Table Of ContentGERMAN COMMUNISM,
WORKERS' PROTEST,
AND LABOR UNIONS
Studies in Social History
VOLUME 14
The titles published in this series are listed at the end o/this volume.
GERMAN COMMUNISM,
WORKERS' PROTEST,
AND LABOR UNIONS
The Politics of the United Front in
Rhineland - Westphalia 1920-1924
by
LARRY PETERSON
....
"
Springer Science+Business Media, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pub1ication Data
ISBN 978-94-010-4718-0 ISBN 978-94-011-1644-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-1644-2
Printed on acid-free paper
AU Rights Reserved
el 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Origina1ly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1993
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanica1.
inc1uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
CONTENTS
Introduction 7
Chapter 1: Labor Unions and the German Left before 1920 20
Part One: The KPD, the Labor Unions, and Economic Movements
in Rhineland-Westphalia, 1920-1924
Chapter 2: The Unified KPD's Offensive in the Labor Unions and 50
the March Action: Brithpangs of an Industrial Strategy
Chapter 3: Heran an die Massen! The United Front in the Unions 93
Chapter 4: Hyperinflation, Rank-and-File Action, and Revolutionary 133
Politics
Chapter 5: 1923: The Almost Revolution 160
Chapter 6: The Crisis of the Unions and the KPD 218
Part Two: Structure, Organization, and Political Program
Chapter 7: The Social Structure of the Communist Opposition 257
Chapter 8: The Industrial Road to Revolution 297
Chapter 9: Rank-and-File Organization 341
Chapter 10: Social Transformation of the Unions 375
Chapter 11: The United Front 399
Notes 429
Bibliography 520
Index 549
ABBREVIATIONS
AAU Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union
ADGB Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund
AfA Arbeitsgemeinschaft freier Angestelltenverblinde
BAK Bundesarchiv Koblenz
BAV Verb and der Bergarbeiter Deutschlands
CGT Confederation Generale du Travail
DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei
DMV Deu tscher Metall arbei ter -Verband
Dok. u. Mat. Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deUischen Ar
beilerbewegung
DTV Deutscher Textilarbeiter-Verband
ECCI Executive Committee of the Communist International
FAV Verb and der Fabrikarbeiter Deutschlands
FAU-G Freie Arbeiter-Union (Gelsenkirchen)
FAU-S Freie Arbeiter-Union (Syndikalisten)
FEV Freier Eisenbahnerverband
GBAG Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-Aktiengesellschaft
HMB Hal bmonats bericht
HStAD Hauptstaatsarchiv Diisseldorf
IAV Industrie-Arbeiter -Verband (Solingen)
IV Textil Industrieverband-Berufsgruppe Textil
IV Chemie Industrieverband der chemischen Industric
IVfBHD Industrieverband fiir Berg und Hiitte Deutschlands
IWW Industrial Workers of the World
KAPD Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands
KAG Kommunistische Arbei tsgemeinschaft
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands
MAZ Metallarbeiter-Zeitung (organ of DMV)
MB Mitteilungsblall der freien Gewerkschaften Dusseldorf
MEB Mitteleuropaisches Biiro (of the Comintem and RILU)
Micum Mission Interalli6e de Controle des Mines et des Usines
NB Nachrichtenblatter
RE Ruhr-Echo (organ of KPD Ruhr)
RGB Rotes Gewerkschaftsbulletin (RILU)
RGI Rote Gewerkschafts-Internationale (organ of RILU)
RGO Revolutionare Gewerkschafts-Opposition
viii
RGZ Reichsgewerkschaftszentrale
RILU Red International of Labor Unions
SA Duisburg Stadtarchiv Duisburg
SA Essen Stadtarchiv Essen
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
StAK Staatsarchiv Koblenz
StAM Staatsarchiv Munster
USPD Unabhlingige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
UdHuK Union der Hand-und Kopfarbeiter
VdAB Verband der Ausgeschlossenen Bauarbeiter
VKPD Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands
INTRODUCTION
This book analyzes how a sizable group of Gennan workers came to support
Communism and how they in turn influenced the emergence and development of
the German Communist Party (KPD) in its fonnative period as a mass party. It
reconstructs the interaction between a party and the constituency to which it
appealed within the constraints and opportunities set by social structures, econo
mic conditions, and political competitors. This interaction revolved around the
elaboration and implementation of a specific concept of revolutionary politics,
and this study investigates both the rise of the KPD as a mass party and its failure
to set off a socialist revolution in the early 1920s in light of the contradictory ways
German workers responded to its revolutionary strategy.
When I began to study the KPD in the mid 1970s, scholarly works in the West
portrayed a party so out of touch with the realities of German life from 1918 to
1933 that its history was a litany of political mistakes that led from crisis to
catastrophe. The KPD was dominated by the foreign policy interests of the Soviet
Union, by factional disputes and personal rivalries among the leadership, by an
authoritarian, centralized party structure that stifled rank-and-file initiative and
imposed a party line determined in Moscow and Berlin, and by a rigid ideology
largely irrelevant to trends in German economy, society, and politics with at best
compensatory value for a minority of the most impoverished workers. Had it not
been for the German defeat in the first world war, four years of severe postwar
inflation, and the Great Depression, the KPD would have never gotten off the
ground. 1 The few critical studies of the KPD in the East presented an opposite
image. The Soviet Union and Comintern guided rather than dominated the KPD;
Communist organization and ideology were developed by a vanguard minority
that represented the dynamic elements in the workers' movement; factional
disputes manifested the unavoidable internal political struggle through which
Marxist theory was correctly defined and implemented.2 Despite diametrically
opposed interpretations, however, both sides approached the KPD almost entirely
in tenns of its leadership, organization, and ideology.
I found these analyses to be unconvincing for two reasons. First, the opposing
interpretations were dominated by the terms of the political disputes between
Social Democrats and Communists of the 1920s and 1930s and by the post-World
War II division of Germany into two states. The emphasis on leaders, organiza
tion, and ideology followed from these political controversies. Missing was a fresh
look that confronted the history of the KPD with German society after 1918, and
in particular with the social history of German workers. Second, even a cursory
7
8 INTRODUCTION
examination of the KPD's history showed that it won the support of a substantial
number of Germans, mostly of working-class origins and concentrated in the most
industrialized parts of the country. This support rose slowly over the course of the
Weimar Repu blic from a relati vely stable base (about 10 percent of the electorate),
reaching exceptional peaks in periods of crisis (1924, 1932) when it virtually
equaled the strength of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) at its
highpoint in 1920. Although the maximum support for the KPD in 1924 and 1932
might be attributed to transitory discontent over economic crisis and unemploy
ment (a hypothesis never subjected to a convincing test), the existing literature
hardly tried to explain how the KPD first won and then maintained a stable,
substantial minimum base of support. The few sociological explanations of
western historians jarred with their overall picture of the KPD as a left-wing sect
dominated by factions of leaders and Comintern agents, arguing with each other
over arcane ideological points of little or no interest to German workers. The
self-description of Communist historiography not only assumed without proving
it that there was a vanguard of workers that formed the KPD's social base, but
also passed over the fact that the KPD did not always succeed in attracting the
most "modern" workers, while it won substantial support among many not-so
modern ones it considered of secondary importance.
Older approaches to the history of the KPD, with their emphasis on leaders,
organization, factionalism, ideology, and the Comintern, did not offer convincing
explanations of the discrepancies between the KPD's social and political fluctu
ations. While they addressed many important questions, they did not explain how
and why the KPD won the mass support that made it a major force in the politics
of Germany and the German workers' movement.
To answer this question, I turned to the areas where the KPD interacted directly
with German workers, the most important of which were labor unions and closely
related economic protest movements. From my research a different picture of the
KPD emerged. The KPD became and remained a mass party capable of interven
ing in the politics of Germany and the German workers' movement through the
impact of economic discontent on working-class politics, more specifically the
ways economically motivated protests could be transformed into political radical
ism. However, the interrelationship between economic protest and political radi
calism was neither simple nor linear. One of the most common explanations of
the KPD's mass appeal argues that the economic crises of the Weimar Republic
caused unemployment and the impoverishment of workers which in turn led to
desperation among the most affected groups of workers who then supported the
KPD.3 This formulation is wrong in three respects. It ignores the great variety in
the causes and types of economic discontent; it fails to consider political contexts,
in particular the alternatives offered by competing workers' organizations and the
political conjunctures of the Weimar state; and it does not explore the way the
KPD adapted its organization and policies to respond to both different kinds of
