The Unified KPD’s Offensive in the Labor Unions and the March Action: Birthpangs of an Industrial Strategy

Abstract

The KPD and USPD-Left merged just prior to the yearly local union elections and at the end of a strike wave. The first act of the Unified KPD in Rhineland-Westphalia was to build on the momentum of unification, especially the party’s new mass following and the overture of the Open Letter, to mount an aggressive campaign for leadership of the unions and in this way establish hegemony over the socialist left, from the rump USPD to the syndicalists. The campaign took three forms: contesting local free union elections, asserting control over the FAU-G, and leading “wild” industrial movements. However, the campaign’s thrust toward Communist organization of rank-and-file workers contradicted the Open Letter’s call for united action with the leaders of other workers’ organizations. While the Communist opposition consolidated itself in a series of union election victories, the simultaneous drive for political control from above and below provoked self-defensive reactions of Social Democrats and Unionisten rather than their cooperation, and the VKPD’s politicized strike strategy underscored its revolutionary intentions. The dynamism of the campaign also undercut within the KPD the calculations of the Open Letter’s authors for a lengthy period of give-and-take with the other workers’ organizations. Although the resistance of free union and FAU-G leaders and the defeat of the largest strikes checked the Communist upsurge by the beginning of March, the initially rapid advance in the unions contributed to the illusion among left-wing Communists that unification had set off a mass movement that the VKPD could quickly turn into a revolutionary challenge to the state, thus making up for the missed opportunity of the Kapp Putsch one year earlier.