Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD)
독일 공산주의 노동자당 (KAPD)
A left-communist party founded in Berlin on 4–5 April 1920 by the left wing of the Communist Party of Germany that Paul Levi's leadership had expelled at the Heidelberg congress of October 1919. Aiming at a dictatorship of the proletariat, it rejected one-party dictatorship on the Russian model and democratic centralism, refused participation in parliamentary elections and work in reformist trade unions, and allied instead with the factory-based General Workers' Union (AAUD). The Dutch theorists Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter were its leading thinkers, and it was the main target of Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. It was a sympathising member of the Comintern in 1920–1921.
In depth
From the Heidelberg expulsions to the Kapp Putsch
The Communist Party of Germany had been divided over elections and trade unions since its founding congress (December 1918 to January 1919). At the Heidelberg congress of October 1919 the central leadership under Paul Levi affirmed parliamentary activity and work in the existing unions as principles and drove out the left wing that rejected them. Many of those expelled had been active in the International Communists of Germany (IKD) before the KPD was founded.
The break was decided by the Kapp Putsch of March 1920. In the left's view the KPD leadership had changed its position on the general strike several times and, by agreeing to the disarmament of the Ruhr Red Army in the Bielefeld Agreement of 24 March, had given up the revolutionary fight. The Berlin district group called a congress of the left opposition for 3 April, which decided to constitute the Communist Workers' Party of Germany. The delegates were estimated to represent 80,000 KPD members. Its strongholds were Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen and East Saxony.
Anti-parliamentarism and factory organisations
The party aimed at the immediate abolition of bourgeois democracy and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, but rejected the dictatorship of a single party on the Russian model. Unlike the KPD it rejected the Leninist organisational principle of democratic centralism, participation in elections and work inside reformist unions, and worked closely instead with the General Workers' Union of Germany (AAUD), which combined organisations formed in each factory. The party was to carry out revolutionary propaganda and political education, while the factory organisations would be the fighting organisations of the masses.
The Dutch Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter played an important role in its theory and founded a Communist Workers' Party of the Netherlands (KAPN) on its model. In "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written in April and May 1920, Lenin attacked the German opposition's slogan "dictatorship of the leaders or dictatorship of the masses", its call to leave the unions and its rejection of parliament; that summer Gorter defended the party in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin.
Relations with the Comintern and splits
The KAPD was a sympathising (co-opted) member of the Comintern in 1920–1921. In August 1920 it expelled the Hamburg founders Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, who had advocated National Bolshevism, and two months later Otto Rühle as well. When troops entered the industrial region of central Germany in March 1921, it joined the KPD in the March Action. At the end of 1921 Rühle, Franz Pfemfert and others broke away from the AAUD to form the unitary AAUE.
The party still had over 43,000 members in 1921 but declined thereafter. In 1922 it split into the Essen tendency (Karl Schröder and others), which rejected taking part in everyday factory struggles, and the Berlin tendency. The Essen tendency founded the Communist Workers' International (KAI) with Gorter's Dutch group, Sylvia Pankhurst's British group and others, but it had fallen apart by 1925. The larger and longer-lived Berlin tendency merged into the Communist Workers' Union (KAUD) in the early 1930s. Members included the writer Franz Jung, the artist Heinrich Vogeler, and Paul Mattick and Jan Appel, later theorists of council communism.