Messages, appeals and statements of Comintern (SH)

Long live comrade Lenin's 153rd anniversary!

Message of the Comintern (SH) on occasion of comrade Lenin’s 153rd anniversary

22 April, 1870 – 22 April, 2023

Today we celebrate the 153rd birthday of Lenin.

We greet the Leninists all over the world.

This year we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Hamburg Uprising on 23 October. In this context, we had announced that we would be taking a critical look at Brandlerism. On Lenin's 153rd birthday, we want to take the opportunity to deal with Brandlerism in more detail here.

Lenin not only dealt with Brandler in connection with the March Action, but also critically with Brandler's thesis on the so-called "workers' government" - (i.e. even before Brandler's betrayal of the Hamburg uprising , on 23 October 1923).

About Brandler and Brandlerism

We had already written recently (International Frankfurt Conference) about the fact that Lenin had been an opponent of the slogan of the so-called "workers' government". The road to the dictatorship of the proletariat leads through armed proletarian revolution and not through an interim parliamentary government with the Social Democracy or with the "left" part of it.

It may not be known to many comrades that Lenin had dealt with Brandlerism. He had, for example, read a pamphlet by Brandler. At that time Brandler was still party leader of the KPD.

Thus Lenin wrote in his "Remarks on the Draft Theses on Tactics for the Third World Congress of the Comintern" (which also contained a criticism of Thalheimer):

"Brandler says of the assessment of the March action: it was defensive. The government provoked.

Let us assume that this is true, that it was indeed so. What conclusion does this lead to ?

1. that all the talk of an offensive - and there was an inordinate amount of talk about it - was false and nonsensical;

2. that the tactic of calling a general strike was a mistake, since it was a provocation by the government to draw the small fortress of communism (that district in central Germany where the communists were already in the majority) into the struggle.

3) Such mistakes must be avoided in the future, for in Germany, after 20,000 workers were murdered in the civil war by clever manoeuvres of the Right, a special situation has arisen.

4. the defensive of hundreds of thousands of workers (Brandler says: one million. Is this also true ? Doesn't he EXCEED ? Why is there no data by areas, by cities ???) as a "coup" and even as a "Bakunist coup" is worse than a mistake, is a violation of revolutionary discipline. Since levi added to this the and the breaches of discipline (one must enumerate them exactly, very carefully), he deserved punishment and was rightly punished with expulsion.

The expulsion must be limited to a period of six months, for example. Then he is allowed to ask for admission to the party again, and the Communist International recommends that he be admitted IF he behaves loyally in the course of this period.

I have not yet read anything except Brandler's pamphlet and write this only on the basis of Levi's and Brandler's pamphlets. Brandler has proved one thing - if anything: The March action was not a "Bakunist putsch" [for such invective Levi had to be excluded[, but a heroic defence of the revolutionary workers, hundreds of thousands; but however heroic this was, IN THE FUTURE one MUST NOT take up such a struggle, provoked by the government which has already murdered 20,000 workers by provocations from January 1919 onwards, as long as the Communists do not have the majority in the whole country, but only in a small district, behind them.

[ The premature taking up of the general struggle - that is the work of the March Action. Not a coup, but a mistake, mitigated by the heroism of the defensive of hundreds of thousands]