The German/Dutch Communist Left

In Germany the beginning of the century was characterized by a tension between official and unofficial expressions of working class strength. On the one hand, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had founded and dominated the Second International, had grown to an unprecedented scale (almost becoming a ‘state within a state’), and was receiving steadily larger proportion of votes in elections. On the other, there was also an increased militancy and radicalization of class struggle, manifesting itself in more and more strikes and lockouts[83] — struggles that in many cases went beyond economic demands and took on a mass and political character. While a left radical current within the SPD was to see these as a way the class was developing towards revolution, the mainstream party and trade union leadership set itself against these new forms of class struggle. In the years to come these two expression of the working class were to drastically clash. Indeed the direct struggle between class and capital would become that of revolutionary tendency of the proletariat and social democracy siding with and representing capital.

The counter-revolutionary character of the gradualist practice of the SPD first came brutally to light when, in the interest of preparing for the next election, the party stepped in to demobilize a wave of industrial struggles and suffrage agitation that swept Prussia in 1910. Although leading to some fierce arguments over strategy between Kautsky and the emerging radical left tendency, it was only with the war that these oppositions made moves towards a split with the party. Despite always having had a position of opposing imperialist wars, the SPD and the unions turned to social patriotism — the party voted for war credits and the unions signed a pact to maintain war production and prevent strikes. As a result, two main opposition tendencies emerged: the left-communist tendency that split from the party, and the Spartacists that at first tried to stay within the party and reform it from within. However, their different responses to the SPD’s turn to social patriotism, was emblematic of what was to follow. Whilst the left communists throughout put themselves on the side of revolution, the Spartacist leadership never entirely managed to break from social democratic conceptions.

The German Revolution: Breaking from Social Democracy

But whilst SPD’s support for the war was important in generating a radical left tendency, it was only in the face of the German Revolution that the overtly counter-revolutionary character of social democracy became clear to large numbers of workers. The Russian Revolution had been a massive inspiration for revolutionaries and the class struggle in Germany. In early 1918 there was a wave of mass wildcat strikes. And although the SPD put a lid on these struggles, the opposition kept growing. Finally in November, revolution broke out when sailors mutinies and a generalized setting up of workers councils ended the first world war. The ruling class, knowing that it could in no way contain the revolutionary wave, turned to social democracy to save the nation, and appointed the SPD leader as chancellor. Knowing that direct confrontation would get them nowhere, they set themselves to destroy the councils from within. The Spartacists, trapped within a ‘centrist’ faction of social democracy, could only watch while it helped the SPD in this task. The SPD thus managed to get a majority vote at the first National Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils in favor of elections to a constituent assembly and for dissolving the councils in favor of that parliament. At the same time the trade unions worked hand in hand with management to get revolutionary workers dismissed and to destroy independent council activity in the factories. Councils against parliament and trade unions became the watch word of revolutionaries.

Recognizing the depth of their failure, the Spartacists broke from social democracy and joined the left communists to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). And in January 1919, within days of this founding conference, the KPD was tested in combat. Prematurely provoked to action by the government, revolutionary workers in Berlin attempted to overthrow the SPD government in favor of a council republic. The KPD put itself on the side of the insurrection, which was crushed by the SPD minister Noske’s freicorps — a volunteer army of proto-fascist ex-officers and soldiers. The Spartacist leaders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, were arrested and murdered. Over the next months revolutionary attempts in Bavaria, Bremen, Wilhemshaven and other places, were likewise defeated in isolation. Social democracy, through armed force when necessary, but more fundamentally through the ideological hold it and its trade unions had over the working class, had defeated the revolution and saved German capitalism.

However, within the class there was also a process of radicalization. Large numbers of workers, recognizing the counter-revolutionary role of the SPD and the unions, and having fought SPD troops and police on the streets, rejected the parliamentary system and left the unions. As an alternative they formed factory organizations to provide a means for united proletarian action, and to be ready for the re-formation of revolutionary council power. While the majority of the KPD, including the rank and file Spartacists, supported these developments, the Spartacist leadership still wanted to participate in elections and the trade unions. In mid-1919, by a series of bureaucratic maneuvers they managed to exclude the majority from the party. The Bolsheviks essentially sided with this rump leadership. The basis of the split between the German communist left and the Bolsheviks was prepared.

In March/April 1920 the split in the KPD was to become permanent. At this time the freicorps that the SPD had used to crush the revolution, turned on their masters and launched a coup: the Kapp putsch. The trade unions called a general strike, which the working class responded to solidly, bringing the country to a stop. The coup collapsed, but workers were now mobilized across the country. In the revolutionary stronghold of the Ruhr the workers had formed a 80,000 strong Red Army that refused to disarm. Although having been saved by this revolutionary upsurge, the SPD saw their role as the same as it had been a year previously, namely to make sure than the struggles did not develop into full scale revolution. Only this time, they did not have the same working class credibility that had previously allowed them to control the situation. Faced by this, they chose a dual strategy: to reestablish their socialist credibility they talked of forming a government composed only of workers parties, whilst at the same time sending in their — now loyal once more — troops to attack and disarm the Ruhr.

The two sides of German ‘communism’ reacted totally differently to these events. The excluded majority of the party put themselves with the working class reaction from the beginning and supported the Red Army in the Ruhr when the SPD troops attacked it. The rump leadership of the KPD, while it had initially said it would not ‘lift a finger’ for the SPD government, quickly changed its position to total support. It offered itself a ‘loyal opposition’ to the proposed ‘workers government’, and called on the armed workers to not to resist the SPD troops. Thus the revolutionary potential of the situation was defeated by social democracy with the support of the Moscow supported KPD, who claimed to be a revolutionary break from social democracy. The left communist side of the KPD, feeling no rapprochement was possible with a group that had tacitly supported the violent suppression of the class, formed itself as the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), orientated totally towards the councils. The question is of course how these lessons affected their view of the Russian Revolution.

The German Left and the Comintern

For these revolutionaries the history of the German workers movement had shown the fundamental opposition between the methods of social democracy and revolution. It had seemed to them that ‘Bolshevik principles’ such as the suppression of bourgeois democracy and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat through workers councils, were key to overcoming the opportunism of the SPD and winning the revolution in Germany. It was in this sense that ‘Bolshevism’ had helped their break from Social Democracy. The fact that the line coming out of Moscow seemed to favor some of the social democratic elements the left communists were breaking from, was merely seen as being based on their unfamiliarity with the West European situation. They thought the Bolsheviks were falsely generalizing from the Russian situation, in which the use of parliamentary methods etc. might have been necessary, to the west European situation where the break with parliamentary practices, and the emphasis on councilism was essential for the revolution to succeed. Even when Lenin launched Left-Wing Communism — An Infantile Disorder a vicious polemic against them and in support of the KPD line, they still thought it was a matter of Lenin not understanding the conditions for revolution in the West. Even when [Otto] Ruhle, their delegate to the Second Congress of the Comintern, returned arguing that Russia was ‘soviet’ only in name, the majority opposed his view. However, Ruhle’s councilist argument that what Russia showed was that party-rule was a bourgeois form, that ‘revolution was not a party affair’, but a matter of councils and unitary factory organizations only, was later to become the dominant position of the remains of the German Left.

However, at this time, it was only when the Comintern adopted a line of a ‘united front’, and ordered the KAPD to liquidate and re-join the KPD, which had by then merged with left social democrats, did they start to rethink their position. By late 1921 — as a result of hearing about the NEP, the suppression of strikes, as well as Russia’s willingness to make commercial and military treaties with capitalist powers — they decided that the Bolsheviks and the Comintern had left the field of revolution. They began to consider that there might have been internal conditions forcing the counter revolutionary policies abroad. The White counter-revolution had failed, yet Russia was acting in a capitalist way both at home and abroad. What was the explanation for this?

The specter of Menshevism: October, a bourgeois revolution?

In 1917, when the German Social Democrats had supported the Menshevik line that Russia was only ready for a bourgeois revolution, the German Left had welcomed October as the first crack in bourgeois power — the start of world revolution. Now with it appearing that the Bolsheviks were retreating from the proletarian socialist path, the German Left started a move back to orthodoxy. Starting with a revised notion that October was a dual revolution, they were to end by deciding it was a bourgeois revolution through and through. Key to their understanding was the perceived dominance of the peasants in Russia.

This first manifested itself when, in the Manifesto of the International they tried to set up as a revolutionary alternative to the Comintern, they not only qualified their previous view of the socialist character of the revolution by going for a notion of dual revolution, but drew the further conclusion that the end result had not been socialism, but state capitalism. As Gorter put it, “in the large towns it was a change from capitalism to socialism, in the country districts a change from feudalism to capitalism. In the large towns the proletarian revolution came to pass: in the country the bourgeois revolution.“[84] The reference to the passing of the socialist side of the revolution was a reference to how, as they argued, the NEP had not merely been a ‘concession’ to the peasantry, as the Bolsheviks talked of it, but had been a complete capitulation to the peasant — for them, bourgeois — side of the revolution. The effect was that the proletarian side of the revolution had been sacrificed, and what had been put in its place was instead a form of state capitalism.

Back to Luxemburg?

It was the central, if implicit, role of the Agrarian Question and the Internationalist perspective was to play in their theories that led them to return, ironically to Luxemburg. In 1918 she wrote a text — The Russian Revolution — in which, while declaring solidarity with the Bolsheviks, she made some deep criticisms of their actions in Russia, nearly all of which the German Left were to take up as their own. Written before the German Revolution, her condemnation of the Bolsheviks was, however, secondary to her condemnation of the passivity of the German Social Democrats for not following their revolutionary example. She had no time for the Menshevik line echoed by the Social Democrats in Germany that Russia was only ready for a bourgeois revolution. Instead she insisted that the problems of the Russian Revolution were “a product of international developments plus the Agrarian Question’ which ‘cannot possibly be solved within the limits of bourgeois society’ and thus that the fate of the revolution depended on the international proletariat, especially the German proletariat without which aid the Russian Revolution could not fail to become distorted, becoming ‘tangled in a maze of contradictions and blunders.’ (p. 29) The German Left — not guilty like the Social Democrats of betraying the Russian revolution — could see itself as theoretically untangling these contradictions and blunders which the failure of world revolution had led the Russian Revolution into.

The blunders Luxemburg criticized the Bolsheviks for were: their line on national self determination; their suppression of the constituent assembly and voting; their tendency towards a Jacobin Party dictatorship rather than a real dictatorship of the proletariat involving the masses; and their land policy which she said would create ‘a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.” [p 46] Giving this last point decisive importance, the German Left supported all of Luxemburg criticisms except for her position on the Constituent Assembly.

In fact the importance they attached to this last point became even clearer when Gorter, in drawing upon Luxemburg’s assessment of the party dictatorship, nevertheless put a different slant on it. This came out when in The International Workers Revolution,[85] started by quoting her statement: “Yes: dictatorship... but this dictatorship must be of the work of the class and not that of a leading minority in the name of the class: that is to say, it must, step by step, arise from the active participation of the class, remain under its direct influence, and be subordinated to the control of publicity and be the outcome of the political experience of the whole people.” In other words, Gorter agreed with Luxemburg that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not the undemocratic dictatorship of the party, but rather the quite democratic dictatorship of the whole class. However he added that what she ‘did not understand’ was ‘that all this could not happen in Russia; that no class dictatorship was possible there, because the proletariat was too small and the peasantry too mighty.’ This orientation to the need for a majority proletariat had thus taken him to question the possibility of socialist revolution in Russia.

Gorter moved to the view that the bourgeois measures the Bolsheviks had made were being forced by Russia’s backwardness. He argued that the minority status of the proletariat in Russia had forced a ‘party dictatorship’, and stated that despite not being organized, the ‘elementary power’ of the peasantry ‘forced the Bolsheviks — even men like Lenin — to stand against the class from which it had sprung, and which was inimical to the peasantry.’ But what he did criticize the Bolsheviks for, however, was their program and the action they had prescribed to the proletariat in advanced countries, which had blocked the world revolution, and hence made the building up of world capitalism possible. It was only because of the latter that the bourgeois measures in Russia had become unredeemable.

Ruhle was to go even further than Gorter in this fatalistic direction. Going away from Gorter’s notion of a dual revolution, he argued that the revolution had been bourgeois from the start. He grounded this view on what he called ‘the phaseological development as advocated by Marx, that after feudal czarism in Russia there had to come the capitalist bourgeois state, whose creator and representative was the bourgeois class.’[86] So considering the historical circumstances, the Russian Revolution could only have been a bourgeois revolution. Its role was to get rid of czarism, to smooth the way for capitalism, and to help the bourgeoisie into the saddle politically. It was in this context that the Bolsheviks, regardless of the subjective intentions, ultimately had to bow for the historical forces at play. And their attempt to leap a stage of development had not only showed how they had forgotten the ‘ABC of Marxist knowledge’ that socialism could only come from mature capitalism, but was also based ‘the vague hope of world revolution’ that Ruhle now characterized as unjustified ‘rashness.’

But whilst this move to a semi-Menshevik position was indeed a move back to the exact same position they had previously criticized the Social Democrats for having, it also had its merits. Where the earlier German Left focus on the New Course and NEP as a reversion to capitalism had the deeply unpleasant implications that both war communism and Stalin’s ‘left turn’ was a return to socialism, the rigidly schematic position of Ruhle’s theory allowed him to question the measures of nationalization used in both these periods:

‘nationalization is not socialization. Through nationalization you can arrive at a large scale, tightly run state capitalism, which may exhibit various advantages as against private capitalism. Only it is still capitalism. and however you twist and turn, it gives no way of escape from the constraint of bourgeois politics’.

It was Ruhle’s semi-Menshevik and fatalistic interpretation of Russia that, like his full blown councilism, was at first resisted, but then largely accepted by the German Left. This came out in what was its closest to a definitive statement on the Russian question: the Theses on Bolshevism.[87]

Theses on Bolshevism

The position the German Left was arriving at, and which came out in their Theses, was that the class and production conditions in Russia, first forced the dictatorship to be a party rather than class one, and second forced that party dictatorship to be a bourgeois capitalist one. But where this general idea, in Ruhle, had been solely confined to describing the historical forces that were at play behind the backs of the Bolsheviks, and regardless of their subjective intentions, in the Theses it took a more conspiratorial form. The Bolsheviks had not merely been forced into a position of unwittingly carrying out a bourgeois revolution, but had done so intentionally. From the very start they had been a ‘jacobinal’ organization of the ‘revolutionary petty bourgeoisie’, who had been faced with a bourgeoisie that neither had the collective will nor strength to carry out a bourgeois revolution. So by manipulating the proletarian elements of society, they had been able to carry out a bourgeois revolution against the bourgeoisie. Consequently, ‘the task of the Russian Revolution [had been] to destroy the remnants of feudalism, industrialize agriculture, and create a large class of free laborers’. But despite this rather conspiratorial element of the theory of the German Left, they escaped arguing that if the revolutionary proletariat had just realized the true nature of the Bolsheviks, they could have avoided the fate that was awaiting them. Rather, the fact that the Bolsheviks had taken the form of a revolutionary bourgeoisie was precisely because of the backwardness of Russia, and the consequent development had been inevitable.

It was this notion of the Bolsheviks taking the role of the bourgeoisie that allowed them, like Ruhle had done, to avoid seeing Stalin’s ‘left turn’ as a step in the right direction, and instead they saw it as an attempt by the Soviet state to master the contradictory tension of the two forces it had been riding: a ‘bolshevistic, bureaucratically conducted state economy’ based on a regimented terrorized proletariat, and the peasant economy which ‘conceals in its ranks the private capitalist tendencies’ of the economy. [p57] Or in other words, not as with Trotsky’s Left Opposition, a tension between the socialist and capitalist sectors, but between the state capitalist and petty capitalist sides of the economy.

So like the Russian left communist current, the German Left was to end up characterizing Russia as state capitalist, or as they called it ‘state production with capitalist methods.’ Whilst the commanding heights of the economy were bureaucratically conducted by the Bolshevik state, the underlying character was essentially capitalist. This they grounded by arguing that ‘it rests on the foundation of commodity production, it is conducted according to the viewpoint of capitalist profitability; it reveals a decidedly capitalist system of wages and speedup; it has carried the refinements of capitalist rationalization to the utmost limits.’ Furthermore, the state form of production, they argued, was still based on squeezing surplus value out of the workers; the only difference being that, rather than a class of people individually and directly pocketing the surplus value, it was taken by the ‘bureaucratic, parasitical apparatus as a whole’ and used for reinvestment, their own consumption, and to support the peasants.

These arguments were a statement of the classic state capitalist case: Russia was capitalist because all the categories of capitalism continued to exist only with the state appropriating the surplus value and the bureaucrats playing the role of capitalists. And in keeping with the notion of state capitalism postulated by Marx and Engels, they ended up grasping it as a higher stage of capitalism. As they argued, ‘The Russian state economy is therefore profit production and exploitation economy. It is state capitalism under the historically unique conditions of the Bolshevik regime, and accordingly represents a different and more advanced type of capitalist production than even the greatest and most advanced countries have to show.’[58–59]

However, the problems with grounding the accusation of state capitalism on the basis that all the capitalist categories continued to exist soon became apparent. To say that production was oriented to capitalist profitability seemed questionable when the immediate aim seemed to be the production of use-values, particularly of means of production with no concern for the immediate profitability of the enterprise. Also to say that goods were produced as commodities when it was the state direction rather than their exchange value which seemed to determine what and how many goods were produced, also required more argument. While the state unquestionably seemed to be extracting and allocating surplus products based on exploitation of surplus labor, to say that it took the form of surplus value seemed precisely a point of contention. It was these apparent differences between Russian and western capitalism that led them to use the terms ‘state capitalism’ and ‘state socialism’ interchangeably. And it was these theoretical problems of the German Left that Mattick was later to try and solve. However, the main direction of German Left theoretical effort in relation to the Russia question was not to analyze the system in the USSR, but to build alternative models of transition to the statist one they identified as responsible for the Russian disaster. On the one hand, they were tempted by a mathematical model of labor accounting that was supposed to overcome money and value,[88] on the other, they made elaborate plans of how workers councils could run society instead of the a party-state.[89]

Mattick: Its capitalism, Jim, but not as we know it

Seeing his role as one of continuing the German council communist tradition, and preserving its insights, Mattick first made explicit what had been implicit in their assessment of Bolshevik policies.[90] Recognizing that Leninism was merely a variant of Kautskyist social democracy, he made it clear that the Bolshevik conception of socialism was from the start very different from, and in opposition to, the one coming out of the councilist left. The reality of what Russia turned out to be was not merely a reflection of the particular historical circumstances it was faced with, but was embedded in the very ideology of the Bolsheviks. This essentially Second International ideology had seen the fundamental contradiction of capitalism as consisting in it being, on the one hand, an anarchic system in which the law of value regulated the market ‘behind people’s back’ and, on the other hand, having a tendency towards the socialization of the productive forces, and the development of more and more centralized planning and control. Socialism was thus seen as the rational solution to this anarchy through the appropriation, by a workers party, of the planning and centralization that capitalism was itself developing.

Mattick, following the councilist tradition, saw this statist vision as having entirely lost the perspective of socialism as the abolition, by the workers themselves, of their separation from the means of production; of the abolition of the capital/labor relation and their consequent ability to control the conditions of life — to establish a society based on the free association of producers, as Marx had called it. It was this perspective that allowed him, like previous left communists, to say that the Bolsheviks, by taking the means of production into the hands of the state, had not achieved socialization, but only the ‘nationalization of capital as capital’ ownership by government rather than private capitalists. It was in this way that he, against Trotsky and Stalin, could make the obvious point that the means of production were not controlled by society as a whole, but still existed vis a vis the workers as alien capital, and as such Russia had not abolished the capital/labor relation fundamental to capitalism. However, while this point was important, it was not enough proof in Marxian terms of the existence of capitalism. The questions remained: how did the system operate?, what was its drive or regulating principles?, what laws governed it? And on these questions he was orthodox enough a Marxist to accept that complete statification of the means of production was a modification of capitalism with serious implications for the validity of fundamental value categories.

Specifically the problem consisted in to what extent the law of value still governed the economy in Russia. As Marx had argued, one of the main defining characteristics of capitalism is that the market is governed by the law of value. This means that instead of having a system in which production is consciously planned so as to meet people’s needs, we have a system in which these needs are only meet indirectly through the exchange of commodities on the market. And the only regulatory principle on the market is that of supply and demand. Against the previous left communist tendency to classify Russia as state capitalist without trying to ground it in the categories of value, Mattick even made the further point that “to speak of the law of value as the ‘regulator’ of the economy in the absence of specifically capitalist market relations can only mean that the terms ‘value’ and ‘surplus value’ are retained, though they express no more than a relation between labor and surplus labor.” [p321] The problem for Mattick was of course that, considering he took Russia at face value and thought it was a genuinely planned system, it became difficult to at the same time call it capitalist. Considering that the market would no longer be run along the lines of indirect forms of commodity exchange governed by the law of value, but would be directly planned according to need, it would be problematic to say that the law of value existed at all.

Ultimately, this led Mattick to concede that state capitalism in Russia lacked what was a defining feature of capitalism, namely the law of value. No longer having this option open to him, Mattick reverted back to his previous reasons for calling Russia capitalist, coupled with the vague point that it was ‘a system of exploitation based on the direct control of a ruling minority over the ruled majority.’[p321]. But while he still insisted on the continuity of exploitative social relations, the fact that Mattick thought that the law of value had ceased to exist, led him to affirm the argument of the previous German Left that Russia was an advanced form of capitalism. This even to the extent that it had overcome some of the main problems of private-property capitalism, namely competition, crises and, as a result of the consequent stability, to some extent class antagonisms.

The notion that Russia could not have a problem with crisis sounds ironic today. There is also the further irony that while the main point of Mattick’s book — on which it succeeded pretty well — was to attack the view, so prevalent in the postwar boom, that Keynesianism had resolved capitalism’s crisis tendency. But a more pressing problem with his theory of Russia lies exactly with what he set out to prove, namely that Russia, despite its apparent differences from western capitalism was still capitalist in Marx’s terms. Although trying to say that what he was describing was just a change in the form of capitalism, from ‘market’ to ‘state-planned’, this was open to the objection that value relations such as those that occur through the market are not incidental — they are of the very essence of the capital relation. And although Mattick rightly pointed to the fact that Russia was still based on the exploitation of the majority by the minority, one could easily argue that the defining point about capitalism is exactly that this exploitation occurs through the indirect form of commodity exchange with all its mystifications. Indeed, it could be argued that Mattick virtually implied that Russia was a non-capitalist form of exploitation that used capitalist forms to cover up the arbitrary nature of its exploitation. It is in the light of the major concessions to the differences between the state system and normal capitalism Mattick was willing to make, that critics would be justified in doubting the validity of the term at all. Hence instead of solving the problems of the theory of the German Left, that led them to use the terms ‘state capitalist’ and ‘state socialist’ interchangeably, he merely exposed them.

In a 1991 interview, his son Paul Mattick (Jnr) speculated that the collapse of the USSR might have indicated that his father was wrong and:

whether it wasn’t a mistake of all the people, members of this ultra-left current, among whom I would include myself, to think of the Bolshevik form, the centralized, state controlled economy, as a new form, which we should think of as coming after capitalism, as representing, say, a logical end point of the tendency to monopolization and centralization of capital, which is a feature of all private property capitalist systems. Instead, it seems to really have been a kind of preparation for capitalist, development, a pre-capitalist form, if you want. ’

This is exactly what the leading thinker of the Italian Left had argued.