1920s
The KAPD’s report on the third congress of the Communist International
Report presented at the meeting of the KAPD Central Committee on July 31, 1921, by a KAPD delegate to the Third Congress of the Third International.
Comrades!
Program of the AAUD
Program of the General Workers' Union of Germany, adopted at their third national conference in Leipzig, December 12-14, 1920.
Introduction
The Communist Left and the resolutions of the second congress of the Communist International - Henriette Roland-Holst
Dutch communist Roland-Holst argues against using the objective and subjective conditions of the Russian Revolution as a model for revolution in the Western countries.
The consequences of the decisions reached in Moscow are more complicated for the left communist groups.
Resolution of the conference of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party
1920 text showing how the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party initially held anti-parliamentarist positions, prior to the Second Congress of the Communist International.
The National Conference of the abstentionist communist fraction of the Socialist Party of Italy was held in Florence on May 8 and 9, 1920.1
- 1. We include this short text of the Italian Left (extracted from Il Soviet and published by Kommunismus) in this collection because it shows, in opposition to the legend maintained by Bordiga and the Bordigists, that the entire Italian Left was actually more
The Kronstadt commune 1921 - The Red Menace
The Red Menace's analysis of the Kronstadt rebellion.
‘The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the rebelling ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. I therefore order all who have raised their hands against the socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once. Recalcitrants are to be disarmed and turned over to the Soviet authorities.
Franz Kafka and libertarian socialism
Michael Löwy explores the links between the seminal writer and the anarchist/libertarian socialist movement.
Clearly, the work of Franz Kafka cannot be reduced to a political doctrine of any kind. Kafka did not give speeches but fashioned individuals and situations. In his work, he expressed a Stimmung or sense of feelings and attitudes. The symbolic world of literature cannot be reduced to the discursive world of ideologies.
Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Rise of Stalinism: Theory and Practice - John Eric Marot
Through a critical examination of the limits of SWP guru Tony Cliff's analysis, Marot demolishes the popular myth that Trotsky and his Left Opposition within the Bolshevik Party in Russia were, during the 1920s, a heroic attempt to defend working class interests against a Stalinist 'socialist construction' and repression that they disagreed with. An effective factual antidote to leftist and ICC-type left-communist apologetics for Trotsky and Trotskyism's anti-working class character in Soviet Russia.
Left-Wing Communism in Britain 1917-21...An Infantile Disorder? - Bob Jones
A survey of the anti-parliamentarist communist movement in Britain during and after WWI, and the effects of Comintern/Bolshevik directives on the efforts at organisational unity.
Lenin's famous manual of reformism, "Left Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder(1920), which directed Communists to work within parliament and existing labour unions, was partly a response to British anti-parliamentarism.
Radical London & The Workers Dreadnought in the early 1920s - Claude McKay
Arriving in London from the US in 1919, West Indian writer McKay describes in these excerpts from his autobiography how he became involved in radical circles and worked on Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers Dreadnought paper.
From; A Long Way From Home, Claude McKay; Pluto Press, London 1985. Originally published in 1937.
1919-1922: The Workers’ Opposition
A short history of a group within the Russian Communist Party that struggled against the increasing party bureaucracy and for trade union control over industry which, by 1922, had been forcibly disbanded by the party.
The Workers Opposition began to form in 1919, as a result of the policies of War Communism, which set a precedence for the domination of the Communist Party over local party branches and trade unions. During the civil war, the Workers Opposition began agitating against the lack of democracy in the Communist Party as a result of the centralising actions of the party’s bureaucracy.
