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German Communism, Workers’ Protest, and Labor Unions

The Politics of the United Front in Rhineland-Westphalia 1920–1924

  • Book
  • © 1993

Overview

Part of the book series: Studies in Social History (SISH, volume 14)

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About this book

This book analyzes how a sizable group of Gennan workers came to support Communism and how they in turn influenced the emergence and development of the German Communist Party (KPD) in its fonnative period as a mass party. It reconstructs the interaction between a party and the constituency to which it appealed within the constraints and opportunities set by social structures, econo­ mic conditions, and political competitors. This interaction revolved around the elaboration and implementation of a specific concept of revolutionary politics, and this study investigates both the rise of the KPD as a mass party and its failure to set off a socialist revolution in the early 1920s in light of the contradictory ways German workers responded to its revolutionary strategy. When I began to study the KPD in the mid 1970s, scholarly works in the West portrayed a party so out of touch with the realities of German life from 1918 to 1933 that its history was a litany of political mistakes that led from crisis to catastrophe. The KPD was dominated by the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, by factional disputes and personal rivalries among the leadership, by an authoritarian, centralized party structure that stifled rank-and-file initiative and imposed a party line determined in Moscow and Berlin, and by a rigid ideology largely irrelevant to trends in German economy, society, and politics with at best compensatory value for a minority of the most impoverished workers.

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Introduction

  2. The KPD, the Labor Unions, and Economic Movements in Rhineland-Westphalia December 1920-June 1924

  3. Structure, Organization, and Political Program

About the author

Larry Peterson (1949) received a PhD from Columbia University in 1979, and has been Managing Editor of Comparative Politics since 1983. He published widely about German, American, and comparative labor history.

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Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: German Communism, Workers’ Protest, and Labor Unions

  • Book Subtitle: The Politics of the United Front in Rhineland-Westphalia 1920–1924

  • Authors: Larry Peterson

  • Series Title: Studies in Social History

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1644-2

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1993

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7923-2111-8Published: 28 February 1993

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-94-010-4718-0Published: 29 October 2012

  • eBook ISBN: 978-94-011-1644-2Published: 07 March 2013

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: VIII, 551

  • Topics: History, general, Political Science

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