{"id":14703,"date":"2026-03-29T00:01:55","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T04:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14703"},"modified":"2026-04-03T23:54:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T03:54:35","slug":"ernst-meyer-leninist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/03\/ernst-meyer-leninist\/","title":{"rendered":"Ernst Meyer, Leninist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poor, dear father! You died before turning 43, marked and condemned to death by tuberculosis and the brutal disappointments of a whole life sacrificed to the party; perhaps this saved you from Hitler, a concentration camp or liquidation in Stalinist Russia<\/em><\/p>\n

Heinz Meyer, 1981<\/em><\/p>\n

Ernst Meyer (1887-1930) has long been a forgotten figure of German communism. No longer. Florian Wilde\u2019s breakthrough biography justly reestablishes Meyer as one of the most remarkable leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD), standing alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Meyer\u2019s time in the KPD, whether as a leader or in opposition, provides Wilde with an \u201cillustrative example of what democracy looked like in one Communist Party\u201d (1) functioning in the most advanced capitalist society in Europe. From this reviewer\u2019s vantage point, Wilde\u2019s contribution compels a significant re-evaluation of the inter-relationships between the Communist International, the KPD, and Stalinism in Russia, as hitherto presented by Trotsky and accepted by many on the revolutionary Left.<\/p>\n

Meyer joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1908. In 1910, he took his doctorate at K\u00f6nigsberg, and in 1913, he became an editor of Vorw\u00e4rts<\/em> (Forward), the main party paper of the SPD. Rallying to the SPD\u2019s left-wing, he became an opponent of the First World War.<\/p>\n

With World War I raging unchecked, Meyer, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Paul Levi, Klara Zetkin, Heinrich Brandler, and others founded the Spartacus group in 1916 to oppose the SPD\u2019s counter-revolutionary, pro-imperialist stance. In 1917, the left-wing of the SPD, pressured by the militantly anti-war Spartacists, split off to form the USPD. Led by Karl Kautsky, the USPD promoted ending the war and returning to the peaceful reformism and evolutionary socialism of the pre-1914 period. But there was no turning back. At the end of the war, revolution erupted in Germany and other countries. Millions of workers and tens of thousands of radicals like Meyer suddenly found themselves engaged in revolutionary activity, but without much clear understanding. Revolutionary impatience culminated in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919.<\/p>\n

The uprising was supported by most workers in Berlin but not by workers across the country. The SPD and right-wing death squads repressed the movement in a bloodbath. Among the hundreds murdered were Luxemburg and Liebknecht, a catastrophic loss. Meyer broke down and cried when he heard the news. Arrested, he spent the next few months in prison.<\/p>\n

In the run-up to the uprising, the Spartacus program had argued for a council republic and against calling for a constituent assembly in Germany. \u201cEven more compellingly than the example of Soviet Russia,\u201d Meyer observed, \u201cthe experiences of the German Revolutionary movement following the first November days must have led [Luxemburg] to revise her position”(80). Indeed, it did.<\/p>\n

In her famous “Tragedy of the Russian Revolution,” written in prison in the summer of 1918, Luxemburg had denounced the Bolsheviks for dispersing the Russian Constituent Assembly in favor of Soviet (i.e. council) power, calling it an assault on democracy. No more.<\/p>\n

When the Congress of the Workers\u2019 and Soldiers\u2019 Councils voted to hold elections for a national assembly, Luxemburg dropped her boycott demand and opted for participation — but without doubting for a moment that such participation still meant that bourgeois-democratic institutions were incompatible with working-class rule, or that both could be combined. In the 64 days she had left to rethink the revolutionary process, she had revised her position, agreeing de facto with Lenin on the question of the state<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the founding Congress of the KPD in January 1919, Meyer joined the Zentrale, which was the party’s executive committee, as an elected member.\u00a0 The congress featured various currents distinguished primarily by their attitudes toward party democracy, democratic centralism, and, above all, the politics of the united front. In the party\u2019s early years, a \u201cdistinct putschist element prevailed among the membership and was soon also reflected in party policy,\u201d which adopted an \u201cultra-left\u201d course (107). Meyer became, for a time, one of the most outspoken advocates of this trend and its \u201ctheory of the offensive\u201d.<\/p>\n

The KPD loathed the SPD leadership both for its support for the imperialist war and its role in suppressing the Spartacist uprising. The new KPD leadership, in 1919, rejected united-front politics, which required revolutionaries to relate tactically and flexibly to the SPD and other reformist workers\u2019 parties. Instead, uncompromising revolutionary action by a minority would jolt the reformist majority into jettisoning their reformism, deserting their treacherous leaders, and embracing socialist revolution.<\/p>\n

Yet by the time the KPD held its Second Congress in Heidelberg in October 1919 it had already taken the first small steps away from ultra-left abstentionism and sectarianism.\u00a0 A bare majority resolved to participate in elections and work in the reformist Free Trade Unions. This \u201clikely necessary clarification and unification of its positions\u201d on this and other issues came at great cost, however, Wilde notes (118). Half of the 107,000 members declined to comply with the Heidelberg resolutions and were consequently expelled, in accord with the principles of democratic centralism. Most joined the short-lived, ultra-left Communist Workers\u2019 Party of Germany (KAPD), which refused to work with reformists wherever they might be.<\/p>\n

In debates within German historiography, Wilde (and Marcel Bois) challenge the view, \u201crepeated time and again in the scholarly literature,\u201d that the Heidelberg Congress quashed inner-party democracy by expelling dissidents (28). Wilde points out that the expulsions were a consequence of extensive political debate, not simply directives from those in power.\u00a0 The expellees were always free to join another party, form their own, or leave politics altogether. For this review, the exclusion of dissidents without debate is not the metric of a Stalinist party exclusively: it encompasses parties from across the political spectrum, from social democracy to fascism.<\/p>\n

Following his release from prison in December 1919, Meyer returned to the KPD’s leadership.\u00a0 In March 1920, the party faced a major challenge with the Kapp Putsch, a right-wing coup against the Weimar Republic planned by freebooting Freikorps units, nationalist groups, and certain factions within the army high command. Upon learning of the coup, the KPD immediately decided:<\/p>\n

\n

The revolutionary proletariat knows that it will fight the military dictatorship. Yet it will not lift a finger for the disgraceful and dishonorable government of the murderers of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. It will not lift a finger for the democratic republic that was but a poor mask for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie\u2026(121)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The working class did not share the KPD\u2019s indifference to the political forms of the capitalist state. It sensed that military dictatorship and bourgeois democracy were not the same. Workers did more than lift a finger to stop Kapp in his tracks \u2013 they went on a general strike. 12 million people participated in a work stoppage initiated by the reformist trade unions, supported by the SPD and the USPD. \u201cWorkers armed themselves, attacked monarchist paramilitaries and formed a \u2018Red Army\u2019 that soon controlled large swaths of the Ruhr\u201d (119). The KPD soon dropped its sectarian abstentionism.. The Kapp coup was defeated — but so were workers\u2019 militias, which the Weimar government also disarmed.<\/p>\n

The KPD’s inconsistent policies disappointed many workers. \u201cThe January battles laid completely bare the weaknesses of the young KPD; its leading members did not pursue a unified course, and the party was unable to lead the movement, which would have also necessitated breaking it off\u201d promptly(109). The KPD paid a price at the polls. The USPD, which had resisted the putsch from the start, doubled its share of the vote in the June 1920 Reichstag elections, from 7.6 to 18.6 percent and nearly five million votes, whereas the KPD only received 1.7 percent and 580,000 votes.<\/p>\n

The Kapp Putsch generated intense debate in the KPD, which Wilde describes in necessary detail. The debate was mostly tactical.\u00a0 Meyer insisted that \u201ckicking\u201d the leftward-moving USPD through radical action by the KPD would win the rank and file over.<\/p>\n

Paul Levi, a leader of the KPD, and others called for negotiations with the USPD instead, rejecting what they saw as Meyer\u2019s voluntarist \u201cactionism\u201d (128). Both positions mustered staunch support in the party leadership and in the rank and file. Levi\u2019s closing remarks at the party congress anticipated Lenin\u2019s \u201cLeft-Wing\u201d Communism: An Infantile Disorder,<\/a>\u201d which was published later but written around the same time.<\/p>\n

The Second World Congress of the Comintern opened in Moscow in the summer of 1920. Meyer was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI). The Bolsheviks broadly attempted to draw syndicalist, anarchist, and left-wing Communist currents towards the Comintern. \u201cWorldwide worker radicalization and the growing prestige of the Russian Revolution had moved numerous parties to attempt to join the Comintern, including many that could hardly be described as revolutionary or Communist\u201d (131).<\/p>\n

In 1921, Meyer took on leadership of the KPD as chair of the party\u2019s Political Bureau. An important concern for German communists was the attitude the KPD should take toward the USPD. Wilde steps back to broaden the perspective.<\/p>\n

\n

In marked contrast to the KPD, the USPD had a mass basis of hundreds of thousands of workers yet, although many of them harbored revolutionary sentiments, the party leadership had often wavered during both the war and the revolution, hardly comporting itself in an unambiguously revolutionary manner. Moreover, how should the Comintern relate to figures such as Kautsky, who unified revolutionary rhetoric with passive practice like no other? From a Communist perspective, Kautsky embodied the wait-and-see attitude that had led to the Second International\u2019s downfall (134).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Radicalized workers had flocked to the USPD because it had played a key role in resisting the Kapp putsch. It\u00a0 counted 300,000 members in January 1919, rising to 800,000 by the autumn of 1920. In the process, the USPD\u2019s internal balance of power shifted towards its leftwing, raising the prospect of a unification with KPD.\u00a0 In October 1920, a special USPD party congress convened in Halle to decide.\u00a0 The USPD split. In a four-hour-long speech, Zinoviev persuaded the left-wing to join the KPD, while the right-wing continued under its old name. \u00a0 With the merger, the German proletariat could now boast of having a mass Communist party.<\/p>\n

Meyer and the leaders of the newly united party (called the VKPD but soon reverting to the KPD), still remained enthusiastic about initiating offensives. Once again, they put the immediate overthrow of the government at the center of the KPD\u2019s political action. This led to the March Action of 1921<\/a>. It was a disastrous failure. Levi wrote an open letter<\/a> bitterly attacking the KPD\u2019s go-it-alone adventurism — the \u201cgreatest Bakunist putsch in history<\/em>\u201d — and again called for united front politics(154). But many in the KPD still would not learn the right lesson. \u201cMajorities in the German party and the Comintern\u2013 not to mention Ernst Meyer himself\u2013 would not become convinced that this sort of politics made sense as a fundamental strategy as opposed to a temporary tactic until they had experienced the devastating practical effects of the \u201ctheory of the offensive\u201d in the March Action\u201d (141-142).<\/p>\n

At the KPD\u2019s August 1921 Jena Congress, Meyer discussed the \u201cpractical effects\u201d of the March action. Meyer walked a fine line: how to acknowledge Levi\u2019s criticism of the ultra-left action without also throwing the followers of the failed uprising under the bus, as Levi had done. Meyer’s self-critical speech adopted a conciliatory tone to persuade everyone to support the resolutions of the Third World Congress of the Comintern in favor of united front politics. \u201cThe adoption of the United Front policy meant a clear victory for the new center of the party around Meyer, who also triumphed in the election to the Zentrale.\u201d Wilde notes that Meyer became \u201cone of the most energetic champions of the new line, inspired especially by the positive practical experiences it generated for the Communists\u201d(174).\u00a0 From this point on, Meyer would never call into question the fundamentals of united front politics.<\/p>\n

The occupation of the Ruhr by French troops in January 1923 and the response of the Weimar government triggered an economic crisis in Germany. Inflation skyrocketed.\u00a0 Workers went on strike. The KPD sought to lead workers to victory through the politics of the united front, which was earning the party much support among the newly radicalized masses, and, as a result, a revolutionary situation seemed to be developing over the summer. A German October was on the horizon, many thought. However, fearing a repeat of the adventurist March Action, compounded by contradictory advice from the Comintern, the KPD backed down at the last minute. A planned uprising was canceled, except in Hamburg, where news of the cancellation had arrived too late. Hundreds of workers were killed and thousands sentenced to prison in the repression that followed. This was another disastrous setback which, incredibly, led to the penultimate gasp of ultra-leftism in the KPD in 1924-1925, an episode called the \u2018Bolshevization\u2019 of the KPD. Meyer did everything in his power to combat it.<\/p>\n

In the historiography of the Russian and German Revolutions, much influenced by Trotsky\u2019s writings, the KPD\u2019s Bolshevization, as Zinoviev\u2019s termed it, is almost universally understood as the final descent of the KPD toward an authoritarian party, a permanent turn away from the politics of the united front, the beginning of the party\u2019s Stalinization. But Wilde soberly criticizes the late Hermann Weber, doyen of KPD scholarship, for overlooking the flaws of this long-standing interpretation.<\/p>\n

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Weber assumes an essentially linear transformation beginning in 1924 with the Fischer\u2013Maslow leadership\u2019s rigid \u2018Bolshevization\u2019 (which entailed expulsions of oppositional members, limits to free debate, ossified thinking, an increase in the power of the apparatus over the base and dependency on Moscow) and successively continuing as additional oppositional groups were expelled (492).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wilde’s analysis tells another story. Bolshevization, as traditionally understood, was reversed.\u00a0 Meyer wrote a letter to the ECCI urging it to intervene against Maslow-Fischer leadership and their intoxication with ultra-leftism. The Comintern\u2019s \u201cOpen Letter\u201d from September 1925 \u201cexploded like a bomb\u201d and played a key role in the process. It was a near verbatim repetition of Meyer\u2019s own letter. The ECCI removed Maslow and Fischer from the leadership, and Meyer regained \u201csignificant and at times even decisive influence within the party.\u201d \u00a0 \u201cInternal party democracy and freedom of debate\u201d allowed dissidents to voice their opinions in the Communist press once again. \u201cThe expulsions of the ultra-left were countered by the reinstatement of previously expelled supporters\u201d of united front politics. The \u201cparty leadership elected at the Eleventh Party Congress in 1927 was pluralistic in its make-up, with nearly all the currents (still) present in the party represented\u201d (493).<\/p>\n

This is a far cry from Stalinization. Why is this not properly recognized, at least in German and, certainly, Russian scholarship? A possible answer lies in Trotsky\u2019s attitude toward Meyer, on the one hand, and Meyer\u2019s attitude toward Zinoviev and Bukharin, on the other.<\/p>\n

Meyer had a good rapport with Zinoviev. As president of the Comintern, Zinoviev supported Meyer’s efforts to remove KPD hotheads Maslow and Fischer from the leadership. Zinoviev\u2019s successor to the Comintern Presidency, Bukharin, also entertained close relations with Meyer.\u00a0 Meyer\u2019s \u201cvision\u201d \u2013 pursuit of united front politics \u2013 \u201cessentially overlapped with that of Bukharin, the chairman of the Comintern,\u201d writes Wilde (397). Bukharin, an exponent of \u201csocialism in one country,\u201d and Zinoviev, who was not, had the same united front politics in international affairs. To understand these connections, it is important to analyze domestic and international issues separately\u2014even though they were historically linked.<\/p>\n

Back in Russia, the Bolsheviks had launched the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 to restore a ruined economy after a devastating Civil War. At its core, the NEP sought to enlist the small-property owning peasantry to voluntarily join the working class in socialist construction. In 1926-1927, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Trotsky or United Opposition emerged to contest the Bukharin-Stalin leadership’s go-slow approach to economic development. Meyer sided against<\/em> the United Opposition\u2019s calls to fast-track socialist construction. When Bukharin himself broke with Stalin in 1928 over Stalin\u2019s forceful measures to rob the peasantry of their surpluses in response to shortfalls in grain deliveries to the towns late in 1927, Meyer became an \u201cunabashed critic\u201d(416) of Stalin\u2019s methods whereas Trotsky \u2018critically supported\u2019 Stalin\u2019s \u2018Leninist turn\u2019. Meyer backed Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, leaders of the Right Opposition, against Stalin and, behind him, Trotsky\u2019s partisans.<\/p>\n

Abroad, Stalin\u2019s man in the KPD, Ernst Thalmann\u2014a member of the Comintern IEC from 1924 and co-chairperson of the KPD beginning in 1925\u2014 was willing implement Third Period politics without demur. \u201cBehind Thalmann’s back stands the opportunist Ernst Meyer,\u201d Trotsky wrote, facilely (383).\u00a0 Either Trotsky did not know of Meyer\u2019s opposition to Stalinist ultra-leftism outside<\/em> Russia, in the KPD, which was also Trotsky\u2019s position or, if he did know of it, Meyer\u2019s incorrect anti-Stalinism inside<\/em> Russia \u2013 Meyer\u2019s pro-Bukharinism \u2013 was, in Trotsky\u2019s eyes, a mistake that outweighed all other considerations.\u00a0 Trotsky’s enmity toward Meyer may explain Meyer’s absence in Trotsky-inspired scholarship. Meyer does not make the index in either Deutscher or Brou\u00e9\u2019s massive Trotsky biographies.<\/p>\n

In any event, Stalin\u2019s ultra-left turn in domestic policy was reflected in the Comintern. In June 1928, Third Period politics became mandatory for all communist parties.\u00a0 In Germany, this meant a return to the ultra-left, sectarian policies of the KPD\u2019s early years, which had identified the SPD with Fascism.<\/p>\n

In December 1928, Thalmann, with Stalin\u2019s backing,\u00a0 expelled Brandler and his partisans for defying the new line imposed from above.\u00a0 Brandler went on to form the Communist Party \u2013 Opposition (KPO) to fight for a return to united front politics. Meyer decided to keep fighting within the KPD to achieve the same goal. His efforts proved vain. \u201cHe literally waged this struggle\u201d for the KPD\u2019s future \u201cwith his last drop of strength\u201d (471). In the summer of 1929, the exhausted Meyer, who had suffered from lung diseases since childhood, checked into a sanatorium to treat his tuberculosis. He never left it. He passed away on February 2, 1930.<\/p>\n

I cannot improve on Wilde\u2019s summary:<\/p>\n

\n

In 1925, the Comintern had initiated the KPD\u2019s turn away from ultra-left policy and back toward the united front policy and a certain degree of inner-party democracy. In 1929, however, it was no longer Zinoviev\u2019s and Bukharin\u2019s international but Stalin\u2019s. The apparatus lost its globally revolutionary forces\u2014the ones that pushed the KPD to shift strategy to the united front to boost Communist influence. Inner-organizational democracy had also fallen out of favor. In 1925, many still saw it as necessary, recalling earlier debates. By 1929, the Comintern had degenerated into an authoritarian instrument for enforcing Stalin\u2019s power and that of his faction in the Communist movement and had become subordinate to the foreign policy interests of Russia\u2019s bureaucracy (456).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Returning to discussions Meyer held in 1918 around adhering to the Third International, Meyer had parenthetically remarked that<\/p>\n

\n

[It] hardly made sense to make the Russian Soviet Republic, a product of historical coincidence, the leader in forming the i[nternational]. Rather, we thought that an international could only really be an i[nternational] if this i[nternational] were equally created by the most important workers\u2019 organizations in the various states (131).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Truly, Meyer was right. The Russian Soviet Republic was the product of \u201chistorical coincidence,\u201d a fluke<\/em>. Not in the sense that the October Revolution was a bolt from the blue, and the social-property relations issuing from that revolution — NEP Russia (1921-1929) — arbitrary, but in the sense that scores of Marxes and Lenins could not have foreseen the peculiar combination of historical circumstances that created a lone workers\u2019 state — and that in a predominantly peasant society. Meyer\u2019s observation is the key to understanding why the international workers\u2019 movement failed to realize socialism in any<\/em> country in the 20th century: the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist state. In these concluding paragraphs, I draw out the international implications of Meyer’s obiter dictum<\/em> and reconsider world history in the absence of Stalinism.<\/p>\n

There is an enormous difference between workers fighting for socialism and seizing power in an advanced capitalist economy, such as Germany\u2019s, and one that was not, Russia\u2019s. The difference can be brought out this way: Hypothetically speaking, if workers had seized power in an advanced capitalist<\/em> Russia, fully integrated in the world economy like Germany\u2019s<\/em>, there would have been a \u201cnatural\u201d economic<\/em> basis for the closest political cooperation between the revolutionary representatives fighting for socialist revolution in every country precisely because the victory of socialism in one country would have been immediately and directly dependent on the victory of the others, investing \u201ca world communist party with supreme reality\u201d as Trotsky put it. Unfortunately, and historically, the Third International lacked this natural economic basis.<\/p>\n