Who was this communist left?

The Communist Left emerged out of the crisis of Marxist Social Democracy that became acutely visible during the war. Left Communist currents emerged across the world. Those with politics that we and Lenin could describe as left communist were generally the first revolutionary militants from their respective countries attracted to the Russian Revolution and to the Communist International (Comintern) set up in 1919. In some countries notably Germany, Italy a majority of those who formed their respective communist parties had left communist politics. However their experience was — sooner or later — to find themselves in disagreement with the policies promoted from Moscow and eventually excluded from the Communist International.

Two main wings of the Communist Left managed to survive the defeat of the revolutionary wave as traditions: the German/Dutch Left[63] (sometimes known as Council Communists) and the Italian Left (sometimes referred to as Bordigists after a founding member). While their analyzes were not the same on all points, what really defined them was a perception of the need for communist revolutionary politics to be a fundamental break from those of Social Democracy. Such a break necessarily implied an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between the political and the economic that was central to the theory of the Second International.

Although they disagreed at what time it occurred, their perception was that the Bolshevik party slipped back into, or never quite left Social Democratic positions. Identifying themselves as revolutionary and as Marxist the common problem for these currents was to understand what had happened in a way that was true to both. While saying the Soviet Union was capitalist allowed a revolutionary position to be taken up against it, they found it necessary to do this in a way that made sense in terms of Marx’s categories and understanding of capitalism. Out of their different experiences they developed very different theories of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and of the capitalism that developed in the USSR.

However these oppositions to the Moscow line were largely eclipsed by the strength of Stalinism in the workers’ movement and by a later opposition to this that grew up around Leon Trotsky, the exiled leader of the Russian Communist Party and state. Due to the revolutionary credentials and prestige of its founder, Trotskyism established itself as the most visible and numerous opposition to the left of the official ‘Communist’ movement. Particularly in Britain, which has not really generated its own left Marxist tradition, it managed to plausibly present itself against Stalinism as the genuine revolutionary Marxism. For this reason we devoted the previous articles to a presentation and critique of theories of the USSR coming out of Trotskyism: the orthodox Trotskyist theory of the degenerated workers state, Tony Cliff’s version of state capitalism, and Hillel Ticktin’s recently influential theory of Russia as a specifically distorted and untenable society.[64]

We argued that a weakness of all these theories was that they moved within a certain kind of orthodox Marxism. Identifying with the Soviet state under Lenin and Trotsky, they assumed that, on the basis of the traditional Marxist premise that socialism is the abolition of private property in the means of production through its wholesale nationalization by the state, that there had been a successful socialist revolution in Russia which in some way had degenerated. They disagreed on what type of system had emerged, but they generally saw it as hinging on the lack of workers’ democratic control of nationalized property. For Trotskyism, Leninism is the revolutionary alternative to the Second International, and Trotskyism was the revolutionary continuation of Leninism against Stalinism. The existence of a Communist Left threatens this picture. It shows that Trotskyism was by no means the only Marxist opposition to Stalinism. In fact, as we’ll see, it questions whether Trotskyism has been a ‘revolutionary’ opposition at all.

However while Trotskyism, through the flexible tactics it was willing to adopt, could exist on the fringes of a Stalinist and social democratic dominated workers’ movement, the left communists, their politics fundamentally oriented to revolutionary situations, were reduced by the thirties to a far smaller and more isolated existence. It was only after Stalinism’s hold on the revolutionary imagination began to break in 1956 and with the wave of struggles beginning in the sixties that there was a resurgence of interest in revolutionary tendencies to the left of Trotskyism, like the Communist Left. The focus on Councils and workers’ self-activity that was basic to the German Left was taken up by groups like Socialism or Barbarism (and its linked British group Solidarity) and by the Situationist International.[65] The German Communist Left which declared itself anti-Leninist was more immediately attractive to those rejecting Stalinism and the critical support given it by Trotskyism than the Italian Left which, because it emphasized the party, seemed like another version of Leninism. However after ’68 partly due to a perceived weakness of a merely ‘councilist’ or ‘libertarian’ opposition to Leninism, there was a renewal of interest in the Italian Left which was the other main Communist left to have handed down a tradition.[66]

In this article we shall look at the various theories of the Russian, German/Dutch and Italian Communist Left. We shall ignore certain other communist lefts because either they have not managed to pass down any theoretical writings on the question or because as, say, with the British Left they largely followed the German/Dutch left on the question of the Russian Revolution.[67] Our point of departure is that Communist Left which developed within the Russian Revolution itself and which received Lenin’s wrath before the rest. Though the Russian Left cannot be said to have developed the same body of coherent theory as the other two, its very closeness to the events gives its considerations a certain importance.