Gorter, the Kapd and the Foundation of the Communist Workers’ International (1921–7)
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chapter 5 Gorter, the kapd and the Foundation of the Communist Workers’ International (1921–7) In January 1921, the recognition of the kapd as a ‘sympathiser-party’ of the Third International with a ‘permanent representative on the Executive’,1 seemed to be a victory for the policy of opposition carried out by Gorter and Pannekoek. It was beginning to be possible for the Comintern and left- communism to work in common. At least that is how it seemed, reading Zinoviev, when he wrote in the name of the Executive Committee: The core of the kapd contains some genuinely revolutionary workers. This party has taken a great step towards communism recently by exclud- ing Laufenberg, Wolffheim and Otto Rühle from its ranks. The kapd criti- cises our German comrades. This is no misfortune. The kpd is not in any 1 The representative of the kapd was Arthur Goldstein (pseudonym: Stahl). Born in Lipine (Silesia) on 18 March 1887, he was a journalist with a doctorate in law. A member of the spd in 1914, he joined the uspd in 1917. In opposition in the kpd in 1919, he was a founding member of the kapd. Within the latter he led a stubborn battle against national Bolshevism, and wrote a pamphlet against it: see Goldstein 1920. A delegate on the Comintern’s Executive from November 1920 until the end of March 1921, he returned to Germany to edit the kap organ in the Ruhr, Klassenkampf. He was part of the Schröder clan, and through this was a member of the kai Bureau of Information, before the split of March 1922. After this, he rapidly became a collaborator of Paul Levi and of the periodical Unser Weg. Levi had him enter the spd ‘to form an opposition’. At the end of the 1920s, he formed the clandestine Rote Kämpfer group together with Schröder, Reichenbach, and Schwab, who left the kapd claiming to take up its original positions. He was exiled to France after 1933, where he tried to form an organisation of the rk. He may have been the co-author, using the pseudonym A. Lehmann, of the article ‘The Communist Workers’ Groups’, and of ‘The economic, social and political causes of fascism’ (Masses, No. 11, Paris, November 1933). In Paris he had close relationship with the Trotskyist ikd group (‘Unser Wort’), to which he adhered in 1933. He left one year later together with Erwin Ackerknecht (1906–1988) and Paul Kirchoff, rejecting the entryism in the social democracy advocated by Leon Trotsky in his essays on The French Turn in June 1934. He was captured by the Gestapo around June 1943. Deported with transport 55 from Drancy Camp (near Paris) to Auschwitz Birkenau Lager on 23/06/1943, he was assassinated on 25/06/1943. (See: Peter Berens, Trotzkisten gegen Hitler, isp, Köln 2007, p. 199; and http:// www.yadvashem.org/). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004325937_007 gorter, the kapd and the foundation of the kai 227 case immune from errors: we only need to remember its attitude during the Kapp Putsch and during the last insurrection of the Berlin electricians …2 The joint work between the left-communists and the Comintern was of short duration. It did not survive the 1921 March Action in Central Germany. The international environment was becoming more and more unfavourable, not only with the very clear retreat of the world-revolution, but, above all, in rela- tion to the politics of the Russian state. The foreign policy of this state, the events at Kronstadt and, finally, the politics of the Comintern in Germany were to be signposts towards the final break that happened at the Third Congress of the Comintern. Preceded by the expulsion of the minority from the cph, even before the Third Congress, the expulsion of the kapd in September 1921 soun- ded the death-knell of an international opposition in the Comintern. However, it was the Dutch communist left that took the lead of the international oppo- sition even outside the International. Under the guidance of Gorter, but not of Pannekoek, a Communist Workers’ International (kai) was formed. But this ultimately became an adventure without any future. It could only precipitate the decline in the communist-left tendency in the Netherlands, as in Germany, before the rise, at the end of the 1920s, of the Group of Communist Internation- alists (gic). As the centre of gravity of the Dutch current moved to Germany, and even to Britain and Bulgaria, the Netherlands became the theoretical and political centre of the international left-communist movement. 1 The Retreat of the World-Revolution – The 1921 ‘Kronstadt Tragedy’ and the March Action The nep (New Economic Policy) in the economic sphere, applied in Russia after March 1921, was preceded by a diplomatic nep on the part of the Rus- sian state. It sought to make alliances with various capitalist states. Through the mediation of Karl Radek, imprisoned in Germany, from autumn 1919 contacts were made with the Reichswehr and its generals,3 but also with the millionaire Walther Rathenau, with the aim of investigating the possibility of a military 2 Letter from the Executive Committee of 15 January 1921, published in Die Aktion, No. 13–14, Berlin, April 1921. 3 See Carr 1952..