Rank - and - File Organization

Abstract

One of the keys to the KPD’s ability to expand its mass support and revive the revolutionary movement lay in the way it organized procommunist workers in unions and mass protests. The KPD created a loose organizational structure that linked the party to workers through a series of organs in the unions, at the workplace, and around economic protest movements. This structure reached from the party, over Communist union members, to rank-and-file bodies in which the Communists were only informally represented. Thus, the KPD relied neither on agitation and propaganda, nor on the party organization itself, nor even primarily on local unions, but rather on a network of direct contacts with rank-and-file workers at the source of discontent over economic conditions. Through this network Communists could quickly gain the attention of workers by articulating their grievances and take over the leadership of mass movements that union leaders were reluctant to recognize, while workers found in rank-and-file bodies a means to express their discontent when union leaders became too remote or did not effectively represent their interests. The KPD’s intermediary organs gave political structure and coherence to spontaneous protests but were also organized flexibly enough to maintain a fluid relation to rank-and-file workers and avoid the institutional rigidity of the unions.