APPENDIX II.
COMMUNISTS AND INDEPENDENTS IN GERMANY.
In my brochure I have ventured an opinion to the effect that a compromise between the Communists and the "Left" wing of the Independents is necessary and useful to Communism, but that it will be difficult to effect this. The newspapers which I have subsequently received have confirmed both aspects of my opinion. A "statement" of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party on the military outburst of Kapp-Luttwitz and on the "Socialist Government" has been published in No. 32 of the Red Banner (Die Rote Fahne, the organ of the Communist Party of Germany, March 26, 1920.) From the point of view both of basic principle and of practical conclusions, this statement is perfectly correct. Its basic position is that an objective basis is lacking at the present moment for proletarian dictatorship, in view of the fact that the majority of the town workers are in favor of the Independents. The conclusion arrived at was: the promise of a "loyal opposition" to the Government, that is to say, a repudiation of an armed coup d'etat, provided that this be "a Socialist Government excluding all capitalist and bourgeois parties."
Undoubtedly this was correct tactics. But, if it is hardly worth while to dwell on trifling inexactitudes, yet it is difficult to pass over in silence such a glaring misunderstanding as the one caused by the official statement of the Communist Party; the government of social traitors is called "Socialist"; it is hardly possible to speak of "the exclusion of bourgeois-capitalist parties" when the parties of both Scheidemann and Messrs. Kautsky-Crispien are petit-bourgeois-democratic; it is hardly permissible to write such things as those contained in paragraph 4 of the declaration, which is to the following effect:—
