New Year's greeting on the 24th anniversary of the founding of the Comintern (SH), 56th anniversary of the founding of the KPD/ML and 106th anniversary of the founding of the KPD by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Ernst Thälmann

When?

December 31, 2024 at 5:00 p.m.

Where?

JVA Heimsheim

2024 was the year of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevization of the KPD. Because in 1924 the KPD was Bolshevized. In 1925 Ernst Thälmann also became chairman of the KPD.

The Bolshevization of the KPD

Without knowing where you come from, you cannot know where you are going.

Here we are blasting out our greeting for the 100 years of Bolshevization of the KPD.

The everyday brutality of world imperialism forces all workers and peasants striving for progress to start anew on the search for possibilities to throw world capitalism and its apparatuses of oppression onto the scrapheap of history.

In other greetings, we have tried to explain why we think that the main lever for this is still the world socialist revolution.

However, we think that a new start in the struggle for world socialist revolution is only possible if we manage to correctly analyze the experiences, successes and defeats of previous communists. This is not about academic interest in history or reminiscing about the good old days.

It is about building on our research to resume the fight for a new communist wave today by repeating the right things and discarding the wrong ones, and by practicing criticism and self-criticism where necessary. Only on this basis will we be able to convincingly confront the disappointments and prejudices of many people and ultimately reawaken hope in the broad working masses for the struggle for world socialist revolution. Furthermore, knowledge of our own communist history will help us to pick up the thread of the communist movement, which has been repeatedly torn, especially in the German state, and to rekindle the fire of the centuries-old tradition of comrades-in-arms fighting for the liberation of the peoples. Since we analyze history in its historical development, we have decided to publish this New Year's greeting for the 100th anniversary of the 'Bolshevization of the KPD', which deals with the development of the historical Communist Party of Germany between 1918 and 1933 and in particular the phase of Bolshevization. This address contains positions that go beyond the collective state of our discussions.

Nevertheless, we want to make it available for discussion to the world revolutionary mass movement.

The historical Bolshevization was the endeavor of the young Communist International (CI) in the 1920s and 1930s to evaluate and generalize the experiences of the Soviet Bolsheviks and thus to help the Communist Parties that had been newly founded all over the world at that time to overcome their social-democratic tendencies.

Even though the Communist International was able to celebrate a triumph with the founding of numerous Communist Parties after the open betrayal of the Second International at the beginning of the First World War, the vast majority of these new parties remained rooted in the traditions of social democracy.

The whole question of Bolshevization has already been raised in the communist scene. The First World War and the suppression of numerous revolutionary uprisings by the working class and peasantry in Europe had made it clear to the communists that the bourgeois states were no less to be feared than Russian tsarism was. Now it was a matter of drawing practical conclusions from this in party building. If we disregard the specific historical conditions under which the question of Bolshevization arose for the world communist movement, it is nothing more than the question of the difference between communist and social-democratic, i.e., bourgeois parties.

What makes it meaningful for us to deal with the question of Bolshevization today? After the October Revolution and until the victory of Hitlerite fascism, the German Communist Party (KPD) was known worldwide as a great model for the Communist Parties of all countries, alongside the Soviet Bolsheviks.

The incomplete fight against social-democratic traditions is the last great painful experience of the German and international workers' and peasants' movement, showing what happens when the attempt to build a genuine party of the Leninist type fails.

Fascism succeeded in decimating the Communist Parties to such an extent partly because of these deficiencies.

Nevertheless, today, of course, many things are different. The reformist/counter-revolutionary and the world-revolutionary tradition of the working class and the peasantry (although the latter is usually extremely weak) are clearly separated organizationally.

We are not today experiencing a decades-long struggle between the world-revolutionary and the internationally counter-revolutionary sections of social democracy, as waged by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and many others for years within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Such a long fight within social democracy was the prerequisite for a split in social democracy, in which significant parts of the structures were preserved under a new communist flag.

On a global scale, however, we will face similar developments in the future. The question of the unity of the world Bolsheviks will not only be resolved by uniting those who already stand on the basis of Stalinism-Hoxhaism.

Also, in the struggle with other currents, the ideas of the Stalinists-Hoxhaists will continue to develop and comrades-in-arms from other currents will reorient themselves. In the near future, we will try to present some conclusions for the evaluation of the former attempt at Bolshevization, as well as conclusions for the tasks that lie ahead of us today.

In the new year 2024, we want to gradually approach the more recent development of the world communist and world revolutionary mass movement. We hope for interesting feedback and new impulses for our world revolutionary struggle!

Long live Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Enver Hoxha!

Long live the world socialist revolution!