Left communism
좌익 공산주의
Left communism, or the communist left, groups the currents that supported the October Revolution but criticised the tactics and organisation of the Bolsheviks and the Comintern from the left. Distinct from around 1918, it has two main traditions: the Dutch–German left of Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter and Otto Rühle, and the Italian left of Amadeo Bordiga. They shared the demand for a party or workers' councils wholly separate from reformists and centrists, rejection or strict limitation of electoral participation, and opposition to popular fronts and national liberation movements. In 1920 Lenin attacked their anti-parliamentarism and refusal of trade-union work in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. The 1918 Russian Left Communist faction and council communism are narrower notions that overlap with it.
In depth
Definition and two traditions
Left communism describes a range of positions held by the left wing of communism that criticise the political ideas and practice of Marxist–Leninists, Trotskyists and social democrats. Left communists regarded their positions as more authentically Marxist than the Marxism–Leninism espoused by the Comintern after its Second Congress and after its "Bolshevisation" under Stalin. Since the First World War there have been two primary currents, the Italian left and the Dutch–German left. Both opposed popular fronts, many kinds of nationalism and national liberation movements, and parliamentarianism. Rosa Luxemburg was murdered in 1919, before left communism became a distinct tendency, but she strongly influenced most left communists politically and theoretically.
Since Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism the term has also been used by orthodox communist parties as a critical label for rivals on their left. Italian accounts summarise Lenin's characterisation of the current as a politics of purity, the doctrinaire repetition of the "truths" of pure communism.
Formation: Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain
Left communism came into focus as a distinct movement around 1918. Its common features were the need for a communist party or workers' councils entirely separate from reformist and centrist elements, opposition to all but the most restricted participation in elections, and an emphasis on militancy.
In Germany the left wing of the KPD, expelled by the party leadership under Paul Levi at the Heidelberg congress of October 1919, founded the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) in April 1920. Unlike the KPD it rejected the Leninist organisational form of democratic centralism, participation in elections and work in reformist trade unions, and while aiming at a dictatorship of the proletariat it rejected one-party dictatorship on the Russian model. The Dutch theorists Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter played an important role for the KAPD. In Italy Amadeo Bordiga formed the "Abstentionist Communist Fraction" in the Italian Socialist Party, arguing that the proletariat could take political power only through armed struggle and revolutionary action and that the party should therefore not take part in elections. Together with the Turin Ordine Nuovo group of Gramsci and Togliatti this current left the PSI at Livorno in January 1921 to found the Communist Party of Italy, of which Bordiga became the first secretary. In Britain the Workers' Socialist Federation of Sylvia Pankhurst and others sharply opposed parliamentary struggle and agreements with Labour.
Lenin's criticism and the break with the Comintern
Lenin wrote "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1920; it appeared that year in Russian, German, English and French and was distributed to delegates at the Second Congress of the Comintern. He criticised the KAPD's rejection of trade-union work, its anti-parliamentarism and Karl Erler's counterposing of a "dictatorship of the masses" to the "dictatorship of the party", arguing that as long as much of the proletariat held illusions in parliament, communists must work even inside reactionary organisations. The anti-parliamentarism of the Dutch left and of Bordiga, and texts by Pankhurst and Willie Gallacher, were also criticised. Gorter replied the same year with a detailed Open Letter to Comrade Lenin.
Pannekoek and Gorter served on the Comintern's Western European Secretariat from 1919 until their removal by the Comintern leadership in 1920. The KAPD was a co-opted member of the Comintern in 1920–1921, but in 1921 Gorter broke with it completely. In 1922 the Essen tendency of the KAPD, together with Gorter's Dutch group, Pankhurst's British group and others, founded the Communist Workers' International, which had disintegrated by 1925. The Dutch–German tradition came to be known as council communism; some in it later argued that the Russian Revolution had only carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution by creating a state-capitalist system. Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutchman tried and executed by the National Socialist government for allegedly setting fire to the Reichstag on 27 February 1933, was a council communist.
In Italy the left was put in the minority by the Moscow-aligned centre at the Lyon congress of January 1926. Bordiga was arrested that year and confined on Ustica, and in 1930 he was expelled from the party for defending Trotsky. In exile the Italian left formed a fraction around Ottorino Perrone in 1927, publishing Prometeo and Bilan; cooperation with Trotsky's Left Opposition failed over questions of principle such as entryism and popular fronts. Bordigists insisted on "organic centralism" instead of democratic centralism.
Left currents in Russia
In Russia left Bolshevism emerged in 1907 when the Vpered group challenged what it saw as Lenin's authoritarianism and parliamentarianism. In 1918 the Left Communist faction led by Bukharin opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; it had largely died out by the end of that year, but some of its characteristics passed to the Military Opposition, the Workers' Opposition and Gavril Myasnikov's Workers' Group during the debates on the New Economic Policy and the succession to Lenin. In a memorandum circulated in May 1921 Myasnikov demanded freedom of speech and the press and the revival of the soviets, and Lenin entered into polemic with him; he was expelled from the party in February 1922. Left communists saw the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion as a turning point in the Soviet Union's development, and by the 1930s they regarded the USSR as a state that aided capitalism.
Distinctions and later history
Left communism is broader than the Russian Left Communist faction of 1918, and broader also than council communism, which it includes as its Dutch–German branch while also covering an Italian left that stressed the need for an international revolutionary party. Within the Italian left, Bordigists considered themselves Leninist and Damenites Luxemburgist, and the Internationalist Communist Party split in 1952 over electoral participation and the national question. The currents also differed on trade unions: the Dutch–German current called for building new revolutionary workers' organs, while Bordigists still saw a possibility of reconquering the unions.
Many left communist groups were destroyed during the Second World War, but in 1945–1952 the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, with Cornelius Castoriadis, developed council theory further. Interest revived after May 1968, above all in France, and in the early 1970s the communisation tendency emerged as a synthesis of different currents. Paul Mattick and Maximilien Rubel were prominent theorists of this period. Today groups such as the International Communist Party, the International Communist Current and the Internationalist Communist Tendency continue the tradition.