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Left Communism is a description of a range of communist viewpoints which oppose the political positions of the Bolsheviks from a position which is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views held by the Communist International after its first two Congresses. Left Communism is also sometimes referred to as the Communist Left.
Introduction
Two major traditions can be observed within Left Communism, the Dutch-German tradition and the Italian tradition. Their political positions have little in common except for a shared opposition to what is termed frontism but there is an underlying commonality at a level of abstract theory. Crucially, Left Communist groups from both traditions tend to identify elements of commonality in each other.
The historical origins of Left Communism can be traced to the period before the First World War but it only comes into focus after 1918. All Left Communists were supportive of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 but retained a critical view of its development. Some, however, would in later years come to reject a proletarian or socialist nature to the revolution and came to assert that it had simply carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution by creating a state capitalist system.
What was later described as Left Communism had a presence in Russia, Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain around 1918. It can be seen as having two geographic currents within it, the major ones then being the German-Dutch tradition and the Italian tradition. The British wing of the movement did not have any theoretical viewpoint of any lasting significance, the Bulgarian wing was in essence an echo of the German-Dutch experience and the Russian wing perished early on. This article looks at each in turn.
Left Communism first came into focus as the left wing of the Communist movement in or around the Communist International in 1918. Its essential features were an stress on the need to build a Communist Party entirely separate from the reformist and centrist elements who were seen as having betrayed socialism in 1914, opposition to all but the most restricted participation in elections and an emphasis on the need for revolutionaries to take the offensive. Apart from that there was little in common between the various wings. Only the Italians accepted a need for electoral work at all and the German-Dutch and Russians both opposed a right of nations to self determination.
Russian Left Communism
Russian Left Communism began as a faction in the Russian Communist Party in 1918, logically named the Left Communists, which opposed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany. The faction, headed theoretically by Bukharin, stood argued for a revolutionary war against the Axis Powers, opposed the right of nations to self determination and specifically of Poland (there were many Poles in the formation), and were generally took a voluntarist stance as regards the possibilities for social revolution at that time. Defeated in internal debates - they had been allowed to publicly publish a theoretical paper The Communist - they dissolved. A few very small Left Communist groups surfaced in the next few years but fell victim to repression by the state.
Italian Left Communism to 1926
The Italian Left Communists were the tendency which named Left Communism at a later stage in their development, but when the Communist Party of Italy was founded they were actually the majority of Communists in that country. This development was a result of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) being in advance of other sections of the PSI in their realisation that a separate Communist Party had to be formed which did not include reformists. This gave them a great advantage over the sections of the PSI who looked to figures such as Serratti and Gramsci for leadership. It was a consequence of the revolutionary impatience common at a time when revolution, in the narrow sense of an insurrectionary attempt at the seizure of power, was expected to develop in the very near future.
Under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga the Left was to control the PCd'I until the Lyons Congress of 1926. In this period the militants of the PCd'I would find themselves isolated from reformist workers and from other anti-fascist militants. At one stage this isolation was deepened when Communist militants were instructed to leave defense organisations that were not totally controlled by the party. These sectarian tactics produced concern in the leadership of the Commuist International and led to a developing opposition within the PCd'I itself. Eventually these two factors led to the displacement of Bordiga from his position as first secretary and his replacement by Gramsci. By then, Bordiga was in a fascist jail and he was to remain outside organised politics until 1952. The development of the Left Communist Fraction was not the development of the Bordigist current it is often portrayed as.
1925 was a turning point for the Italian left as it was the year that so called Bolshevisation took place in the sections of the Communist International. This plan was designed to eliminater all social democratic deviations from the national sections and develop them on Bolshevik lines or at least along the lines of what Zinoviev, the secretary of the International, considered Bolshevik lines. In practice this meant top-down bureaucratic structures in which the members were controlled by a leadership approved of by the Comintern's International Executive Committee. In Italy this meant that the leadership which had formerly been in the hands of Bordiga was given to a body that came into being when the Serrati-Maffi minority of the PSI joined the PCd'I, although Bordiga's group were in a majority. The new leadership was supported by Bordiga as a centralist, who bowed to the will of the International.
Naturally such actions produced a reaction and Bordiga fought the IEC from within, only to have an article of his which was favourable to Trotsky's positions on the disputed Russian questions suppressed. Meanwhile sections of the left motivated by Onorato Damen formed the Entente Committee. This committee was ordered to dissolve itself by the incoming leadership, led now by Gramsci who only then opposed Bordiga's positions, which had gained prestige after a successful recruitment campaign. With the party Congress of 1926 held in Lyons, crowned by Gramscis famous Lyons Theses, the left majority was now defeated and on course to becoming a minority within the party. With the victory of fascism, Bordiga was jailed and when he opposed a vote against Trotsky in the prison PCd'I group, he was expelled from the party in 1930. He took a stance of non-involvement in politics for many years after this. The victory of fascism also meant that the Italian left would enter into a new chapter in its development this time in exile.
German-Dutch Left Communism to 1933
The German-Dutch tradition of Left Communism was so named because the movement in both countries was so closely connected. Among the leading theoreticians of the more powerful German movement were Pannekoek and Gorter (for example) and German activists found refuge in the Netherlands after 1933. This current could trace its origins back before World War One as in the Netherlands a revolutionary wing of Social Democracy had broken from the reformist party even before the war and had built links with German activists. After the beginning of the German Revolution in 1918, a leftist mood could be found among sections of the Communist Parties of both countries. In Germany this led directly to the foundation of the Communist Workers Party (KAPD) after its leading figures were expelled from the Communist Party (KPD) by Karl Levi. This development was mirrored in the Netherlands and on a smaller scale in Bulgaria where the Left Communist movement was to mimic that of Germany.
The KAPD when founded was a small party of some tens of thousands of revolutionaries but within a few years had been reduced to an impotent and much split set of sects. This was because it was not founded on a coherent set of politics but on the basis of revolutionary optimism and a purism that rejected what became known as frontism. Frontism was seen as an opposition to working in the same organisations as reformist workers, such work being seen as unhelpful at a time when the revolution was seen as an actuality and not merely as a goal to be aimed at. This led the members of the KAPD to reject working in the traditional trade unions in favour of forming their own revolutionary unions. These unionen, so called to distinguish them from the official free trade unions, had 80,000 members in 1920 and peaked in 1921 with 200,000 members after which they declined rapidly. They were also organisationally divided from the beginning with those unionen linked to the KAPD forming the AAU-D, and those in Saxony around Otto Ruhle who opposed the conception of a party in favour of a unitary class organisation were organised as the AAU-E.
The KAPD was unable to reach even its founding Congress prior to suffering its first split when the so-called National Bolshevik Tendency around Wolffheim and Laufenburg appeared. It should be noted that this tendency has no connection with modern political tendencies which seek to fuse Marxism and extreme nationalism together, but are in fact variants of fascism. More seriously the party lost most of its support very rapidly as it failed to develop lasting structures. This also contributed to internecine quarrels and the party actually split into two competing tendencies known as the Essen and Berlin tendencies to the historians of the Left. The recently established Communist Workers International (KAI) split on exactly the same lines as did the tiny Bulgarian Communist Workers Party. The only other affiliates of the KAI were the Communist Workers Party of Britain led by Sylvia Pankhurst, the KAPN in the Netherlands and a group in Russia. The AAU-D split on the same lines as it rapidly ceased to exist as a real tendency within the factories.
Left Communism and the Communist International
As discussed above, the Left Communists initially rallied to the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and to the new Communist International. In fact, they controlled the first body formed by the Comintern to coordinate its activities in Western Europe, the Amsterdam Bureau. However this was little more than a very brief interlude and the Bureau never functioned as a leadership body for Western Europe as was originally intended. The vienna Bureau of the Comintern may also be classified as Left Communist but its personnel were not to evolve into either of the two historic currents that made up Left Communism. Rather the Vienna Bureau was subject to the ultra-left moods of the earlyiest period of the history of the Comintern.
Left Communists supported the Russian Revolution, but did not accept the methods of the Bolsheviks. Many of the German-Dutch tradition adopting Rosa Luxemburgs criticisms as outlined in her posthumously published essay wrongly entitled Marxism or Leninism? In this essay she rejected the Bolsheviks position on redistribution of land to the peasantry and their espousal of the Right of nations to Self Determination which she rejected as historically outmoded. The Italian Left Communists did not at the time accept any of these criticisms and both currents would evolce, as we shall see, over the course of the coming years.
To a consdierable degree Lenin's well known polemic 'Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder is an attack on the ideas of the emerging Left communist currents. However it would be false to see it in such a narrow focus as the pamphlet also contained polemics against other currents such as the De Leonists Socialist Labor Parties, the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, the KAPD and Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers Socialist Federation. His main aim being to polemicise with currents moving towards Bolshevik tactics by showing them that they could remain based on firmly revolutionary principles while utilising a variety of tactics. Therefore Lenin defened the use of revolutionary parliamentarism and working within the official trade unions.
As the Kronstadt Rebellion occurred at a time when the debate on tactics was still raging within the Comintern it has been wrongly seen as being Left Communist by some commentators. In fact the Left Communist currents had no connection with the rebellion although they did rall to its support when they learned of it. In later years the German-Dutch tradition in particular would come to see the suppresion of the revolt as the historic turning pooint in the evolution of the Russian state created after October 1917.
Italian Left Communism 1926-1939
After 1926 Italian Left Communism took shape in exile and without the participation of Bordiga. Contacts between the Italians and the germans had been made and were developed in France but the Italian Left associated the KAPD's stress on factory organisation as being similar to the ideas of Gramsci's L'Ordine Nouvo and therefore rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group around Karl Korsch also failed. The real foundation of the Italian Left as an independent group may then be placed at that point when the Left Fraction of the PCd'I was established in July 1927 by a number of young militants. The new group had members in France, Belgium and the USA and published a review Prometeo. It was estimated in 1928 that it had at most 200 militants but it would seem that while it never had more than 100 militants active at any one time its influence was actually far greater. The control of the PCd'I apparatus by the Stalinists however meant that attempts to reach other exiles was almost impossible and they were driven back into small circle work.
The Italian Left Fraction was for the rest of the 1930s led by Ottorino Perrone, although it was fiercely opposed to the cult of the personality which was developing in the Comintern around Stalin in these years and resisted similar pressures in its own organisation. The Fraction had members in France, Belgium and the USA, how many in Italy looked to it cannot be ascertained. The main activity of the fraction through these years was the publishing of its press which consisted of the paper Prometeo and the journal Bilan. With its establishment as a group the Fraction also looked for international co-thinkers and seeing the International Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, as central to the non-Stalinist Communist movement sought contact with it. These contacts were to be severed when agreement on basic principles proved impossible (see note below).
The political distance between the Fraction and other communist currents would deepen throughout the 1930s as the Fraction declared itself opposed to the tactics adopted by the Left Opposition to broaden its support, i.e. opposition to fusion with centrist groups, opposition to entrism, etc. Always opposed to the United Front tactic of the Comintern the Fraction now declared itself firmly opposed to the Popular Front after 1933. Like the Trotskyists it saw the failure of the Communist Party of Germany in the face of fascism as its historic failure and ceased to consider itself a fraction of the Communist Party from the date of its 1935 Congress, held in Brussels.
Isolated, the Left Fraction sought to discover allies within the milieu of groups to the left of the Trotskyist movement. Typically these discussions came to nothing but they were able to recruit from the disintegrating Ligue des Communitistes Internationalistes (LCI) in Belgium, a group which had broken from Trotskyism. A loose liaison was also maintained with the Council Communist groups in the Netherlands and in particular with the GIK. However, these disucssions were pushed into the background as the attempted fascist coup in Spain led to revolution and civil war.
Immediately after the civil war began a minority emerged within the Left Fraction whose members ought to engage in events as participants. This minority including long time members of the fraction numbered some 26 militants mainly belonging to the Parisian federation of the Fraction. They travelled to Barcelona to enlist in the workers militias and after a fruitless meeting in September with a delegation from the Fraction were expelled. The problem for the Fraction was that the military support given to the Republican forces by the minority was accompanied by political support in that the minority wished to halt strikes among loyalist workers in the name of military victory. For the Fraction no support could be given to a bourgeois state, even in a struggle against fascism.
The question of Spain forced the Belgian LCI to clarify its positions and a split ensued as a result of debate within its ranks. At its February 1937 conference a minority of the LCI led by Mitchell defended the positions of the Italian Left and were expelled. Although less than ten in number they formed a Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left. It was at this point that the Italian Left learned of a group called the Grupo de Trabajadores in Mexico with very similar positions to their own. It was led by Paul Kirchoff and had left the Mexican Trotskyist group. Kirchoff had formerly been a member of the KAPD in Germany, then a Trotskyist in the USA but his tiny group would seem to have disappeared at the outbreak of war in 1939. In early 1938 the Italian and Belgian Fractions formed an International Bureau of the Left Fractions which published a review called Octobre.
During this period the Italian Left also reviewed a number of positions which it thought had become outdated. They rejected the idea of national self determination and began to develop their views on the war economy and capitalist decadence. Much of this was carried out by Vercesi but Mitchell from the Belgian Fraction was also a leading figure in the work. Perhaps most dramatically they also reviewed their understanding of the Russian Revolution and the state that had emerged from it. Eventually they came to hold a position that argued that the Russian state was by the late 1930's state capitalist and was not to be defended. In short, they believed there was need for a new revolution.
Left Communism 1939-1952
Many small currents to the left of the mass Communist Parties collapsed at the beginning of the Second World War and the Left Communists were initially silent too. Despite having foreseen the war more clearly than some other factions, when it began they were overwhelmed. Many were persecuted by either German Nazism or Italian fascism. Leading militants of the Communist Left like Mitchell, by origin a Jew, were to die in Buchenwald.
By 1942 a process of regroupment and active engagement was underway. The French Nucleus of the Communist Left appeared based on the positions of the Italian Left. In 1941 some elements drawn from exiled Austrian and German Trotskyist circles created the Revolutionary Communists of Germany in exile in France, and adopted Left Communist positions. They in turn recruited French comrades who formed the Revolutionary Communists in 1942 which became Proletarian Fraternisation in 1943 and Revolutionary Communist Reassembly in 1944. These tiny French groups worked closely with the Germans but were autonomous even at a local level.
Meanwhile, in Germany the final council communist groups had disappeared in the maelstrom and in the Netherlands the International Communist Group (GIK) was moribund. The former "centrist" group led by Henrik Sneevliet (the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, RSAP) transformed itself into the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front. But in April 1942 its leadership was arrested by the Gestapo and killed. The remaining activists then split into two camps, on the one hand some turned to Trotskyism forming the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists (CRM) while the majority formed the CommunistenBond-Spartacus. The latter group turned to council communism and was joined by most members of the GIK.
In 1941 the Italian Fraction was reorganised in France and along with the new French Fraction came into conflict with the ideas which the Fraction had propagated from 1936: of the social disappearance of the proletariat and localised wars, etc. These ideas continued to be defended by Vercesi in Brussels. Gradually the Left Fractions adopted positions drawn from German left communism. They abandoned the conception that the Russian state remained in some way proletarian and also dropped Vercesi's conception of localised wars in favour of ideas on imperialism inspired by Luxemburg. Vercesi's participation in a Red Cross committee was also fiercely contested.
Between 1944 and 1952 the Soviet Union began to systematically vet and process communists in its zone of control. At the same time, the PCd'I and PCF moved to the right. This climate resulted in the arrest and detention of left-tending communists behind the iron curtain, and simultaneously, the political isolation of left-communists in the West. Additionally, within the Soviet Union itself the war experience had thrown up new groups of quietly dissenting students who sought inspiration from Lenin, or even more politically dangerous texts. In Yugoslavia the intellectual Milovan Djilas occupied a left-communist position within the Yugoslav leadership before he was expelled, arrested and imprisoned.
In the United States, some Trotskyist theorists who became inspired by industrial struggle placed renewed emphasis on militancy. In particular the Johnston Forrest tendency which had been influenced by the Shachtmanites argued for a reassessment of the class structure of the Soviet Union.
Little of this activity had a relationship with formal left-communist groups, mostly Bordigist, who were increasingly isolated and sectarian.
Left Communism 1952-2004
In the modern period Left communism as a label has been increasingly neglected, and restricted to sectarian Bordigist organisations. However, at the same time, the arguments of Left communism have become more and more relevent to social action. When contemporary radicals use the label "left communist" they rarely mean Sylvia Pankhurst or Rosa Luxemburg; and more commonly mean an intrasigently working class, revolutionary and democratic form of communism.
Reactions to the Death of Stalin
- East Berlin
- Ukraine
- Poland
- Hungary
France
Italy
- Sectarianism and Bordigism
- Autonomism: PO and AO and the class composition
- Autonomism: Lotta Continua and the social movements
- Autonomism: Urban Indians, situationalism aesthetic in Italy
- Autonomism: The 1980s movement, squats and violence
- Autonomism: Tutti Bianca and the movement today
Western Europe
- Dutch Autonomen in the 1960s and 1970s
- German Autonomen in the 1980s
United Kingdom
United States
- Student protests and civil rights
- The 1960s, SDS, SDS splits
- Radikal Amerika
- 1970s and 1980s American Autonomism and Situationalism including Processed World
- Contemporary American protest movements
A Note on Left Communism and the Left Opposition
Following his exile from Russia, Trotsky and his supporters formed the International Left Opposition as an external tendency of the Communist International, aiming to reform it. This has caused some commentators to confuse the Left Opposition with Left Communism. In fact the two were briefly associated until Trotsky came to the conclusion that the positions of the exiled Italian Left Communists were irredemably sectarian and broke with them. Left Communists came to argue that with the Second World War that Trotskyism had passed over to the camp of the bourgeoisie and no longer represented a communist current. The confusion between the two currents was made worse by the tendency of some Trotskyists to call themselves Left Communists, which was made most explicit in the case of the Spanish section of the International Left Opposition which named itself the Left Communists of Spain (ICE). This was objected to by Trotsky, as he held this was not the position of the Opposition which was instead Bolshevik-Leninist i.e., Trotsky identified the Left Opposition as the orthodox Leninist current in contra-distinction to both the Left Communists and the Stalinist centrist faction.
See also
Further reading
There is very little in English on Left Communism but the following two books give an adequate historical survey of the movement. Albeit from a viewpoint that is fundamentally in sympathy with Left Communism. Both are published by the International Communist Current (http://www.internationalism.org) a present day Left Communist current.
- The Italian Communist Left 1926-1945
- The Dutch-German Communist Left
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