council communism
Weiland, Alfred, 1906-1978
A short biography of council communist, organiser of underground network, Alfred Weiland, kidnapped by the East German state in the post war period
Alfred Weiland was born on 7th August 1906 in the Moabit district of Berlin. He apprenticed as a fitter. He later worked as a telegraph worker.
In 1925 he was for a short time a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) which in Berlin had a more “left” outlook than elsewhere. Soon after he joined the communist KAPD and AAU.
Communism - Story of the Communist Party - Guy A. Aldred
Aldred's summary of the development of the official communist movement and of its external radical communist critics contains a wealth of detail.
[b]Published during World War II, it illustrates how Russian political intervention in China and Europe served Russian foreign policy interests and so worked against the possibilities of proletarian revolution.
Lenin’s Infantile Disorder. . .and the Third International
Franz Pfempfert comments on Lenin's infamous pamphlet, Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
I
From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution - Otto Ruhle
Written in 1924, this pamphlet charts the development of the Russian and German revolutions, and attempts to point forward from the failure of these two major events, analysing the role of the parties and the trade unions in their respective failures.
This online version taken from http://www.marxists.org
From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution
1 The Bourgeois Revolutions
Programme of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), 1920
May 1920 programme of the party, with appended background and information notes
Preface
Council Communism & The Critique of Bolshevism
Cajo Brendel on council communism and Bolshevism.
Council Communism & The Critique of Bolshevism
Preliminaries on councils and councilist organization - René Riesel
A look at workers' councils and the historical contexts in which they were created. A useful analysis - which challenges some aspects of the standard anarchist analysis of the events in Spain during the 1936 Revolution.
Bernard Reichenbach:The KAPD in retrospect - An interview with a member of the Communist Workers Party of Germany
A former member of the anti-parliamentary, councilist KAPD describes his experiences of the German Revolution, his time spent in Moscow amongst the Bolsheviks and the difficulties faced in a revolutionary situation.
Published in Revolutionary History, Vol. 5, No. 2 Spring 1994.
We have omitted the footnotes from this text as they are mainly short biographies of people in the text. This interview first appeared in Solidarity Vol. 6 no.2 when Reichanbach was a militant in the anti-parliamentary Left in Germany. He was interviewed by Rudi Dutschke (RH)
Bolshevism and Stalinism - Paul Mattick
Mattick analyses "the superficiality of the ideological differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism" and why "Trotsky's own past and theories", with his role in the construction of the Russian regime, "condemned 'Trotskyism' to remain a mere collecting agency for unsuccessful Bolsheviks".
Article source: The Council Communist Archive - www.kurasje.org
The largest collection of Mattick's work is at the Paul Mattick homepage - http://www.home.no/mattick/
'Bolshevism and Stalinism' was originally published in Politics Vol. 4 - no. 2 - Mar/Apr 1947.
Anti-Bolshevist Communism in Germany - Paul Mattick
The council-communist Paul Mattick looks back at the German revolution he participated in.
He describes the conflicts and tensions between the various political factions; between communist revolutionaries and social democracy, between German revolutionaries and Russian Bolshevism. He discusses reasons for the failure of the revolution in the context of the wider international situation and the development trends of capitalism.
