Revolutionaries (9 page)

The problem arising out of the instability of the leadership is twofold: why was the turnover so large?
⁵
And why did it lead – as I think most observers must agree – to a progressive lowering of quality? The line from Liebknecht and Luxemburg, through Levi and Meyer, Brandler and Thalheimer, Ruth Fischer and Maslow, to Thaelmann and his group is a distinctly descending one in terms of general political ability, though not in courage and devotion. This is not by any means the case in all other communist parties.

What seems to have happened is that the
KPD
never succeeded in developing a coherent body of leaders out of Spartacus (whose surviving cadres, after the shedding of quasi-syndicalist elements, tended to be ‘right' deviationists), the ex-Independent Socialists (who tended to breed ‘left' deviationists), and the post-1920 entrants into the party. The struggle for the formation of a leading group continued until it was merged with ‘bolshevization' by Moscow; and in this struggle the ablest in all groups tended to be eliminated for their prominence, or were unable to establish themselves as leaders of independent standing in the
KPD
before being reduced to
Comintern functionaries.
⁶
This is perhaps the real tragedy of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Spartacus provided what the German left lacked: a potentially coherent and flexible approach to German politics, which did not confuse revolutionism with leftism. If Rosa Luxemburg was not likely to provide an alternative to Lenin internationally, within her own country her prestige might have imposed the Spartacus approach on the new party. It might have provided that party with a nucleus of political leadership and strategy.

For at bottom this was the drama of the
KPD:
it had no policy for any situation other than one of revolution, because the German left, one might almost say the German labour movement, had never had one. The
SPD
did not practise politics, but merely waited (in theory) until historic inevitability brought it an electoral majority and hence ‘the revolution', while concealing (in practice) a subaltern acceptance of the
status quo
by providing its members with a large collective private world. The German left had spent its time criticizing the
de facto
abandonment of revolutionary or any working-class struggle by the
SPD
, but had little chance to develop more than a few buds of an alternative policy, which never bore fruit. The German
CP
settled down to the same attitude as the old
SPD
, except for its genuinely revolutionary temper: to mobilize, to confront and to wait. It had not time – though quite a few of the early
KPD
leaders might have had the capacity – to develop a revolutionary politics; in other words, at the least, something political to do when there were no actual barricades to be put up. It lacked that tradition of participation in a going system of radical, or even bourgeois-reformist, politics, which, with all its dangers,
provided the proletarian left of other countries with strategic or tactical models for non-insurrectionary periods. When the French
CP
, ‘bolshevized' in every sense, including a fair proportion of its leaders, confronted a problem like fascism, it would automatically think of falling back on a familiar political device, the temporary bloc of the left or the ‘people', in defence of the Republic. In fact there are signs that even during the most insanely sectarian phase of 1928–33, these were the reflexes of
PCF
leaders, though they were still stifled by the Comintern. It was not that someone like Maurice Thorez was less of a good bolshevik than Thaelmann, or even that he was brighter – though he was; but that there was a French tradition of proletarian
political action
, whereas in Germany there was not. There they bred fighters of unparalleled bravery and loyalty and remarkable organizers, but not revolutionary politicians.

Hence the
KPD
not merely failed in the crucial period of Hitler's rise to power – the prevailing policy in Moscow would have made it almost impossible to succeed even if, what is more than doubtful, the German
SPD
would have tolerated a common resistance to fascism. It did not even realize that it was failing, until long after it was too late, let alone how catastrophically and irrevocably it had failed. And so it went down to total and final defeat. For the test of its failure lies not in Hitler's victory, nor even in the rapid, brutal and effective destruction of the party which was the most persistent, the bravest, in a sense the
only
active force of opposition under the Nazi dictatorship.
It lies in the failure of the KPD to revive after 1945
, except in the Russian-occupied zone, where political conditions eliminated its potential rivals.
⁷
When Hitler had been defeated, the old
SPD
, which
had done nothing to prevent his rise and had virtually liquidated itself peacefully after his triumph, revived as the major mass party of the West German working class. The
KPD
still polled about 6 per cent (1.4 million votes) in 1949, compared to the
SPD'S
30 per cent, but by 1953 it was down to 2.2 per cent (0.6 million votes) compared to the
SPD'S
29 per cent, and there is no reason to believe that it would have done all that much better, had it not been formally banned by the federal republic. In a word, after 1945 it lived on rapidly wasting assets. It had failed during the Weimar Republic to establish itself as a permanent factor in the German working-class movement.

Its failure contrasts not only with its striking mass influence in the Weimar days, but also with the record of other – generally smaller –
CP'S
in countries where the anti-Russian reflex might have been expected to weaken them. In Austria, for instance, the Communists continued to poll a steady 5.5 per cent in the first ten postwar years (their support before 1938 had been negligible). In Finland, they never polled less than 20 per cent (perhaps double their interwar score). Both these countries had fought wars against the
USSR
, or lost territory, or been partly occupied by the Red army. Almost everywhere in Europe the
CPS
emerged from the period of anti-fascism stronger, and – at least for a time – more deeply rooted in their national working classes than before. In Germany, Hitler had eliminated them as a mass movement.

Yet one cannot conclude the tragic survey of the Weimar
KPD
entirely on this gloomy note. For it did, after all, achieve what the
KPD
set out to achieve – a German Socialist Republic, and the fact that this came into existence through the Red army rather than through the efforts of the German movement, would have been perfectly acceptable to the Weimar communists. The German Democratic Republic must be entered on the balance sheet as much as the decisive defeat in the western part of the country. For that republic, which can only be criticized if we also acknowledge
its remarkable achievements in very difficult circumstances,
⁸
is indeed the child of the
KPD
. To this extent the critique of the party must be qualified. After all, how many other communist parties have succeeded in actually building new societies? Yet who ever doubted that, if someone ever handed power to them on a plate, the great body of upright, brave, loyal, devoted, able and efficient functionaries and executives who returned from exile and from the concentration camps to do their duty as communists, would do a competent job?

How left-wing parties behave when they are given power is not an insignificant test: social democratic ones have failed it with great regularity, starting with the German
SPD
in 1918. But communist parties have always known that they would pass it. The German
KPD
, however, failed other tests, by which revolutionary movements must also be judged. Unlike the French and Italian
CPS
, it failed to become an integral part of its working-class movement, though it had excellent chances of doing so. Its political history proved as impermanent as the Weimar Republic. It failed to develop any policy for operating under conditions of even a temporarily stabilized capitalism, and for this reason it went down before Hitler with the rest of the Weimar Republic. This failure reflected a more general difficulty which faced all the communist parties or indeed all revolutionary socialists in developed industrial countries: how to envisage a transition to socialism in conditions other than the historically exceptional ones of the years after 1917. Yet while the development of other
CPS
shows some attempt to come to terms with this problem (in so far as they were not prevented by outside influence), that of the
KPD
does not While it was a mass
force, it did one thing: it held the red flag high. Its worst enemies cannot accuse it of any compromise with reformism, any tendency to allow itself to be absorbed by the system. But confrontation is no policy. In a period of crisis, as in 1929–33, it might attract growing support from those who had nothing to lose – by the spring of 1932, 85 per cent of the party membership was unemployed – but numerical support is not necessarily strength. The 2,500 or so members of the
PCI
, at the very same time, represented a more serious force than the 300,000 German communists, the 6,000,000
KPD
voters.

The history of the
KPD
is tragic. The great hope of the world in 1919, the only significant mass communist party in the west in 1932, it is little more than an episode in the history of Western Germany. Perhaps it failed for German reasons: because of the inability of the German left to overcome the historic weaknesses of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat of that great and ambiguous country. But other possibilities for its development can be envisaged, without excessive unrealism. At all events Dr Weber provides us with a wealth of material for assessing a crucial case of failure in the history of the left. Others may perhaps learn from this failure. They should read him with care, and not without compassion.

¹
Hermann Weber,
Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus (2
vols.), Frankfurt, 1970.

²
At this time the average age of the
SPD
leadership was fifty-six.

³
See Weber, vol. I, p. 301.

⁴
According to an informant of Tasca, quoted in Spriano,
Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano
, vol. 2, p. 228.

⁵
In the absence of comparably detailed calculations for other
CPS
it is impossible to be certain, but it does seem that their turnover was smaller. Thus in 1929 only two members of the
KPD'S
political bureau had survived from 1924 – Thaelmann and Remmele, of whom the latter was subsequently eliminated. In France five political bureau members sat continuously from 1926 to 1932, and another discontinuously, while three – but for Semard's death, quite certainly four – were still members in 1945.

⁶
A case in point may be the late Gerhart Eisler, whose policy as a Weimar leader combined unconditional loyalty to the
USSR
with opposition to local ultra-leftism. He was actually instrumental at one point in securing a temporary suspension of Thaelmann from the leadership, and subsequently disappeared into Comintern international service, until his return – in various secondary functions – to the German Democratic Republic.

⁷
The argument that the
KPD
under Weimar had its greatest bastions in what is now the
DDR
, is not convincing. In actual fact, the greatest preponderance of
KPD
over
SPD
voters in 1932 was to be found in the Rhine-Ruhr area, where the party had about twice as much support as its rival.

⁸
Two of these achievements are worth noting: the genuine settling of accounts with the Nazi past of the German people, and the quiet refusal to join, except in the most marginal way, in the show trials, victimizations and executions of communists which disfigured the other east European regimes in the late Stalin period.

It is not surprising that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War should have been followed by a new look at the history both of the
USSR
, the states of what had been known as ‘really existing socialism' and the international movement of Communist Parties. For one thing, a vast supply of sources for a documented and realistic history in these fields now became accessible for the first time. Somewhat paradoxically – for not even the intelligence services of the ‘free world' could any longer discern a ‘communist danger' nationally or internationally – some of this literature took the form of an impassioned polemic against those misled into Communist Parties, as so many of the authors of such works had themselves been, especially in France. François Furet's
The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century
¹
is probably the most influential text of this kind, both because of the author's prestige as a historian, because of his position in the intellectual and media life of his country, and as a standard-bearer of the ideology of free market liberalism. My observations about it are not directed only against his book, which has not survived the years since its publication too well, but against the history that insists on continuing, or reviving, the ideology of the twentieth-century Wars of Religion.

It may be simplest to begin with the two aspects of Furet's argument which have aroused most interest: the comparison between fascism and communism, and the role of ‘anti-fascism' in communist propaganda.