Reiner Tosstorff, Profintern: Die Rote Gewerkschaftsinternationale 1920–1937, (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2004), pp.791, ISBN 3-506-71793-6.
The history of communism was the history of a global movement. At least during the 1920s and early 1930s — to paraphrase both Marx and Lenin — the clarion call was for workers of the world to unite under communist leadership against dying imperialism and its social democratic ‘lackeys’. To join the Communist International (Comintern) was to accept the Bolsheviks’ ‘21 Conditions’ of entry, in which centralisation and uniform ideology was understood as an antidote to the dissolution of proletarian internationalism on the eve of the First World War. Yet, since scholars have seen the files previously for party-historians only, research has focussed on communism in its various national contexts. There are good reasons for this. Important studies have convincingly demonstrated how specific domestic environments informed the politics and political culture of the Comintern’s national sections. However, another obstacle stood in the way of a comprehensive study of world communism: few historians are also linguists with the skills necessary to access world communism’s polyglot proceedings. For this reason, the best available studies have been eruditely edited collected volumes that have drawn together the finding of experts on one or more of the Third International’s national sections.[ 1 ]
As Tosstorff’s impressive study demonstrates, historians have failed to notice an elephant inhabiting the headquarters of world communism. The history of communism was also a (highly ideologically constructed) cult of the international proletariat, which had to be won over for communism in the factories to pave the path for revolution. His monograph provides the first documentary-based study of the ‘Red International of Labour Unions’ (RILU) (or Profintern, according to its Russian acronym) from its foundation in 1921 to its dissolution in 1937. In addition to the author’s native German, the monograph is impressively researched in Russian, English, French and Spanish, enabling him to digest a vast amount of documentation held in Moscow, (East) Berlin, Bonn, Britain and the US. The book’s most important contribution is to look beyond the relationship between bolshevism and the leftwing of social democracy, demonstrating how the foundation of the RILU required a meeting of communism and syndicalism — not just in southern Europe but in North and Latin American. At least in the early years, Tosstorff argues that there was a cross-fertilisation between syndicalism and communism, which centred on a common desire to revolutionise the factories ‘from below’.[ 2 ] However, with the consolidation of Bolshevik rule in Russia and Stalin’s rise to power, the risks of revolution gave way, in all but rhetoric, to placing the defence of the state at the centre of foreign relations.
After setting the scene with a sketch of international trade unionism before 1914 (pp21–50) the following five chapters offer a highly detailed analysis of the developments leading to the foundation of the RILU in 1921 and its activities until the end of 1923. The foundation of the RILU was, in essence, a Soviet reaction to the post-war re-foundation of the ‘reformist’ International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). Famously, the slogan dominating the interwar years was ‘Moscow or Amsterdam’, where the IFTU had its headquarters. The first organisational step taken towards setting up a ‘revolutionary’ trade union international was the formation of the ‘International Trade Union Council’ in 1920 (esp. pp165–73), which had the main objective of convening a world congress of revolutionary trade unions in Moscow. During these developments, Tosstorff pays close attention to the role of the future head of the RILU, Alexandre Losowsky. It was not only Losowsky’s mastery of foreign languages that suited him for the job. An aptitude for anticipating changes in Moscow’s political tactics and promptly adapting to their new demands ensured that he, unlike his counterparts leading the Comintern, headed the RILU throughout his existence.
From its foundation, the RILU was and, despite some tactical shifts in political strategy, ultimately remained a narrow, sectarian organisation. It proved impossible to win mass influence in the social-democratic unions in Germany and Britain, which were the IFTU’s main national pillars. Assorted sections of the syndicalist movement around Alfred Rosmer in France and Andrés Nin in Spain joined Moscow’s ‘revolutionary’ trade union international — at least in the short term. But significant communist influence in the socialist-dominated trade-union movement in Czechoslovakia remained something of an exception.[ 3 ] Tosstorff also brings out the structural dilemmas produced by the formation of an independent ‘revolutionary’ international while, between 1921 and 1928 and after 1934, communist trade unionists were expected to conquer the social democratic-dominated trade unions from within.
After detailing the discussions between Moscow and syndicalists throughout Europe, North and Latin America (pp220–60) prior to 1921, a case study assesses the impact of the trade-union question on the consolidation of the largest communist party outside Soviet Russia, the German Communist Party (KPD) (pp260–70). Tosstorff sketches how the German Revolution set in motion a process of political ferment on the far-left, in which the ‘official’ KPD was only one of a diversity of communistic and syndicalist-type organisations. What they all had in common was an attraction to the successful revolution in Russia, and the Bolsheviks used their kudos in order to negotiate with all sides. Yet, rather than serving as the glue holding together a broad revolutionary church, Moscow’s machinations ultimately alienated the workers deemed necessary for revolution. The ill-fated March Action of 1921, a putsch in the central German mining district, estranged the revolutionary trade unionists who had come over to the ‘United KPD’ from the leftwing of the Independent Social Democratic Party in December 1920. Similarly, Moscow’s efforts to rein in the ultra-radicals in the western German mining industry, who advocated ‘industrial unionism’, led to their departure from the RILU in the spring of 1921. Thereafter, the KPD was never able to win significant influence in the social-democrat-dominated ‘Free Trade Unions’ outside of a number of local strongholds. For the remainder of the Weimar Republic, the KPD never resolved the tactical conundrum of whether to work inside the ‘reformist’ trade unions, or to leave them and set up independent ‘revolutionary’ unions.
Structural factors also came into play. By 1921 the post-war ‘revolutionary wave’ had already ebbed. Thus, at least in this reviewer’s opinion, from the outset the RILU was all-but destined to be part of the flotsam of revolution. In 1923, the ‘revolutionary tide’ lapped over Germany again during the crisis initiated by the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. But, the ‘united front’ strategy failed to detonate the German revolution (pp580–89). What Tosstorff could have spelt out, is that the Bolsheviks now saw the Red Army rather than workers in the factories as the vanguard of any European revolution. More generally, in line with many recent studies, he does, however, indicate that bolshevism’s drive for strict organisational centralism and ideological conformity and uniformity preceded Stalin, who made a bad situation worse. In 1921, for example, Zinoviev informed the KPD’s representative at the Comintern’s Third Congress, Curt Geyer, that, ‘If admitting Unionists [to the International] were contingent on the KPD’s approval […] that would mean “national federalism”, but not an international’ (p265).
Some three-quarters of Tosstorff’s study addresses these early years in the history of the RILU. After 1923-24, when syndicalism had either abandoned the movement or joined the party, the Profintern became merely the trade union-arm of the Comintern. During the ensuing years, the RILU struggled to survive as an independent organisation. Apprehensive of the formation of the ‘Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee’ amid calls for ‘international trade union unity’, the RILU’s looked to the colonial world as a new forum for world revolution during the mid-1920s (pp639–48). In 1927, a ‘Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat’ was set up to co-ordinate policy. The failure of Moscow’s interventions in China, however, turned this new avenue of activity into another dead-end. The Comintern’s ultra-sectarian ‘Third Period’ (1928–34) seemed to offer the Profintern a new lease of life (pp649–83). But the ill-fated attempts to set up ‘red trade unions’ at the national level and specialist ‘sub-internationals’ for black workers, stevedores and Latin America, proved to be a paper tiger. With the arrival of the Comintern’s ‘Popular Front’ policy in 1934-35, the Profintern and its member unions were regarded as an obstacle to ‘united’ actions with social democrats – and, indeed, bourgeois organisations – to halt the rise of European fascism. In 1937, it was unceremoniously dissolved, almost as if its existence had become a dark secret.
Some readers may regret that Tosstorff’s methodology remains ‘traditional’: a sort of latterday E H Carr plus Soviet documentation. At times the view ‘from above’ could usefully have been supplemented by attention to the social history of the revolutionary left. For example, providing an examination of why syndicalism could take root in the western German mining industry, but not in the pits of South Wales or in the old-industrial regions of Saxony and Thuringia.[ 4 ] This could also have been used to demonstrate why Moscow’s ‘general lines’ could not be simultaneously valid in, for example, Germany and Latin America at the same time. A more explicitly comparative approach would also have helped illuminate national differences in the response to Moscow’s uniform ‘general lines’ and the process of ‘stalinisation’. Equally, despite the painstaking attention to the period 1917 until 1923, the study fails to convince that syndicalism’s early flirtation with bolshevism was based on more than a ‘misunderstanding’ (p713). It is a conclusion the majority of the book appears to contradict. Tosstorff begins his monograph by refuting Geoffrey Swain’s conclusion that the organisation was ‘never more than a footnote in the history of the international workers’ movement’ (p13). Both of them are right: the RILU was a ‘spectre’ haunting global capitalism, but it never took on the substance it founders initially hoped for.
Of course, any study of this length is bound to raises questions as well as providing important research conclusions. It should be stressed that Tosstorff did not set himself the task of offering a social as well as political history of the RILU. Crucially, however, he has paved the way for future scholars working on world communism, giving a much needed global dimension to existing literature focusing on relations between individual countries and the Profintern. It can only be hoped that this book will be translated in order to reach the majority of scholars are not themselves polyglots.
 |  Previous article | |  Back to Contents |
 | Contents page: this issue | Index | Search CHNN | CHNN Home
Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 18, Autumn 2005 |
