Remolding Militancy The Foundation of Communist Parties

Remolding Militancy The Foundation of Communist Parties

THE DIVISIONS OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM

Once the Bolsheviks took power and the armistice gave right-wing socialists freer rein, both extreme wings moved to institutionalize the wartime split. As Stockholm discussions faded away, Allied socialists appointed a three- person committee of their own and called a conference in Bern for February

1919 to reestablish the Second International. In parallel, the Bolsheviks launched the Third International, with a founding congress in Moscow for March 1919.² Yet, much socialist opinion was aligned with neitheressen- tiallythe old Zimmerwald majority, greatlyexpanded now that legal pol- itics were back. Some parties either boycotted the Bern meeting, like the Italians and Swiss, or else went and later withdrew. Between the First and Second Congresses of the Communist (Third) International in March 1919 and July1920, such official secessions made the Second International mainlya northern European affair, based on majoritysocialist parties in Britain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The first to leave was the Italian partyin March 1919, followed bythose in Norway, Greece, Hungary, Switzerland, and Spain. In early 1920, the German USPD, the French SFIO, the British ILP, and the Austrian SPO all followed suit.³

While some of these parties gravitated toward Moscow, Second Inter- national losses werent immediate gains for the Third. Those came later, after the Second Comintern Congress in July1920 issued its Twenty-One Conditions for joining, which then provided criteria for defining a Com- munist party(CP).⁴ With this instrument, Grigorii Zinoviev and other Bol- shevik emissaries toured sympathetic Socialist parties in winter 192021, cajoling the pro-Bolshevik Left into finallybreaking with their opponents, either byexpelling the latter where theywere strong enough or bythem- selves forming a new party. This occurred first at the Halle Congress of the USPD in October 1920, which voted 237 against 156 to accept the Twenty- One Conditions: the right kept 340,000 members and most of the appa- ratus, but the left claimed 428,000 members, taking 370,000 of them into the united KPD in December.⁵ The SFIO came next, voting at its December Congress in Tours to join the Third International and create the French Communist Party(PCF).⁶ In Livorno in January1921, roughlyhalf the PSIs membership left to form the Italian Communist Party, and in May the same occurred in Czechoslovakia.⁷ These new parties joined the smaller CPs established around Europe after 1918 (see table 11.1).

This new round of splitting gave large groupings no international home, so yet a third international body took shape, emerging from two confer-

TABLE 11.1 The Foundation of Communist Parties

CountryName of PartyYear Membership

Austria Communist Partyof German Austria (KPO ) 1918 3,000

Belgium Communist Partyof Belgium (PCB) 1921 517

Bulgaria Bulgarian Communist Party(BKP) 1919

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakian Communist Party(KSC) 1921 170,000

Denmark Danish Communist Party(DKP) 1920 25,000

Finland Socialist Workers Party(SSTP) 1920 2,500

France French Communist Party(PCF) 1920 109,000

Germany Communist Partyof Germany(KPD) 1918 106,656

Great Britain Communist Partyof Great Britain (CPGB) 1920 3,000

Greece Socialist Workers Partyof Greece (SEKE) 1918

HungaryHungarian Communist Party(KMP) 1918

Iceland Icelandic Communist Party(KFI) 1930

Ireland Communist Partyof Ireland (CPI) 1921

ItalyCommunist Partyof Italy(PCI) 1921 70,000

Luxemburg Communist Partyof Luxemburg (CPL) 1921 500

Netherlands Communist Partyof Holland (CPH) 1918 1,799

NorwayNorwegian Communist Party(NKP) 1923 16,000

Poland Polish Communist Workers Party(KRPP) 1918

Portugal Portuguese Communist Party(PCP) 1921

Romania Romanian Communist Party(PCR) 1921 2,000

Spain Spanish Communist Party(PCE) 1919 1,000

Sweden Communist Partyof Sweden (SKP) 1921 14,000

Switzerland Communist Partyof Switzerland (KPS) 1921

Yugoslavia Communist Partyof Yugoslavia (KPJ) 1919

ences in Bern and Vienna in December 1920 and February1921 as the

International Working Union of Socialist Parties. This Vienna Union, or

Two-and-a-Half International, rallied the left-socialist rumps who re- jected the Twenty-One Conditions, including the USPD, the Czech Social Democrats, the SFIO, and the full arrayof Balkan Social Democratic groups. Theywere joined bythe Swiss Social Democrats, who first affiliated and then left the Third International in summer 1919; anti-Bolshevik Rus- sians among the Mensheviks and Left SRs; and the British ILP. The moral lead came from the Austrian Socialists, who during 191920 stayed con- sistentlyindependent between the camps.⁸

The Vienna Union was exactlywhat Lenin condemned in the latter-day Zimmerwald movement, officiallydisbanded bythe Third International in March 1919a temporaryrefuge for antireformists who couldnt stomach a split. But for Friedrich Adler, its secretaryand moving spirit, it was a bridge to socialist unity. He brokered a unity conference in Berlin in April

1922, to which each Internationalthe Second, Third, and Two-and-a- Halfsent 10 delegates, with the remaining executives as observers. It was perhaps remarkable that this conferencethe first since the old ISBs final meeting in Brussels in July1914 where all tendencies of the international

movement were presentmet at all, at least creating a Committee of Nine for future cooperation. But bythe Committees first meeting the following month the framework was alreadylost. The Third International withdrew, amid violent recriminations now onlytoo familiar in Left polit- ical exchange.⁹ Byfall 1922, the Two-and-a-Half International was in unity talks with the Second International. In May1923, theymerged as the Labor and Socialist International (LSI) in Hamburg.

This universalized the split in the socialist movement opened bythe war, a split disfiguring the Lefts politics until the flux of 195668 and beyond. Two camps faced each other across a minefield of polemical difference. Yet a nonaligned center had sought to escape these polarized outcomes imposed bythe Second and Third internationals, and in much of Europe still carried the Lefts hopes. Its leading voicesFriedrich Adler, Giancinto Serrati, Jean Longuet, and in a different wayKarl Kautskywere infuriatinglywishy- washywhen it came to acting on their revolutionaryprinciples. ByBolshe- vik standards, parties like the USPD and SPO were certainlyno advertise- ment for revolutionarydecisiveness. But in the light of later historynot just the Russian Revolutions degeneration and the murderous stain of Sta- linism but the Lefts return in the 1970s and 1980s to classical democratic perspectivestheir scruples deserve to be taken seriously. However in- effectual its bearers on a scale of revolutionarysuccess, the line from Zim- merwald to the Vienna Union charted principles of national diversityand classical democracy, which the Third International sacrificed to its cost.

LAUNCHING THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL

Once Bolshevism was in power, Lenin had his way, and a new International was formed. Scope was initiallylimited bywartime communications. In earlyFebruary1918, a Moscow meeting of leftists from Scandinavia and eastern Europe wanted to call a conference, but the Soviet regimes renewed militaryproblems supervened. Nevertheless, a Federation of Foreign Groups of the Russian Communist Partywas formed in May, and plans resumed with the end of war and the central European revolutions. In a radio appeal to Europe on Christmas Eve 1918, the Bolsheviks rallied sup- porters openlyto the Third International, which, for all intents and purposes, has alreadybeen launched.¹⁰ On 21 January1919, a small group drafted an invitation to the first congress of our new revolutionary International in Moscow, broadcast three days later in the names of the Russian, Latvian, and Finnish Communist Parties, the RevolutionaryBal- kan Federation, and the Foreign Bureaus of the Communist Workers Par- ties of Poland, Hungary, and Austria.¹¹ Originallycalled for 15 February, the meeting actuallyconvened in the first week of March.

The call mentioned 39 groups in 31 separate countries, all European apart from the United States, Australia, and Japan; others from the colonial world were added later. The Congress drew 52 delegates from 35 organi- zations in 22 countries. After national reports and credentialing, proceed- ings revolved around analysis of the world capitalist order, recorded in four detailed statements: The Platform of the Communist International; Lenins Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracyand the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; the Attitude toward the Socialist Currents and the Bern Conference; and the Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World. Communism was contrasted with the moribund system of bourgeois democracy, which not only the social patriots but also the amorphous, unstable Socialist center were now defending. To parliaments and classical liberal freedoms were counterposed the soviets or workers councils as the conditions and forms of the new and higher workers democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the instru- ment of the workers class emancipation, just as insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners, and their attempts at restoration were the unavoidable medium of the bourgeoisies rise before. Forming an international vanguard was the utmost priority.¹²

There was no dissent. On the third dayof the Congress, 4 March 1919, the motion to found the Communist International, submitted byAustrian, Hungarian, Swedish, and Balkan delegations, was passed unanimouslywith one abstention. While the Congress was a small and vaguelyrepresentative gathering, in the Lefts longer historyit was a momentous occasion, whose significance needs careful explication.

The Bolsheviks own phenomenal success, the central European up- heaval of fall 1918, and radicalization in Italyand elsewhere, fueled the sense of an impending world-historical break. Even in the face of immediate disasterlike the German repression and the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht preceding the Congressthe new Communists saw contradic- tions moving inexorablyin their own favor. The drama of the occasion, and the sense of revolutionaryanticipation, of being on the cusp of a new era, was palpable. Arriving in the midst of the second day, the Austrian delegate Karl Steinhardt captured the mood: dirtyand disheveled, striding straight up to the podium to declare his credentials, ripping them from his tattered greatcoat byknife, and immediatelyreceiving the floor. After a stirring and grosslyinflated account of Austrian Communist strength, he ended on a heroic note:

For seventeen days we have been underway from Vienna to Moscow. We travelled the whole waylike hoboes; on coal cars, locomotives, couplings, in cattle cars, on foot through the lines of Ukrainian and Polish robber bands, our lives constantlyin danger, always driven by the single burning desire: we want to get to Moscow, we must get to Moscow, and nothing will stop us from getting there!¹³

European revolutionaryadvance was thought to be imminent. The new International would soon be headquartered in the West, in Berlin or Paris, depending on where the breakthrough occurred.

Yet, revolutionaryenthusiasm aside, what exactlythe Congress repre- sented was unclear. Despite the search for appropriate affiliates and the Credentials Commissions meticulous standards so familiar from pre-1914 international socialist culture, the Moscow meeting was an arbitrarymis- cellanyof self-appointed radicals. Simplydisseminating the invitation was a problem, given the Allied blockade of Soviet Russia, the Civil War, and the Soviet governments diplomatic isolation, which lasted into late 1919. The call appeared in Austria and Hungaryas earlyas 2930 January1919 but wasnt properlypublished in Germanyuntil a month later. Some two dozen emissaries tried to carrythe invitation through the blockade, but onlya few reached their destinations. Most participants resided in the So- viet Republic itself.¹⁴

This problem of representationof the Communist Internationals ac- tual, rather than rhetorical, relationship to an international movement becomes clearer from the overall picture of the Congress. Delegates fell into five categories. With the exception of the Germans and Hungarians, those representing Communist parties alreadyin existence came exclusivelyfrom the Russian empires former territories, including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, Poland, Ukraine, and Armenia. Second, nationalist intellectuals spoke for areas of the Middle and Far East, where Communist organization barelyexisted, including Turkestan, Azerbaijan, the Volga Germans, and the United Group of the Eastern Peoples of Russia, together with Turkey, Persia, China, and Korea. A special case was Georgia, where the socialist intelligentsia had exceptional popular support but took a Men- shevik rather than a Bolshevik path.

Next came small left-wing sects with little working-class support, per- haps calling themselves Communist parties, but not particularlyCom- munist in character: groups from Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Swe- den, and the United States, plus the Balkan RevolutionarySocial Democratic Federation. Fourth, a few delegates came from mainstream so- cial democratic parties, including those in Norway, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and France. Last, several delegates alreadyin Moscowfrom the Czech, Bulgarian, Yugoslav, British, and French Communist Groupsrepresented onlythe Russian partys Federation of Foreign Groups rather than any distinct connections at home.

There was thus a big gap between the Internationals revolutionary elanits sense of purposeful forward momentumand the European labor movements continuing allegiances. The spread of radicalism was patent enough, but how to capture it for Communist parties, and indeed what defined Communism in the first place, remained unclear. The new Inter- nationals opening toward the colonial world was a far stronger distinction. A quarter of the delegates, 12 out of 52, came from Asia, and in this sense

the Russian Revolution brought anticolonialism freshlyinto the heart of the Left. The Bolsheviks earlyinternational policyincluded an audacious bid to revolutionize the non-Western world, turning its sights deliberately

toward the Orient, Asia, Africa, the colonies, where this movement [for national self-determination] is not a thing of the past but of the present and the future.¹⁵ Here, the Congress launched a vital longer-term tradi- tion, to which the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in September

1920 became the bridge.

The Congress also marked the arrival of a younger activist generation. One categoryof delegates, from Russia itself and eastern Europe, had be- come social democrats in their teens and twenties, either in the founding upsurge of eastern socialist parties in the 1890s or during the radicalizing experience of 1905. But most of the rest were formed bythe First World War, including the western Europeans, Transcaucasians, and broader Asian contingent. Here the contrast with the prewar Second International Con- gressesand with the Bern Congress of February1919was sharp: In- stead of all the well-known esteemed fathers of international Social De- mocracy; instead of the theoreticians, hoary with age; instead of the leaders of the workers movement of the previous half-century; here, with a few exceptions, were gathered new people, whose names were still little known.¹⁶

But neither these youthful energies nor the general revolutionary opti- mism could conceal the fledgeling Internationals dependence on events in Russia. Bolshevik leaders assumed that the Moscow headquarters were temporary. Zinoviev anticipated transferring the Third Internationals place of residence and executive committee as quicklyas possible to another capital, for example, Paris. He was echoed byTrotsky: to Berlin, Paris, London.¹⁷ But despite this genuine internationalism, Bolsheviks retained the decisive voice, particularlywhen pan-European revolutionism subsided after 1921. Once defending the Soviet Union became an overriding priority for Communists elsewhere, the Comintern dwindled unavoidablyinto a resource for Soviet foreign policy.

WHAT KIND OF COMMUNISM?

Given the uncertainties of the Third Internationals relation to the Left countrybycountry, the big unanswered question concerned the kind of Communist parties to promote. Lenins Theses . . . on Bourgeois Democ- racyand the Dictatorship of the Proletariat defined strict criteria for af- filiation with the Comintern, incorporated into the Platform of 6 March. Here, Communist politics meant soviet as against parliamentarystate forms. Yet this prescription worked onlywhile insurrections were on the agenda. Once theyreceded, the Left again faced participating in the existing orderparliaments, elections, and the general institutional world of bour-

geois democracy. Lenin would find himself, willy-nilly, conceding the im- portance of parliamentary, trade union, and other legal fields of action, however tactical, subordinate, or cynical these concessions claimed to be. Furthermore, the Third Internationals impact beyond the Soviet Unions own borders and contiguous areas of the colonial world required making serious inroads into Europes established socialist movements. Its success depended on breaking into these existing formations and their popular sup- port, just as Zimmerwald had needed the broader antiwar sentiments of the much maligned center. Lenin might hammer on the need for a new start and a clean break. But new parties couldnt be fashioned from nothing. Theyneeded to reshape existing traditions and contexts of militancy. Where such parties were launched into a vacuum, without splitting an ex-

isting movement, theyseldom escaped sectarian marginality.

This gave the Comintern a dilemma. Once the affiliated groups ex- panded in 191920, particularlywith the hemorrhage of support from the Bern International and the possible regroupment of the socialist center, the ambivalence of the Cominterns potential supporters over soviet versus par- liamentarydemocracycouldnt be ignored. By1920 and the buildup to the Second Congress, the affiliated parties embraced the gamut of left-wing politics, from parliamentarysocialism of the prewar kind, through council communism, to syndicalism and an extreme ultraleftism that refused all truck with parliaments. Resolving this question became the Third Inter- nationals keydilemma as it entered its second year.

The Twenty-One Conditions of July 1920 were only a partial solution. These were certainlyeffective in drawing the lines more sharplyagainst reformists, digging a deep ditch between Communist parties and the older social democratic ones still shaping the Left in Scandinavia, the Low Coun- tries, and Britain. But theybrutallyexcluded a much wider range of so- cialist opinion and support, that expressed through the short-lived Two- and-a-Half or Vienna International, which included not onlyMensheviks and other defeated factions, or smaller Left parties like the British ILP, but also the prestigious Austrian Socialists and larger left-socialist groupings from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and France unhappy with the discipline and loyalty the Third International now required. Over the longer term, the new CPs could onlyprosper bywinning the confidence of these group- ings and their support. For most of the 1920s and 1930s, however, Com- munists onlyaccentuated their differences, driving left-wing socialists back into the arms of the social democratic right.

Equallyserious, the most impressive revolutionaryinsurgencies during

191921 reflected violent, volatile, and localized forms of working-class radicalism, which the new parties had little abilityto organize or control. This was clearest in Germany, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, where the strong- est CPs faced mobilized workers angrilyresistant to anyleadership seeking to implement national strategyor develop a coordinated political line. In- deed, as much activism existed beyond the organized frameworks of Com-

munist and left-socialist allegiances as within them: in late 1920, for in- stance, as the 78,000 KPD members awaited the influx of former USPDers, the council-communist KAPD and its associated General Workers Union mayhave counted another one hundred thousand supporters, not to speak of the kaleidoscopicallyshifting patterns of unaffiliated neosyndicalist mil- itancy.¹⁸ These working-class mobilizations simultaneouslysustained and frustrated Communist revolutionaries, producing the most reckless chal- lenges to authoritybut without lasting supralocal effect. This was the infant Communist parties thorniest dilemma: how successfullytheyshaped such militancywould decisivelyinfluence the kind of Communist parties they would become.

for women in the revolutionaryyears, the ambiguities of change were acute. The wars end brought the first breakthrough of female enfranchisement. Before 1914, women voted in onlyFinland (1906) and Norway

(1913), but by1918 theyshared in Europes democratization. First in Russia, then in the central European revolutions of Czechoslo- vakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Ger- many, and finally in Ireland (1922), the new states included women as voting citizens, as did the liberal polities of the northDenmark and Iceland (1915), Sweden (1918), Britain

(1918), Luxemburg (1919), and the Nether- lands (1920). If womens suffrage wasnt uni- versalin Belgium, France, and Italyreforms were blockedthe trend was clear.¹

In contrast, womens economic depen- dencywas scarcelyimproved. Wartime entry into protected male occupations was crudely reversed. Women stayed in waged jobs, be- cause working-class households still needed their incomes, but the priorityof demobilized male breadwinners was quicklyrestored. Right and Left shared a desire to restabilize gender relations upset bythe war. In short, while winning constitutional gains, women became the objects of social policies implying that little reallyhad changed.

CITIZENS, MOTHERS, AND CONSUMERS

In a nutshell: women were enrolled into citi- zenship and mens and womens political

rights finallygrew the same, onlyfor social policies to reassert their differ- ence. The leading edge of this gender politics was maternalismideas and policies foregrounding motherhood as crucial for the nations public health, global competitiveness, and moral order. Two intersecting anxieties were involved. One was the wars demographic catastrophe. Europe lost 5060 million to militaryand civilian casualties, starvation and disease, and war- induced birth deficits, and 2025 million were permanentlydisabled, leav- ing a stark gender imbalance among younger women and men. Second, the war disordered normal familylife. It snatched husbands and fathers from patriarchal roles and required new female responsibilitiesnot just the ob- vious burdens but ambiguous freedoms and opportunities too. Added to demobilization and mens reentryinto the labor market, which spurred talking about womens place, these effects harnessed attention to the health of the family.

Population policybecame an obsession of interwar public life. The sur- plus of women and shortage of men, the declining birth rate, the wars visible human wreckage, and fears of social degeneration all combined with womens new political rights and the enhanced welfare state to bring women to the political fore. Pronatalist policies for raising the birth rate and the qualityof societys human resources and maternalist policies for strengthening womens familyroles converged. The resulting policyre- gimesand the debates and battles surrounding themvaried countryby countryin complex ways but described a space of political intervention common to interwar Europe. Questions of reproduction (birth control, abortion, sterilization), child welfare, medical advice, household efficiency, and social services composed the shared battleground of politics. Theyin- cited diverse projects of social policing and improvement, with openings not onlyfor the efficiency-maximizing ambitions of bureaucracies and ex- perts but also for the altruism of reformers, from professionals and social activists to labor movements and womens organizations, as well as ordi- narywomen themselves. Consequently, it mattered enormouslywhat par- ticular balance of political forces pertained.²

The Right sought to confine women at home, invoking traditional familyvalues or nationalist demands for purifying the population pool, for which Nazisms racialized policies in 193345 became a terrible ex- treme. But this wasnt the prerogative of the Right alone. Whether in the USSR, the French Third Republics population policies, Fabian social pol- icies in Britain, or sex reform in Weimar Germany, the Left were active too. Biological politicsremoving issues from contention bynaturalizing them, referring them to medical and scientific expertise rather than demo- cratic debatewere common ground of discussion for welfare issues, child- raising, public health, sexuality, and sex differences between the wars.³

Other public discussions also revolved round this central theme, from the memorializing of the First World War to the linking of patriotism with masculine ideals of virilityand domesticized images of female patience and

virtue.⁴ The feminizing of social policy, education, and family life into womens distinctive domain reflected this syndrome too.⁵

Left and Right occupied a single frame. Familyreform implied womens advancement, whether via positive recognition as wives and mothers or recruitment into voluntaryagencies and caring professions for the same familial needs. In the meantime, analyses of fascism and post-1968 feminist critiques have explored the disempowering consequences of such biologi- callybased familialism confining women to the home. Seeing womens emancipation in a separate sphere of familial, domestic or feminine vir- tues has become more problematic in light of these critiques, because sep- aration undermined civic and legal equalityas often as securing it. But in

1918, these issues were blurred. Even the strongest radicals, like the Bol- shevik Aleksandra Kollontai, retained some notion of a natural division of labor affecting womens innate roles as mothers.⁶

Initially, validating motherhood and domesticity could be empowering. Social feminismprotection for motherhood, family-oriented social poli- cies, education for girls, protective labor legislation, a politics of womens special naturehad focused feminists vision of womens emancipation be- fore 1914 as much as legal equalityand the vote.⁷ Advanced thinking among emancipated women and men enlisted eugenicist ideas for regulating human procreation, blurring the lines between feminist control over repro- duction and national efficiency arguments for survival of the race. Unless reforms made motherhood more attractive, it was commonlyargued, only

inferior mothers would have children.

There was one last complication. If tensions endured between civil equalityand constructions of sexual difference, theyalso defined the new consumerismbetween social policies confining women to the familyand consumer promises tempting them out. Housewives became household managers, joining the public sphere as purchasing agents for husbands and children. Even more destabilizing, a new culture of cheap entertainment in dream palaces and dance halls, and the lure of lipstick, smoking, and fashioncaptured attention. Younger women found an expressive inde- pendence, a stylistic escape from domestic and public oppressiveness of male control, in a commercially driven culture of possibility, playing on fantasyand desire.⁸ Advertising and the cinema transported this reality from the sociallyrestricted culture of the metropolis to the general topog- raphyof womens imaginations.⁹

How the Left reacted to the commercial culture of mass entertainment became a keyquestion of politics. For feminists and socialists alike, young women embodied this challenge. On the one hand theywere egregiously neglected bythe Left; on the other consumerism offered an escape from domesticity. Feminist campaigners dimissed the new fashions as distraction, while male socialists slipped easilyinto misogynist contempt. The pleasure- seeking young had no place in the socialist imaginarythose silly girls in their synthetic Hollywood dreams, their pathetic silk stockings and lip-

sticks, their foolish strivings.¹⁰ Yet consumerism, like the politics of the familyand welfare, described a keysite of politics. These were the new realities the war and the contemporarytransformations of capitalism en- gendered. Theyelicited a new right-wing political repertoire, to which the Left had a remarkablyslow response.