Left communism
Left communism should not be confused with the Trotskyist Left Opposition.
Left Communism is a term describing a whole range of
communist viewpoints which oppose the political ideas of the
Bolsheviks from a position which is asserted to be more authentically
Marxist and
proletarian than the views of
Leninism held by the
Communist International after its first two Congresses. Left Communism is also sometimes referred to as the
Communist Left.
Its primary world manifestation today is in the current of
Council communism. Prominent post-1968 proponents of Left Communism have included
Gilles Dauve and
Maximilien Rubel. Prominent small
left communist groups existing today include the
International Communist Current and the Internationalist Communist Group. Some include certain larger organisations, such as the
Worker Communist parties of
Iraq and of
Iran, within the category of left communism.
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 came into focus after
1918. All Left Communists were supportive of the
October Revolution in
Russia, but retained a critical view of its development. Some, however, would in later
years come to reject the idea that the revolution had a
proletarian or
socialist nature, asserting that it had simply carried out the tasks of the
bourgeois revolution by creating a
state capitalist system.
Left Communism first came into being as a clear movement in or around 1918. Its essential features were: a 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 move on the offensive. Apart from that, there was little in common between the various wings. Only the Italians accepted the need for electoral work at all, and the German-Dutch and Russian wings both opposed the "right of nations to self-determination", which they denounced as a form of
bourgeois nationalism.
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 Left Communists wanted international
Proletarian Revolution across the world. The leader of this faction, in the beginning, was
Bukharin. They stood for a
revolutionary war against the
Central Powers; opposed the right of nations to self-determination (specifically in the case of
Poland, since there were many Poles in this communist group and they did not want a Polish capitalist state to be established); and they generally took a
voluntarist stance regarding the possibilities for social revolution at that time.
They began to publish a newspaper,
Kommunist, which offered a critique of the direction in which the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union was heading. They argued against the over-bureaucratisation of the state, and further argued that nationalisation should proceed at a quicker pace than
Lenin desired.
The Left Communists faded as Lenin proved too strong a figure to argue against. They also lost Bukharin as a leading figure, since he moderated his own position and eventually came to agree with Lenin. Being defeated in internal debates, they dissolved. A few very small Left Communist groups surfaced within the
RSFSR in the next few years, but later fell victim to repression by the state. In many ways, the Left Communist faction's positions were inherited by the
Workers Opposition faction.
The Italian Left Communists were named Left Communists 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 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 (Communist Party of Italy) 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 Communist 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 (as it is often portrayed).
The year
1925 was a turning point for the Italian left as it was the year that the so-called
Bolshevisation took place in the sections of the Communist International. This plan was designed to eliminate all
social democratic deviations from the Comintern 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, who, as a centralist, accepted the will of the International.
Nevertheless, 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 Gramsci's famous
Lyons Theses, the left majority was now defeated and on course to becoming a minority within the party. With the victory of
fascism in Italy, 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.
The German-Dutch tradition of Left Communism was so named because the movement in both countries was very 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 I, since 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
Paul 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.
When it was founded, the KAPD included some tens of thousands of revolutionaries. However, within a few years, it had broken up and practically dissolved. This was because it was founded on the basis of
revolutionary optimism and a purism that rejected what became known as frontism. Frontism was seen as the idea of working in the same organisations as reformist workers. Such work was seen by the KAPD as unhelpful at a time when the revolution was thought to be an imminent event, and not merely 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 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 Rühle who opposed the conception of a party in favour of a unitary class organisation being 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
Fritz Wolffheim and
Heinrich Laufenberg appeared (it should be noted that this tendency has no connection with modern political tendencies in Russia which use the same name). More seriously, the KAPD 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, and it rapidly ceased to exist as a real tendency within the factories.
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 adopted the ultra-left ideas of the earliest period in 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 adopted
Rosa Luxembourg's criticisms, as outlined in her posthumously published essay entitled
"Marxism or Leninism?". In this essay, she rejected the Bolshevik position on distribution 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 evolve, as we shall see, over the course of the coming years.
To a considerable degree, Lenin's well known
polemic 'Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder [
1] is an attack on the ideas of the emerging Left Communist currents. However, it would be incorrect to see it exclusively 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 was to polemicise with currents moving towards pure revolutionary tactics by showing them that they could remain based on firmly revolutionary principles while utilising a variety of tactics. Therefore Lenin defended the use of 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 rally to its support when they learned of it. In later years, the German-Dutch tradition in particular would come to see the suppression of the revolt as the historic turning point in the evolution of the Russian state created after October 1917.
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 saw the KAPD's stress on factory organisation as being similar to the ideas of Gramsci's
L'Ordine Nuovo and therefore rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group around
Karl Korsch also failed. The Left Fraction of the PCd'I was formally established in July
1927 by a number of young militants. This new group had members in France, Belgium and the USA and published a review entitled
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 (since all communist activities there had been driven underground by the fascist government). 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. Seeing the
International Left Opposition, led by
Leon Trotsky, as central to the non-Stalinist Communist movement, they 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. the Fraction affirmed its opposition to fusion with
centrist groups, opposition to
entryism, 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 Communistes 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 discussions 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 sought to participate in the events in Spain. This minority, including long time members of the fraction, numbered some 26 militants mainly belonging to the Parisian federation of the Fraction. They traveled to
Barcelona to enlist in the workers
militias and after a fruitless meeting in September with a delegation from the Fraction back home, they were expelled. The problem for the Fraction was that the military support given to the
Republican forces by this minority was accompanied by political support (in that the minority wished to halt
strikes among loyalist workers in the name of military victory against fascism). According to 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 Kirchhoff and had left the Mexican Trotskyist movement. 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 argue 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.
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, who was Jewish, were to die in the
Buchenwald concentration camp.
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
Henk 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 Nucleus of the Communist Left 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 Rosa Luxemburg. Vercesi's participation in a
Red Cross committee was also fiercely contested.
The strike at FIAT in October
1942 had a major impact on the Italian Fraction in France, which was deepened by the fall of Mussolini's regime in July 1943. The Italian Fraction now saw a pre-revolutionary situation opening in Italy and prepared to participate in the coming revolution. Revived by Marco in Marseilles, the Italian Fraction now worked closely with the new French Fraction, which was formally founded in Paris in December 1944. However in May 1945 the Italian Fraction, many of whose members had already returned to Italy, voted to dissolve itself so that it's militants could integrate themselves as individuals into the Internationalist Communist Party. The conference at which this decision was made also refused to recognise the French Fraction and expelled Marco from their group.
This led to a split in the French Fraction and the formation of the Gauche Communiste de France by the French Fraction led by Marco. The history of the GCF belongs to the post-war period. Meanwhile the former members of the French Fraction who sympathised with Vercesi and the Internationalist Communist party formed a new French Fraction, which published the journal
L'Etincelle and was joined at the end of 1945 by the old minority of the Fraction who had joined
L'Union Communiste in the 1930's.
One other development during the war years merits mention at this point. A small grouping of German and Austrian militants came close to Left Communist positions in these years. Best known, to those few who know of them, as the "Revolutionary Communists", these young militants were exiles from nazism living in France at the start of World War II and were members of the Trotskyist movement but they had opposed the formation of the Fourth International in 1938 on the grounds that it was premature. They were refused full delegates' credentials and only admitted to the founding conference of the Youth International on the following day. They then joined Hugo Oehler's International Contact Commission for the 4th Communist International and in 1939 were publishing
Der Marxist in
Antwerp.
With the beginning of the war, they took the name
Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD) and came to define Russia as state capitalist, in agreement with Ante Ciliga's book
The Russian Enigma. At this point they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a
degenerated workers' state). After the fall of France, they renewed contact with militants in the Trotskyist milieu in Southern France and recruited some of them into the
Communistes Revolutionnaires in 1942. This group became known as
Fraternisation Proletarienne in
1943 and then
L'Organisation Communiste Revolutionnaire in
1944. The CR and RKD were autonomous, and clandestine, but worked closely together with shared politics. As the war ran its course, they evolved in a councilist direction, while also identifying more and more with Rosa Luxemburg's work. They also worked with the French Fraction of the Communist Left and seem to have disintegrated at the end of the war. This disintegration was speeded no doubt by the capture of a leading militant,
Karl Fischer , who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was to participate in writing the
Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald when the camp was liberated.
The closing stages of the Second World War marked a watershed in the history of Left Communism, as was true for every other political tendency. Left Communists, like the Trotskyists, expected the war to end with at least the beginnings of a revolutionary wave of struggle similar to that which had marked the end of the First World War. Therefore strikes in Italy from 1942 onwards were of intense interest to them. Many Left Communists formerly in exile, in jail or simply inactive due to repression returned to active political activity in Italy. This had the result that new organisations identifying with Left Communism came into being and older ones dissolved themselves. We look at these organisations and in particular at the Internationalist Communist Party below.
If for the Italian Left the end of war marked a new beginning, it also did so for the German-Dutch Left. Although in Germany it was the case that the Communist Left tradition was all but extinguished, surviving only in the form of a few scattered groups holding councilist views, France, by comparison, saw an interesting development with the beginning of a conscious attempt to develop a synthesis of the two strands of Left Communism in the form of the
Gauche Communiste de France, which built on pre-war contributions.
The year 1952 signaled the definitive end of any remaining mass influence on the part of Italian Left Communism, as its sole remaining representative, the Internationalist Communist Party, split in two sections. By coincidence, the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) also dissolved in the same year. Left Communists entered a period of constant decline from this point onwards, although they were somewhat rejuvenated by the events of
1968.
The uprisings of
May 1968 led to a small resurgance of interest in left communist ideas. Various small left communist groups emerged around the world, predominately in the leading capitalist countries. A series of conferences of the communist left began in 1976, with the aim of promoting international and cross-tendency discussion, but these petered out in the 1980s without having increased the profile of the movement or its unity of ideas. [
2]
Prominent post-1968 proponents of Left Communism have included
Gilles Dauve,
Maximilien Rubel. Prominent small
left communist groups existing today include the
International Communist Current, the
International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party and the
Internationalist Communist Group. Some people include certain larger organisations, such as the
Worker Communist parties of Iraq and of Iran, within the category of left communism.
*
Council Communism*
Luxemburgism*
Anarchist communism*
Libertarian socialism*
Left Communism in China*
List of left communist internationals*
List of left communistsOutside the pages of the publications of modern day Left Communist groups, which are obscure, there is very little avaiable on this political tradition. However the International Communist Current, itself a Left Communist grouping, has in recent years produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedants. The book on the German-Dutch curent (which is an unauthorised reprint of a thesis by Philippe Bourrinet) in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.
The Italian Communist Left 1926-1945The Dutch-German Communist Left (
Original thesis by Philippe Bourrinet)
The Russian Communist Left, 1918-1930The British Communist Left, 1914-1945Also of interest is volume 5 number 4 of Spring 1995 of the journal Revolutionary History. This volume may be usefully read in conjunction and for reasons of chronology after the ICC book referred to above.
*Through Fascism, War and Revolution: Trotskyism and Left Communism in Italy
* http://www.internationalism.org/ - The international communist current
* http://www.ibrp.org/ - International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party
* http://www.worldsocialism.org/ - World Socialist Movement
* http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/ - Communist theoretical magazine from the UK
* http://www.riff-raff.se/en/ - Communist theoretical magazine from Sweden.
* http://www.libcom.org/ - Libertarian Communist Resource
* http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/ - Antagonism, a left communist site
* http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/ - For communism, communist archive
* http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/ - Texts by the US communist Loren Goldner
* http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/ - Class against class, archive of communist texts
* http://www.plusloin.org/plusloin/ - Plus Loin, texts in french
* http://www.mondialisme.org/ - Includes texts by Echanges et Mouvements
* http://www.sinistra.net/ - Left communist, Bordigist archive
* http://www.libcom.org/library - Archive of Libertarian and Left Communist texts
* http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/ - German communist webpage
* http://www.wildcat-www.de/index.htm - German magazine with revolutionary theory and discussion
* http://www.mouvement-communiste.com/ - Texts by the French group Communist Mouvement
* http://www.simaiesocialism.com/ - Iranian communist website also known as Komonist-e-emrooz
* http://www.kavoshgar.org/ - Group translating communist texts into Persian
* http://www.prole.info/ - Modern communist theory, left communism meets post anarchism
* http://www.prole.info/introduction/intro_0.html - Easy introduction to an anti-political insurrectionist communism
* http://www.prol-position.net/ - "The newsletter is an open project discussing and circulating articles from different regions, translated from different languages, and reporting on different spheres of exploitation and proletarian struggle around the world."
*http://internationalist-perspective.org - Left communist group which publishes Internationalist Perspective in English and French
*
List of Left Communist Parties/Groups
