We respond here to the article by Mike Jones, 'The KPD: From Revolutionary Marxism to Centrism: the Decline, Disorientation and Decomposition of a Leadership', published in the journal Revolutionary History, volume 2 no 3. Against Jones' view of the history of the German Communist Party, which is based in part on Heinrich Brandler's correspondence with Isaac Deutscher (published in New Left Review no 105, September/October 1977), it is necessary to assert that Leon Trotsky, unlike Deutscher in his later years, saw a revolutionary opportunity in the crisis provoked by the French invasion of the Ruhr in January 1923. In the massive strike wave of the spring and summer of 1923, the bulk of the German proletariat looked to the Communist Party to make the revolution - and the party defaulted. It was in explicit answer to Brandler's defence of the temporising policy of the German leadership that Trotsky wrote in his 1924 seminal work Lessons of October:

`...the leading comrades in the German party, in their attempt to explain away their retreat last year without striking a blow, especially emphasised the reluctance of the masses to fight. But the very crux of the matter lies in the fact that a victorious insurrection becomes, generally speaking, most assured when the masses have had sufficient experience not to plunge headlong into the struggle but to wait and demand a resolute and capable fighting leadership ...The transition from an illusory, exuberant, elemental mood to a more critical and conscious frame of mind necessarily implies a pause in revolutionary continuity. Such a progressive crisis in the mood of the masses can be overcome only by a proper party policy, that is to say, above all by the genuine readiness and ability of the party to lead the insurrection of the proletariat. On the other hand, a party which carries on a protracted revolutionary agitation, tearing the masses away from the influence of the conciliationists, and then, after the confidence of the masses has been raised to the utmost, begins to vacillate, to split hairs, to hedge, and to temporise - such a party paralyses the activity of the masses, sows disillusion and disintegration among them, and brings ruin to the revolution; but in return it provides itself with the ready excuse - after the debacle -that the masses were insufficiently active.'

SAP leader Jakob Walcher's notes on his conversation in France with Leon Trotsky of August 1933 report a discussion with Trotsky on the German October of 1923. Watcher's notes, published in Volume 2 of the Oeuvres, were not reported to have been initialled by Trotsky himself. The discussion was in the context of the preparatory consultations for the 'Declaration of Four', which was an attempt to draw the centrist organisations of the newly formed London Bureau into a principled agreement around the necessity for building a new international - the Fourth International - after the 1933 German catastrophe. The notes do not in, any case constitute a repudiation of Trotsky's 1924 analysis of the German events.

Defeat is ever an orphan while victory has many fathers. In answer to the essentially Brandlerite methodology which pervades the whole of Mike Jones' article we can only quote again from Lessons of October:

'It is not difficult to imagine how history would have been written, had the line of evading the battle carried in the Central Committee [of the Russian party]. The official historians would, of course, have explained that an insurrection in October 1917 would have been sheer madness; and they would have furnished the reader with awe-inspiring statistical charts of the military cadets and the Cossacks and shock troops and artillery, in fan-like formation, and army corps arriving from the front. Never tested in the fire of insurrection, these forces would have seemed immeasurably more terrible than they proved in action. Here is the lesson which must be burned into the consciousness of every revolutionary!'

The failure of the German party in 1923 accelerated the crystallisation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia and decisively shaped world history in the decades that followed. As we noted in 'Trotskyist Policies on the Second Imperialist War - Then and in Hindsight' (introduction to Prometheus Research Series 2, 'Documents on the "Proletarian Military Policy"'):

'The political consciousness of all classes in Europe in the period following WWI was dominated by the victory of the proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917. The spectre of Bolshevism loomed very large for those European sectors that had even one piece of silver to rub between their grubby fingers. For these elements - those who gained the slightest material advantage from the status quo, those with ideological or religious connection to the bourgeois order - fear of Communism dictated necessarily pro-Fascist sympathies. After the military defeat in WWI of the most powerful European state, Germany, and especially after the failure of two successive proletarian revolutions in that country, the stage was set for Nazism, Germany's virulent nationalism, to place itself at the head of European reaction.'