On May 1st, 2014, our organization made its first public appearance. Here, for the first time, a leaflet with the name and logo of our organization was distributed. Since then, the 1st of May has been considered the founding day of our organization.
In choosing this date for our first public appearance, not only its symbolic importance played a role. Despite the ritualized distortion of Mayday which prevails today, this day is still more suitable than any other in Germany to reach and address the entire spectrum of the communist movement, the beginnings of a class-struggle oriented workers movement and political resistance movement. And this was exactly our goal at the time.
Prior to this step, numerous discussions on ideological and organizational unification had been held by a small group of comrades. Following an evaluation of our own and different historical as well as international experiences of the communist movement, this group eventually decided to set out in an effort to gather forces for the construction of a new communist party in Germany. They were united by the understanding that there is no communist party in Germany that would correspond to the requirements of the socialist revolution in this country.
At that time, our ranks were mixed with various naive, idealistic-optimistic ideas of how party building could take place on a revolutionary basis. One of these ideas was the hope for a quick unification with other organizations or at least a strong rapprochement process, which we could give an initial impulse through our foundation.
Even then, our organization showed a fundamental openness towards establishing contacts with all the structures of the revolutionary and communist movement and attaching a corresponding value to them. This was in part made possible by the direct decision to not let ourselves be artificially restricted by the paths of discussions of the past decades. In many cases, we initially focused more on the similarities than on the differences to others. We have maintained this approach in all the modest successes we have achieved since then.
As early as 2014, when we were founded, we attempted to formulate answers to the general problems of the movement with our work. At that time we analyzed the situation in the movement in such a way that there was a general search for answers to the political resistance movement caught in fragmentation and relative insignificance. At the same time the movement was dominated by sectarian group think and a pronounced regionalism.
Even if this situation has not fundamentally changed today, the search for answers has however been elevated to a higher, more conscious level.
In 2014, it was in fact a certain unique selling point that we acted openly with the aim of creating a new Communist Party, trying to create a concrete pathway to it and calling on all those who saw themselves as communists, to work with us on this goal. From the beginning, we also emphasized certain aspects of a Communist Party, which often garner the particularly strong attention of anti-communist attacks, such as the characteristic of being a cadre party, the at its core illegal construction and democratic centralism.
Today, on the other hand, such positions are far from being so special in this country. Much more, a whole series of structures have developed. Despite certain ideological, political or methodological differences to us, they directly name the goal of working to construct a Communist Party. This is a very positive development and we can evaluate it as a first success of the 10 years of our existence as an independent organization that we too could contribute to a greater clarity in the question of organization with our political and ideological work, at least in the field of ideology.
If we find that certain cornerstones of our ideas of a Communist Party have become common among a section of the Communist movement today, it means that we have fulfilled a task here, but must now, based on this, face newer and bigger tasks. In other words: we cannot rest on past achievements, but rather must constantly discuss and reassess what the current needs of the communist movement are and how we can meet them.
Communist history is ripe with individuals and organizations which serve as a cautionary example of what happens to political forces that, for a limited time, play a progressive and important role, but then, following initial partial successes, do not manage to live up to new challenges. If you want to say, slightly reduced, that our organization 10 years ago, despite its shortcomings and amateur working methods, could fulfill the function of putting the question of party construction back on the table, we are today concerned with taking concrete steps towards finding a solution to this question.
The growth in the number of organizations with the goal of party construction is however not only an ideological change. It is especially also an expression of the accelerating contradictions within imperialism and a corresponding growing desire of the most conscious sections of the working class to no longer stand party- and thus ultimately defenseless in the face of attacks by capital.
Instead of merely promoting a cautious ideological rapprochement of the movement on individual issues, today we face the task of leading the common struggle of the revolutionary and communist movement concretely and thus establishing the conditions for further rapprochement, regardless of whether or not a common party will emerge from parts of this struggle force. As per the last congress of our organization:
“Only through the common struggle against the class enemy and simultaneous ideological-political confrontations in solidarity, can we succeed in establishing a revolutionary culture of struggle and at the same time take the necessary steps towards founding Marxist-Leninist parties of struggle.”
“Raising Marxism-Leninism to the Level of the Times“
The founding of the organization brought with it the challenge and responsibility of developing an own ideological line. In the early days of our development the need to define our own relationship to the communist movement and its history was in the forefront; especially because this question typically came up when introducing ourselves to comrades from other organizations.
Even if different roots of our organization lie in the anti-revisionist communist movement in West Germany, at the beginning of the organizational development the conscious decision was made, to not explicitly continue this specific tradition. At the same time, this enabled us to involve a new generation of comrades who had grown up in the political youth movement in these discussions.
Instead of tracing back and evaluating the development of a single particular organization since its founding, this enabled a free discussion about which ideological questions and practical projects were most needed for the construction of a communist party. In this way we were able to approach them in the order we deemed useful and as they became necessary in practice.
At the same time, we were able to anchor ourselves in our own ranks in such a way that we still consider ourselves as part of the communist movement as a whole and set ourselves the task of critically evaluating its development as a whole and learning from all its experiences, without narrowing our view by locating ourselves in a very specific line of tradition.
From the very beginning, the organization set itself the goal of “raising Marxism-Leninism to the level of the times”. In this concession, already centrally placed in our founding documents, that parts of our world view do not meet the requirements of reality and the class struggle today, but are dogmatically ossified and revisionistically distorted in various points, lay another, initially very primitive method to establish an anti-dogmatic self-image, that differed from the typical sectarian behavior of large sections of the old communist movement.
Although we still see the limitations of our own work in this area, we have to this day stayed true to our set goal. articles in our theoretical organ Kommunismus, which are also discussed and arouse interest far beyond our own ranks, as well as our books on the foundations of communist work and the foundations of Marxism-Leninism, represent significant tangible successes of this work. On the one hand we were thus able to work on our own political-ideological line, and on the other hand contribute to the training of a new generation of comrades.
Approaches to an analysis of today’s class relations and the functioning of the German state, as indispensable foundations for the development of a revolutionary strategy, as well as various evaluations and systematizations of our own practical experience should also be emphasized here. In recent years, articles on psychology and postmodernism have also succeeded in addressing fields of theory that have received little attention from communists.
These successes have only been possible because, despite a gradual increase in our standards and the quality of our theoretical work, we have managed to maintain a certain „methodical modesty“ so that we have not yet fallen into typical mistakes in this area: We have neither gone on to fight the ideological battles of our predecessors over and over again with thousands of pages of paper, nor have we exaggerated and one-sidedly inflated individual developments of our theory so that they in turn would have turned into dogmatism.
Our theoretical work is essentially rooted in the material reality of the class struggle. We endeavor to derive the questions we ask ourselves and the perspective from which we approach them from the immediate needs of the revolution and party building and to draw practical conclusions from them.
Thus, articles on questions of our political practice and cadre development are also taking up more and more space in our ideological work and are reflected in the practice of the organization.
However, all the minor and major successes in this field by no means justify a complacent attitude. Although we have been able to develop our ideological level, the dynamics of imperialist conditions are even greater and present us with numerous challenges, including in the theoretical field.
A grown organization with a larger sphere also immediately brings with it the need for even more systematic educational work at a new level. Here, solutions and concepts must be developed to ensure that all comrades undergo training in scientific communism, even if studying classical Marxist literature is not always easy for them.
However, these tasks will only be solved if we become more skillful and flexible in combining different means of communicating Marxist-Leninist theory and our line. The creation of our own educational platform, which uses modern forms of agitation and propaganda, is a first step in this direction, but it still needs to be fully developed.
Above all, however, the ideological work of the organization must be shouldered by more members in order to keep pace with the growing demands. It must indeed become the task of the entire organization, of all its members and supporters.
Mass work as the engine of our organizational development
Even in the first published texts of our organization, the task of bringing theory and practice into harmony was clearly stated, even in a very early phase of party building. Nevertheless, the first approaches of our practice inevitably had an amateurish and often incoherent character.
The fundamental theoretical understanding has always been that the Communist Party must be more than the various organs of formal party members. It can only fulfill its role if it is simultaneously surrounded by a network of mass organizations that are more or less closely affiliated to it and which it guides politically.
Our organization had formulated this understanding since its foundation. Work in and with mass organizations was not postponed until some unknown time in the future after the founding of the party. However, our first attempts in this respect were initially severely limited by our own inexperience and weaknesses and were determined by various fluctuations.
In practice, for example, it was not initially possible to establish a proper relationship between mass and cadre organization. Individual comrades either turned away from our organization or could not be won over to it because the simultaneous task of developing the mass organizations and Communist construction seemed like an irreconcilable contradiction to them. These weaknesses were exacerbated by an overly narrow-minded and sectarian policy in the admission of new members, as well as by the organization’s own weak practice, which initially reduced its power of attraction and binding force.
After some experiments and setbacks in this area, a phase of organizational development began in 2017, in which the first approaches to a system of mass organizations were gradually brought to life.
Thus, a mass youth organization and a general mass organization were initially founded, which developed an independent political identity and their own organizational structures and have been supplemented to this day by further mass organizations in order to address, politicize and permanently organize different sections of the class according to their life situation. The mass organizations, for all their limitations, have served as a motor of organizational development and a tool in the class struggle after only a short time – and continue to do so today.
The successes so far already indicate the almost infinite possibilities offered by a system of class-struggle oriented mass organization that is actually aimed at all sections of our class.
The need for a multifaceted system of mass organizations also arises from the fact that we are working in a highly differentiated working class in Germany today, which comes into conflict with the capitalist-patriarchal system at different points according to the different realities of their lives.
The mass organizations have a dual character. On the one hand, they should already today serve as a link between the Communist organizational structure and the progressive sections of our class and, on the other hand, make a concrete contribution to the reconstruction of a class-struggle oriented workers‘ movement in Germany.
Linked closely in time to the first mass organizations mentioned, an initial approach to a socialist mass press also emerged, which, while forming its own instrument of mass work, was also intended to fulfill the function of providing a certain minimum amount of information about political and social developments and assessments based on this information to the public, but in particular also to the members of the organization and their environment.
These steps pushed back various previous weaknesses in the organization. Probably the most important progress was that the organizational system as a whole became more accessible, at least partially freed from its sectarian restrictions and thus revitalized with new dynamism and development. The contradiction that organizational membership was only open to comrades who expressed the aspiration to work as communist cadres, but at the same time there was no space in which they could develop into such cadres, was thus eliminated.
As soon as the internal connection of mass work to our organization became better known, the corresponding work also had a positive effect on the appeal of our organization and comrades who expressed interest in working with us could be integrated into the work much more easily and without high hurdles.
At the same time, the steps described here were still fraught with serious weaknesses. For example, the establishment of the first mass organizations was not based on a clear concept. Based on the correct idea that there must be a qualitative difference in terms of political line, working methods, demands on members and appearance between mass organizations and communist organizations, these were initially founded with a purely „anti-capitalist“ political identity.
It was only a few years later that this defensive approach to bourgeois anti-communism and the low level of consciousness of our own activists was broken through on the basis of increased theoretical clarity about the program of the revolution in Germany. In practice, we were now able to prove that the open and accessible character of a mass organization in Germany today is by no means in contradiction to open agitation and propaganda for socialism and thus the socialist character of these mass organizations.
With the development of the first elements of the outlined framework of mass organizations, 2017 nevertheless marks a point in time when a certain turning point in organizational development was achieved. From this point onwards, an initially tentative growth began, which progressed along uncertain paths and then accelerated; both in terms of the number of members and activists, but also in terms of the geographical expansion of our work in Germany.
The 3rd Congress of our organization in 2021 also decided to take steps towards a new united class-struggle movement with the aim of uniting our mass work under a single political umbrella and giving it a clear political-ideological orientation.
Even if our mass work is still fraught with weaknesses and one-sidedness and remains limited in terms of quality and quantity, it has repeatedly succeeded in organizing sections of the working class at their place of residence, workplace or place of apprenticeship and making them an active part of the class struggle. The majority of today’s cadres in our organization have also been won over in this way.
A function that is elementary for the development of the communist movement is thus being fulfilled in modest beginnings, albeit to a qualitatively and quantitatively still far too weak extent: Its direct strengthening and reproduction from the ranks of the working class.
We must build on these successes, because measured against the requirements of the class struggle, our mass work is still far too limited and has by no means freed itself from all sectarian or amateurish characteristics.
In order to achieve openness towards all sections of our class and to set ever larger sections of our class in motion, a permanent ideological struggle for these goals is necessary on the one hand, and at the same time a constant analysis and adaptation of our own forms of mass work. In particular, we must counteract the tendency for working methods of the communist organization to be consciously or unconsciously copied in the mass organizations. If we do not succeed in this, they risk degenerating into an ends in themselves instead of becoming living mechanisms of connection between communists and the working class.
The Communist Youth as a source of new cadres
Our youth organization, the „Communist Youth“(Kommunistische Jugend), was formed in 2017, a good three years after our organization was founded. Initially, we had to overcome a certain amount of skepticism within our own ranks before this step was possible. The key question was whether we as a structure were actually ready for such a step. Ultimately, the initiative for this came from a group of young people who were already very close to us ideologically, for whom there was no appropriate place in the organizational model at the time.
In connection with the steps mentioned above in the area of mass work, this step played a major role in shedding the organization’s strongest sectarian tendencies. „Suddenly“ it became possible to organize a whole series of young comrades in a relatively short time in a structure that was directly linked to Communist Construction in its political line and self-image. In fact, the forces with which the organization could act in practice doubled in just a few months.
Since then, in some cities, the development of our organizational framework on the ground has been almost entirely taken over by members of the youth organizations; in other cities, individual young people have become important driving forces for the dynamic development of mass work. In short, the youth organization has played a role in strengthening the organization that can hardly be overemphasized.
Since the Communist Youth shouldered a large part of the responsibility for building up the organization, especially where the Communist Construction was only weakly represented, it is only logical that some comrades from the youth organization developed quickly and reached a level in their working methods that no longer differed significantly from the requirements of the Communist Construction.
However, these successes of the youth organization have also given rise to new problems. For example, the actual organizational principle of a Communist youth organization as it has been established in our movement, i.e. the political-ideological commitment with simultaneous organizational independence, has not yet been fully implemented in the practice of our youth organization. Similarly, the formally significantly lower minimum requirements of the youth organization for its members compared to the organizational structure are repeatedly shifted upwards in practice.
In the time that now lies ahead of us, it will be important not only to continue to set no limits to the development of the comrades of the youth organization and to courageously involve them in the tasks of party building, but also to carry out a clear differentiation between the organizational structure and the youth organization. This is necessary so that the youth organization can actually play its true role and become a genuine mass organization that has a clearer political profile than other mass organizations and creates a binding organizational model, but at the same time is actually broad and easily accessible to young people interested in communism.
It will be crucial for us to involve some of the most experienced and forward-looking young people in other areas of organizational development with even greater determination. Only if we succeed in finding the right balance between the autonomy of the youth organization and participation in party building, as well as between the independent cadre policy of the youth organization and the targeted further development of parts of the youth organization in communist building, can we achieve our goals here.
This is the only way to create a healthy relationship between the youth organization and the organizational structure and to effectively counteract the recurring tendency for the youth organization to turn into a kind of „small organizational structure“ and thus to constrict itself organizationally.
The Communist Women’s Organization and the Line of the Women’s Revolution
Our women’s organization was founded in 2019 at the 2nd congress of our organization. Looking at the position of various women’s comrades in the organizational structure today, a few years later, the success and necessity of this structure are unmistakable.
At the beginning, however, the development of independent women’s work also involved an internal struggle within the organization. The traditions of independent women’s structures or at least specific sub-structures for the development of Communist women’s work, which certainly existed in the Communist movement, have largely been forgotten today.
Organizations that assign independent significance to the struggle against patriarchy in party building and the socialist revolution are quickly suspected of having given in to bourgeois-feminist influences. In our ranks, too, there have been such discussions time and time again, which have led to particular pressure on the women’s organization to prove itself twice and three times over.
However, it was not only in this form that the work of the Communist Women’s Organization consisted from the outset of a struggle against patriarchy in the revolutionary movement and in its own organization. This relationship of oppression does not stop at the ranks of socialist and communist organizations, and so reality repeatedly put the fight against patriarchal behaviour and patriarchal violence on the agenda of the women’s organization.
Patriarchal violence and patriarchal behavior always have a destructive effect on the development of those affected. Accordingly, it is also clear that patriarchal violence undermines the fighting unity of the working class as a whole. It is thanks to the work of our women’s organization, however, that our organization has now been able to develop methodical principles for dealing with it that hold the perpetrators accountable and strengthen the backs of those affected.
The communist women organized in our ranks are also politically responsible for significant successes of our organization. Thanks to their ability to react, for example, we were able to organize progressive protests against the violence perpetrated on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016 in Cologne, while at the same time clearly distinguishing ourselves from the racist agitation organized by the bourgeois camp.
It is probably also our women’s organization that repeatedly has to engage in the fiercest ideological and political conflicts between our structure and other political forces. Postmodern ideology and the line of the women’s revolution regularly clash in our attempts to organize alliance work for the International Women’s Day of Struggle and the International Day against Violence against Women.
At the same time, there are still concrete questions in this area regarding the role, evaluation and our intervention in the struggles of all people who are oppressed because they deviate from the role assigned to them by the patriarchal gender system (LGBTI+). Here we need to develop a political line in which these struggles are led together towards the goal of the anti-patriarchal, socialist women’s revolution, without bourgeois pseudo-answers coming to the fore or one struggle being played off against the other.
Although the development of our women’s organization has made it possible for women comrades to play leading roles in all areas of organizational life and not be limited to the struggle against patriarchy in the narrower sense, there are still far greater steps to be taken.
The patriarchal behaviour of our male comrades and the internalization of patriarchal role models still hinder the development of our female comrades. Their role in the fight against patriarchy is also still too weak and characterized by strong reticence.
In the next phase of development, the main task will be to build on the successes achieved and to place the development of our female comrades even more at the center of attention of all comrades in order to bring to full fruition the enormous potential that lies dormant in the genders oppressed by patriarchy for the socialist revolution and party building!
Cadre development as the key lever for development
This brings us to a point in this review that could just as well be at the beginning, because the importance of the cadre question, the methods for its development and the need to train professional revolutionaries have been strongly emphasized by the organization since its founding.
This was initially an expression of the need to put this question at the center of the agenda, as it had hardly been consciously addressed, let alone answered, in the communist movement in our country in recent decades. It is obvious that the development of cadres through a permanent struggle against all bourgeois parts in their personality is not an easy task in imperialist Germany.
The aim here must be not only to keep the inner revolutionary flame burning, but also to ignite the urge in other people to join our struggle. In the entire history of the Communist movement in Germany, this task has only been achieved in rudimentary form and never on a mass scale.
The fact that we consider the development of class consciousness to be necessary on several levels at the same time is still formative in the collective understanding of cadres today: This includes class consciousness in the narrower sense, gender consciousness and enemy consciousness.
Ultimately, in our relatively limited experience as a young organization, we have already seen how true Stalin’s famous saying “ Cadres decide everything!“ is. Many of the problems mentioned here in our development as an organization could just as well be described as part of the problem of cadre development.
In recent years, the organization’s approach to this question has gradually moved away from an often abstract discussion about the need for professional revolutionaries towards more concrete methods and measures of cadre development and the creation of professional revolutionaries.
However, the systematic transfer of a way of working, an organizational culture and an ideological line could not have succeeded to the same extent at any other time before. Certain experiences and mistakes in questions of mass work, one’s own practice as an organization and political guidance probably had to be made in one form or another in order to learn from them and develop a collective approach.
Even the status we have reached today is certainly no more than an intermediate stage, because the really intense class struggles and tests are undoubtedly still ahead of us and the communist movement in Germany.
The development of the political situation and the class struggle leaves us no time to dwell on philosophical discussions about the cadre problem in Germany. The purposeful development of all comrades, the constant breaking of boundaries in the development of their personalities and, above all, the permanent self-revolutionization of all those comrades who want to become professional revolutionaries will not be on the agenda sometime in the next ten years. It is on the agenda today and is an unavoidable prerequisite for further development steps in all areas of our organizational development.
The Perspective of the next Steps in Party Building
When we look back on ten years of the development of Communist Construction, we can look back on a whole series of successes, many of which have only been touched on here and some of which have gone completely unmentioned. The most important thing in our anniversary year, however, is that we determine the next steps correctly on the basis of what we have achieved and a correct understanding of the class struggle situation and our movement, and that we face the tasks ahead of us with courage.
It is already clear that the development of all these factors is becoming more dynamic. Our organization must also respond to this with faster, bolder and also riskier steps, because otherwise it will inevitably degenerate into an insignificant marginal element in the class struggle and ultimately lose its raison d’être as an organization altogether. This is not a special characteristic of our structure, but an irrefutable law of development of every revolutionary organization from the smallest circle to a party of millions.
It also follows from this that we can only control the pace of development to a limited extent; we must constantly analyse political developments to discover and realize revolutionary opportunities in every contradiction of imperialist policy that arises. This is an essential prerequisite for us to be able to continue to develop dynamically and by leaps and bounds, instead of allowing ourselves to be constricted by the inevitable problems of the growth of a revolutionary organization in the imperialist center.
For example, we are faced with the question of how we can constantly adapt our functioning as an organization to our own growth and at the same time prevent these mechanisms from developing into bureaucratic structures. Here, the organization must constantly reinvent itself at all levels in order to adapt to new challenges while remaining a living organizational mechanism whose function and structure are geared to the needs of the class struggle.
Even at today’s very modest level of development, we are faced with problems that have traditionally preoccupied our movement in Germany, such as the correct link between central leadership responsibility and local initiative. We must succeed in constantly winning new comrades from our class for the political struggle and purposefully training them as cadres.
The speed of the further and higher development of our organization in the coming period will be largely determined by how quickly we succeed in developing a sufficient number and quality of Communist cadres for the tasks ahead of us. Building a flexible and stable organizational backbone, consisting of a core of professional revolutionaries trained in theory and practice, must be the focus of our efforts. At the same time, however, we must also succeed in significantly raising the level of work, the consciousness of our comrades and their personal commitment to the cause of the revolution across the entire breadth of the organization, its sympathizers and mass organizations – indeed, right into the most progressive sections of our class.
