Communist Workers' Party of Germany
The Communist Workers Party of Germany ( CAPD ) was a Communist Party during the Weimar Republic, took the left, critical parliamentary and council communist positions.
History
The KAP was founded on April 3, 1920 by members of the left wing of the Communist Party of Germany ( KPD), the ( 20 to 23 October 1919) at the Heidelberg Congress of the Communist Party through the central management under Paul Levi had been excluded. Its main aim was the immediate elimination of bourgeois democracy and the constitution of a dictatorship of the proletariat, a dictatorship of one party was discarded after the Russian model. The KAP refused, unlike the Communist Party, especially the Leninist organizational form of the so-called democratic centralism, participation in elections and participation in reformist unions from. An important role for the KAP played the Dutch communist Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter theorists, the KAPN called after the model of CAPD in the Netherlands to life, which of course never reached the importance of the sister party in Germany.
Background for the establishment of CAPD was the Kapp Putsch. He had shown the left wing opinion in the KPD that the behavior of the KPD party line was equivalent to an abandonment of the revolutionary struggle, as the Communist Party adopted a repeatedly changing attitude to the general strike and the Bielefeld Agreement of 24 March 1920 to disarm the Red Ruhr Army had agreed. The Berlin district group called 3 April 1920, a congress of the Left Opposition. There it was decided to constitute itself as the " Communist Workers Party of Germany". The delegates represented estimated 80,000 members of the KPD. The newly founded party advocated the rejection of parliamentary activity and the active struggle against the bourgeois state. She worked in the aftermath closely with the AAUD. Strongholds of the party were in Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen and East Saxons, in both of which a large part of the KPD members of the new party joined.
In August 1920, the exclusion of the founding members of the Hamburg Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim who had represented National Bolshevik ideas took place. Two months later a founding member Otto Rühle was excluded. The KAP was from 1920 to 1921 co-opted member of the III. International.
1921 cooperated with the KAP of the March Action again with the KPD. This has been triggered by the invasion by troops of the Weimar Republic in the mid- German industrial area, with CAPD and KPD feared that the military wanted to occupy the farms.
The end of 1921 there was a further splintering, as they parted sections of AAUD to Rühle, Franz Pfemfert and Oskar Kanehl of the KAP and the AAUE founded.
After 1921, when the KAP still had 43,000 members, the party lost more and more important and split in 1922 in the "Berlin direction " and the " Essen direction " by Alexander Schwab, Arthur Goldstein, Bernhard Reichenbach and Karl Schroeder. The main reason was the rejection of participation in running daily struggles in a revolutionary situation as assessed by the Essenes.
The establishment of a Communist Workers International ( KAI ) in 1922 by the KAP of the " Essenes direction " (the " Berliner direction " rejected this move as premature ab), together with the groups of Herman Gorter in the Netherlands, by Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain and other groups in Belgium, Bulgaria and exiles from the Soviet Union had little success. The KAI, whose secretariat was dominated by the German section, disintegrated until 1925.
1926/1927 it came to the short-term association of KAP (Berliner direction ) with the Resolute to the left excluded from the KPD deputies Ernst Schwarz. This merger resulted in the CAPD to a further splitting, because black resigned his seat not as it called for a minority of members who regrouped after it made exit to the journal volcano.
Resistance groups against the Nazis, who stood in the tradition of CAPD, were the Red fighters and the Communist Union Councils in the Braunschweig. Genuine KAP - resistance groups there were in the Ruhr area, in Leipzig ( where the local CAPD group also created materials for other resistance groups in its printing ), in Königsberg and Memel in Lithuania.
Other well-known members of the KAP were the writer Franz Jung, Adam Scharrer and Friedrich Wendel, the artist Heinrich Vogeler, the press photographer John Graudenz, the anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff, the leaders of armed communist guerrilla groups 1920/1921 Max Holz and Karl Plättner, the council communist theorist and activists Fritz Rasch, Paul Mattick and Jan Appel and August merges, which was briefly 1918/1919 President of the Socialist Republic of Braunschweig.