kapd documents in ‘ideas’

Introduction by Chris Ford

The following two texts are from the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD).  The KAPD is mostly known through the critique written by Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism – An Infantile Disorder, aimed at the KAPD amongst others.   As result the KAPD are often simply dismissed amongst the traditional left as “anarchists” and “ultra-left”.  In fact the KAPD were none of these things:  they were a mass communist party and played a key role in the German Revolution.

independent labour party pamphlets

today we added two new items to the ‘ideas‘ section of the website, both pamphlets produced in the late 1950s by the independent labour party but which have long been out of print.

socialism and workers’ councils (1957) and nationalisation: a socialist analysis (1958) both counterpose industrial democracy to nationalisation by the bourgeois state, and pose the question of how the working class can rule both economically and politically.

william paul’s ‘the state: its origins and function’

Here we reproduce sections of William Paul’s The State.

Introduction by Chris Ford – William Paul: a pioneer of communism from below

 William Paul (1884-1958) is a largely forgotten Marxist theoretician and activist from the early part of the 20th century. Paul joined the De Leonist influenced Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in Glasgow and was to become its leading Marxist theorist and tutor and later a founding member of the Communist Party and one of its key figures in the 1920s. Paul was joint editor, with Tom Bell, of the SLP’s paper, The Socialist, and was a formidable lecturer and theoretician mainly active in England.

cob announces 45 day truce with bolivian government

la paz, august 13 – translated from the spanish from www.econoticiasbolivia.com

This Tuesday evening the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) announced a 45 day truce in its struggle to win a new welfare system for pensions, but warned that it would begin mobilisations again if the Evo Morales Government did not keep his end of the bargain.

the fundamental principles of communist production and distribution

Today we have added to the site The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, a book produced by the Dutch GIK (Group of International Communists) in 1930, putting forward a vision of communist society totally different from that of the many failed state-socialist experiments. Below we reproduce the foreword written in 1989 by Mike Baker, who translated this important work into English.

new content in ‘ideas’

we have added more content to the ‘ideas‘ section of the commune.

first off is a piece on self-management in the struggle for socialism by michel raptis – also known as michel pablo and at one time a leading member of the trotskyist international secretariat of the fourth international – who in the late 1960s and early 1970s turned his focus towards workers’ self-management.

tamás krausz describes the struggle for workers’ self-management in action with his article on the workers’ councils in hungary in 1956, where workers mounted a revolution against the stalinist bureaucracy and tried to take power, only to be crushed by russian tanks.

then we reproduce kevin anderson’s essay on lenin’s engagement with hegelian philosophy during world war one, and his little-read hegel notebooks.

and in state capitalism or bureaucratic collectivism? chris ford introduces the debate in the united states workers’ party over the class character of the soviet union, and we republish speeches by raya dunayevskaya and max shachtman.