be encouraged to organize themselves into unemployed councils directly and thereby join with workers’ councils.[1] The factory groups were open to any revolutionary workers, even unemployed ones, regardless of affiliation, as long as they agreed on the goal of communism. The party, on the other hand, required that adherents agree with its principles. This division between factory groups and party split the difference between mass party and professional party—the factory were mass communist organizations, whereas the party took up particular positions and postures. For example, within the factory groups there might be very different ideas about how to organize the councils during and after the revolution. And of course there was disagreement about whether or not a party was needed in addition to the factory groups, with some group of partisans of the councils outside of the KAPD from the beginning, and another leaving over a disagreement on this point precisely, and forming the AAUD-E, the Allgemeine Arbeiter Unionen Deutschland Einheitsorganisation—unitary organization, indicating that it was party and factory group all in one.
Appel and his comrades learned from the example of the Ruhr rising and organized themselves in a form adequate to the energies they had encountered—a selfsame example, capable of acting as a catalyst for armed, self-organized councilar power. This party was of a very particular type, however, not the democratic centralist party that Radek wanted. In Appel’s party “each individual should be a fully developed Communist, and he should be able to fulfil a leading role in whatever position he finds himself in,” guided not by particular directives but by the organization’s program. At the same time, each communist could only negotiate with the unanimity of his comrades. Dauvé on the KAPD here is useful:
each member knew what had to be done, and he did not join the KAPD to follow orders and to be told what to do. Congresses and various kinds of general assemblies were quite frequent. There was no central committee invested with full powers for an indeterminate period of time: there was, on the one hand, a current affairs committee (Geschäftsführung) and also a “Central Committee” (Hauptausschuss) which met whenever important decisions had to be made, and, unlike the same structure in other organizations, was on each occasion subject for the most part to re-election by the party districts, and consisted of the standing administrative committee and the district delegates. One could say that the party line was constantly decided by the whole party, which manifested an enormous force in the KAPD; it was only in order to recuperate this force that the Communist International tolerated the presence of this party, which never ceased to openly and violently attack the Communist International’s opportunism. In the KAPD, throughout its best period, that which Bordiga denominated as “organic centralism” was actually realized.
This possibility of acting independently and yet with the assent of the group, except in explicit negotiation, is connected to Appel’s insistence that the party can only play an affirmative role with regard to spontaneous worker’s actions. In the summer of 1920, as the Red Army cut a swathe through Poland, the KAPD resolved to sabotage the arms shipment which France and other Entente powers were sending through Germany to the Polish Army. Had the Red Army not chosen to head toward Warsaw it might have been mere miles from Germany. The KAPD organized for insurrection in the areas where trains were passing and then, as the time for our action neared, reversed course, attempting to call off what they had organized with a hasty publication. Certain groups went forward with it, declaring the Council republic in small towns, and were then wiped out. Appel insists that it was wrong to call off the action—the role of the party can only be affirmative or neutral not negative. Whereof it has fucked up, thereof it must remain silent. This is because, given its insistence of self-organization, on catalysis, it can only promote, not hinder free action.
The March Action is the best place to see this theory at work, for there we see the effect of the KAPD’s affirmative, adventurist but not vanguardist politics. The March Action was part spontaneous, part planned, an Action not a rising. Throughout 1920 and 1921, as the economic situation deteriorated, communists in the KPD and the KAPD were looking for the next insurrectionary moment, not wanting to miss their chance, as they had the year previously, during the 1920 rising in the Ruhr. The flash point this time emerged to the east, in Halle and Mansfeld, where the unionen were quite active and the workers armed, especially in the ultramodern Leuna works, where according to one estimate at least two thousand of the twenty-five thousand workers were organized in the AAUD union. When the government tried to disarm the workers, a general strike spread through the region, and in a moment of synchrony, both the KAPD and the KPD decided that the time for insurrection had come. This was the moment of heroic ultraleft adventurism. Responding to the general call, the armed units began burning down police stations and courthouses, robbing banks, and distributing goods. Max Holz, the so-called Robin Hood of the revolution, ambushed the police units sent from Berlin to put down the rebellious workers in Mansfeld. Here is a description of his proto-communizing force in action:
A motorized squad had between 60 and 200 men. A reconnaissance unit proceeded in advance, armed with machine guns or small arms; and then came the trucks with heavy weaponry. Then came the commander in his own car “with the strongbox,” along with his “secretary of the treasury.” As a rearguard, another truck loaded with heavy guns followed behind. All of these vehicles were covered with red flags. Upon arriving in a town, supplies were requisitioned and post offices and banks looted. The general strike was proclaimed and largely paid for by the business owners. Butchers and bakers were compelled to sell their goods for 30% or 60% less than the normal prices. Any resistance was immediately and violently crushed. Such units were very active throughout Saxony after the Kapp Putsch
The KPD and KAPD central committees issued a general call to insurrection, but beyond that had little control over fast-moving events. Messages got lost in the relay between the center and the provinces. Armed groups operating autonomously had little sense of what was happening elsewhere. In a signal example of the general lack of coordination that ruled, the semi-skilled workers at the occupied Leuna plant resisted the call to take up the arms they had and pass over into the offensive because they concluded they would be massacred. They were unaware, however, that Holz’s force was nearby and might have come to their aid. Eventually the factory was bombed, the workers disarmed, Holz captured and arrested. The moment had been lost.
All counterfactuals are facile. If things had been different, then they would have been different. Yes. But it is not facile to ask what a councilar revolution might have looked like, and what forces might be involved in it. Between the unionen, the parties, the councils, and the armed groups, some process of catalysis would need to take place leaving in its place a pure communist precipitate: the councils, autonomy armed. The difference between Appels’ theory and Radek’s, which would result in the mechanistic, doomed Hamburg insurrection of 1923, is that for Appel the chief site of reflection is the class itself, whereas for Radek it is the party. For Radek, the party is the servomechanism of the class, directing class action through feedback mechanisms. But Appel’s affirmative party can only feedforward, only accelerate. It is a passive reflector, inert, and this is true of the factory groups too. Any control, self-modulation, or direction must come from the class itself, the class as event, taking control of the councils. There is the site of reflection, self-direction, and leadership.
Massive questions remain, how would the councils organize themselves? By industry, as the syndicalists proposed, or by region, as the communists did. If by region, what precisely is the connection between workplace councils and regional councils and how to prevent the infiltration of petit bourgeois mediation, as had happened. Arming the workers is one thing but in conditions of mass dislocation, who is working and where and who is fighting and where does control over the working and the fighting lay? For Appel these are questions the councils themselves would have to sort and it is the very flexibility of this form and the rigidity of its proletarian content which lends itself to such challenges.