Turning the debate upside down – thoughts on some of the challenges facing the communist movement in Germany

Below we publish the fourth contribution to the debate, which will be sent to us on the 15th.

August from Ayse D. has reached.

This was preceded by contributions from David Meyn, Max K. and Malik L.

By Ayse D.

I find Lower Class Magazine's initiative to initiate a cross-organizational and cross-current debate in the communist and revolutionary movement about our situation and the associated challenges very valuable.

It would be a wasted opportunity if the initiative were to sink into the echo chambers of the internet.

Therefore, as an organized communist, I decided to write down my thoughts and share them with all comrades.

Such a public debate can only work if all comrades participate individually and anonymously.

Therefore, everything that follows is my personal opinion, even if it has developed through many collective debates.

Any errors, biases and mistakes are solely my fault.

David Meyn opened the debate with a contribution on anti-revisionism.

Even if I find this starting point to be somewhat arbitrary and share Max K.'s answer as a necessary clarification, the article raises important questions, such as the interaction between identity and dogmatism.

Max K.'s contribution highlights that, among other things, it is about dogmatism and sectarianism and the associated dangers.

Malik L. deepens these reflections on our problems by taking social factors into account (including the decline of university education, which is a factor for the low theoretical level of the movement) and postulates a scientific discussion of, among other things, the last revolutionary departure of the K groups after 1968.

All contributions so far contain valuable ideas, but in my opinion the analysis does not yet get to the essence of the questions raised.

They work on the level of appearance as it appears today.

This is probably also because they look at the history of communists in Germany based on the subjective experiences of a certain trend or perhaps one should say tradition - namely the "projects of post-autonomous communist organization" (David Meyn) - and in particular assess the K groups in the 1970s rather negatively.

The necessary subjective one-sidedness of the previous contributions probably comes from the (individual and collective) biography of the authors and touches on a problem that I have often noticed in discussions with the new generation.

The story begins in the 2000s.

David Meyn named Perspective Communism (PK), Communist Construction (KA) and the League of Communists (BdK) as examples.

The best way to classify BdK, whose tradition goes back a quarter of a century and to ARAB, among others, is as a “post-autonomous communist project”.

For PK and its core, the RAS, this is rather misleading, since the strategic reorientation of the part of the Western European urban guerrilla oriented towards Marxism-Leninism was initially inspired by the concept of counter-power from the 1990s, which still shapes PK in a certain way today.

KA, on the other hand, emphasized in its first programmatic self-image in 2014 that the new (the new type of party in Germany) cannot emerge from the existing (the projects in the political resistance movement that are classified as circular).

The comrades have therefore formulated a clear break with “post-autonomous communist projects”.

Our history as a revolutionary movement is much more complex than it could be reconstructed from our own limited experiences, regardless of structure.

By the way, this also applies to the question of the break in tradition (in fascism and through the end of the K groups) that Malik L. worked out.

On the one hand, there were these breaks.

On the other hand, if you examine history scientifically, you will discover a hidden, deeper continuity beneath the level of appearance.

This stems partly from the objective social conditions 1 and partly from personal and cultural continuities, which also shape the organizational, idea and problem history of our movement.

Concluding these preliminary remarks, I would like to call on all comrades not to follow the example of Comrade Lenin on one point.

As is well known, he was a great polemicist who often attacked his political opponents personally and demagogically, including in the opinion battles in the RSDLP.

I don't want to assess this historically, but if our debate is to be fruitful, we should all strive for a culture of debate on equal terms that is tough in substance but cooperative in form.

In my opinion, formulations such as “disgusting behavior of the K-groups” do not contribute to the necessary overcoming of mental blocks and a forward-looking culture of debate.

I would like to encourage all comrades to contribute to the discussion with their thoughts.

It would be desirable if as many comrades as possible got involved, even with contributions that, for example, only shed light on one aspect.

This call is particularly aimed at comrades from the currents, structures and traditions that are still missing.

The state of our movement and the dangers of growth as a K-group revival The red (youth) movement has been growing very strongly for several years, which has led, among other things, to the fact that the communists have now gained something of a hegemony within the revolutionary movement in Germany.

The disintegration of the anti-capitalist movement of autonomists and anti-imps, as it had developed since the 1980s, also contributed to this.

The extremely weak solidarity from this spectrum with Daniela Klette was only the last visible evidence of this decline.

But that cannot be a reason for communists to gloat.

Because every weakening of revolutionary structures reflects on all of us.

And it is true that communism, at least that part that did not end in dogmatism or reformism, survived in the deep valley of tears from 1980 to the mid/late 2000s in the anti-capitalist structures of this current.

And, for example, the Antiimps were fighting comrades from whom a lot could be learned, as the recently published book by 14 women from the armed fighting movement 2 impressively proves.

However, our own efforts also contributed to the hype of communism in the political resistance movement, considering that the first texts about “neo-Leninists” appeared in the mid-2000s.

But at the moment we are benefiting most from the objective situation, the polycrises of the imperialist world system, which have now also led to a noticeable social ferment in Germany as an imperialist center.

In my opinion, it is an expression of a gradually maturing quality in our movement and at the same time what is particularly valuable about the contributions so far - that more and more comrades are not satisfied with dynamic growth, but are asking questions about unresolved problems and future challenges.

Our problems consist of the objective and subjective levels.

I think it's good if we start with the internal challenges, i.e. put a certain focus on our difficulties.

Because we can overcome these with our own strength.

However, I think – and the title of this article alludes to this – that we should not base this on our subjective experiences and the current current situation.

I will therefore choose the opposite structure and proceed from the general to the specific in the following.

I begin with the question of method, work out a problem in our understanding of dialectics at a general level, and then move on to the operational revolutionary strategy.

Only at the end of my contribution will I address some concrete challenges that I consider to be central questions for the near future.

Dialectics, written culture and a break in epochs It is an insight that is clear to every comrade that we must apply dialectics as a scientific method for researching the material world to all phenomena of human society and thus also to ourselves.

This is already in the Communist Manifesto and has been learned “by heart” by communists for generations and – as a rule – not done.

We analyze class forces and struggles dialectically, we can dismantle opposing ideologies and philosophies with the help of dialectics, but we do not approach our organization, the history of the communist movement in Germany, internationally and the world, or the question of cadre development with the help of dialectics.

How can this be and why does this keep happening?

If a development occurs again and again in various places and over more than 150 years, it obviously cannot only be due to subjective weaknesses such as an “ideological level that is too low” etc.

There must also be objective reasons why we as communists often do not apply the dialectic to ourselves, contrary to our rational knowledge.

Sometimes you can see the splinter in the other person's eye more easily than the log in front of your own head.

The Marxist philosopher Hans Heinz Holz, who died in 2011, wrote, among other things, a monumental philosophical presentation of dialectics in 5 volumes.

In the 2nd

In this volume, while analyzing Catholic scholasticism, he casually highlights the core problem of the theoretical development of the world communist movement: “A dogma is nothing other than a theoretical structure that is characterized by a high degree of consistency of its components, by a coherent and coherent construction and by the ability to integrate foreign elements through assimilation (interpretation).

There is no culture that is not based on dogmatic assumptions and guidelines; That's just their tradition, the (classic) quote is its indication.

Once the foundations of a worldview have been validly formulated, these formulations can be referred to again and again.

It would make no sense to reformulate them over and over again for the sake of individual originality.

However, they can be interpreted as meanings.” 3 A theoretically coherent worldview is based on written texts that are no longer questioned as the basis of teaching.

Holz's allusion to the classic quote rightly points out that Marxism-Leninism also represents a worldview that is based on such a written culture.

A scribal scholarship has far-reaching effects on the cultural identity of a movement as well as on the way of education and the theory production based on it, including the fact that it goes through certain stages of development: "The first phase of a cultural age is always determined by the determination of the coordinates that define the field of knowledge; this was done for the Middle Ages by the church fathers who developed the dogmatic core.

In the second phase, the marked field is explored; it is the time for quoting and repeating [= practicing by repeating; learn] ; The monastery and cathedral schools fulfilled this task until the universities were founded.

The third phase is then filled with the restlessness of further questioning, (…) the great thinkers of the 12th and 13th centuries.

Century are the bearers of this thought movement.

Finally, the systematic unity of the worldview collapses and the paradigm shift is in preparation; the nominalism 4 of the late Middle Ages is an expression of this last phase.” 5 If we apply this analysis to ourselves as a historical analogy, it becomes understandable what challenge the epochal break of 1989/91 represented for the world communist movement - and why it largely failed because of it.

At this point in time at the latest, Marxism-Leninism had to be renewed due to the changes in class society, as the dogmatic core of the teaching, the classics, was no longer sufficient to provide answers to all questions and challenges by quoting.

But exactly in the second one described by Holz above.

phase as a written culture, the time of repetition and quotation, Marxism-Leninism as a worldview essentially became stuck.

In my opinion, it was not simply the “stupidity” or “dogmatism” of the K groups that led to many negative phenomena such as strong sectarianism.

Rather, dogmatism itself came from the history of the development of the communist worldview.

Ultimately, a strong external impetus was needed to initiate the dialectical leap into the third stage of questioning and further thinking after 1989.

That is why “K-group bashing” that remains at the appearance level leads to a theoretical dead end in the tradition of the anti-capitalist movement after 1980.

In my opinion, the first three contributions are still influenced by this tradition, which has been rooted in the political resistance movement for over four decades, even though the authors are seriously trying to find a theoretical renewal and practical solution to our problems. In 2021/2022, the text 'The Necessity of Reorganization' 6 was published in the Marxist-Leninist newspaper 'Marksist Teori', which analyzes the crisis of the world communist movement in the 1990s with a focus on Turkey and Kurdistan.

This analysis penetrates to the essence of the existential crisis of the international communist movement. “ Whether revolutionary or reformist, whether they fought for socialism or represented it only in words, whether they recognized the structural crisis or not - all parties and organizations that strived for socialism were pushed into the maelstrom of reorganization by changing historical conditions.

Because they operated with the ideological, theoretical, programmatic, strategic, tactical and organizational foundations that had been formed under the outdated historical conditions.

However, the new historical conditions that emerged required - whether they became the object of conscious and willful orientations or not - a renewal whose scope ranged from the socialist ideological arguments to the Marxist theoretical understanding, from the analysis of imperialist globalization to the lessons of the defeat of socialism, from the perspectives of world and regional revolution to the strategy of the united revolution in Turkey and Kurdistan, from women's liberation to the nature of political struggle, from the frontal alliances to the organizational units, from the forms of struggle to the party structure.” 7 The existential crisis of the communist movement in Germany took different forms, but the three possible reactions identified in the text (dogmatism, the path to the right by abandoning the revolutionary compass and comprehensive renewal) also existed here.

The fact that this is a general law of development becomes clear, among other things, from the fact that these behavioral patterns also appeared in the armed fighting organizations in Western Europe.

A comprehensive renewal of one's own foundations is a complex process for every movement and organization.

The lower the quantity and quality of the movement - and in Germany the communist movement fell to a historic low after the annexation of the GDR - the more difficult and lengthy the laborious development of a comprehensive reorganization will be. 35 years later we can at least say that we have avoided the first cliffs on this long journey, albeit with difficulty and with a lot of luck.

And if the rebirth of the communist movement in this country actually represents a certain peculiarity in Europe, then that has something to do with that.

Revolution in the imperialist center – but how?

In addition to the legacy of a written culture and the huge challenge of fundamental renewal that the objectively changed social conditions are forcing upon us, there is another “little thing”.

There has never been a successful revolution in an imperialist country and there is nothing in the written foundations of our worldview about how one could be brought about.

We are not the first to ponder this problem, but a solution has not yet been developed.

But at least in the dispute on the III.

World Congress of the KomIntern on the so-called offensive theory on the occasion of the rather botched, because voluntaristic, uprising in Central Germany in 1921, raised the right questions by Clara Zetkin and Lenin. 8 Lenin and Zetkin formed an alliance at that time and were on the right wing of the KomIntern and KPD.

It was largely thanks to Lenin's authority that the ComIntern adopted Resolution 9, which he himself had drafted and which rejected the offensive theory.

Instead, the focus on conquering hegemony among the majority of the working class was established as a necessary precondition for the transition to revolutionary offensives.

In her memoirs of conversations with Lenin, Zetkin makes the central argument for this: “Bela Kun overlooked what many of you overlook, namely, that the power of a revolutionary party varies depending on the size, age and historical tradition of the proletariat in individual countries.

In states with a thin, small layer of a young proletariat with no historical tradition, an ideologically and organizationally solid, well-disciplined minority can pull the proletarian masses along relatively quickly and easily.

But things are completely different in countries with a very numerous, old proletariat that still has a head full of bourgeois views and many years of political training and tradition. 10 Lenin himself fought vehemently for this resolution in 1921.

His assessment sounds all the more surprising a year later: “On the III.

At the 1921 Congress we adopted a resolution on the organizational structure of the communist parties and on the methods and content of their work.

This resolution is excellent, but it is almost distinctly Russian, i.e. everything is taken from Russian conditions.

My impression is that we have made a big mistake with this resolution, namely that we have blocked our own path to further progress.

As I said, the resolution is excellent, I sign all of its 50 or more paragraphs.

But we didn't understand how to approach foreigners with our Russian experience.

Everything said in the resolution has remained a dead letter.

We Russians must look for ways to make the principles of this resolution clear to foreigners.

Otherwise they are absolutely unable to carry out this resolution.

In the period that is now beginning we are learning in a general sense.

They, on the other hand, must learn in a special sense in order to truly understand the organization, structure, method and content of revolutionary work.” 11 Every word was right and we made a big mistake - anyone who does not understand opposites as a dialectical contradiction will hardly be able to understand Lenin's statement.

But much more important than such philosophical considerations is the fact that this speaks to the core of the challenge for a revolutionary strategy in an imperialist country.

Of course, a revolutionary fighting organization is needed to defeat German imperialism and seize political power.

At the same time - at least at the decisive moment of the revolutionary crisis - you need the majority of the working class to rally behind the CP and go into civil war as a revolutionary mass action.

The only problem is that – unlike the young proletariat in Russia, or more precisely in Saint Petersburg and Moscow in October 1917 – you cannot simply drag the workers along.

In addition, they will probably still have a lot more to lose than their chains.

The same contradiction, let's say generalized between party and class, takes many other forms in imperialism.

Just a few are mentioned here as examples: the question of the military and political levels; the challenge of integrating cadres/professional revolutionaries and party members/activists to create a vibrant organizational framework; the contradiction of city versus country; the seemingly eternal battle between left-wing sectarianism, dogmatism and right-wing opportunism, pragmatism, which we as a historical movement feel like we repeat every ten years, etc.

However, as outlined above, these contradictions are a deeper-seated continuity that determine the nature of the development of the revolutionary and communist movement in Germany, where breaks in tradition at the appearance level also shape the image of history in the self-perception of the comrades.

Problems of operational strategy in general Does this now mean that a revolution in Germany is impossible?

Of course not, but it is already clear today that it cannot follow the pattern of the October Revolution.

Combining the contradictions of building a revolutionary fighting organization (whether in the form of a new type of party or another form of organization) and winning over the majority of the essentially non-revolutionary working class into a dialectical contradiction is the task that needs to be solved.

The unity and struggle of opposites, which depend on each other and whose “solution” lies not in the liquidation of one pole but in their development to the point of change, is the general answer that arises from the basic principles of dialectics.

Put so philosophically, it may sound acceptable.

As soon as this insight is transferred to the political level, it immediately becomes clear that it represents a break with the internalized traditions of the communist movement.

As far as I know, both Revolutionary Construction Switzerland (RAS) and KA have already formulated that the communists can and must only win hegemony among the majority of the working class in the imperialist center in the relatively short phase of the revolutionary crisis.

But this is far from overcoming the long-standing tradition of the fight for the right line, which historically has repeatedly expressed itself either in the fight against right-wing opportunism or against left-wing sectarianism and dogmatism.

Even if there are “left” and “right” deviations that must be fought ideologically, there is no one correct line, especially for the entire strategic stage up to the socialist revolution.

Rather, there are opposite poles that form, so to speak, the guard rails between which we have to constantly realign ourselves.

Sometimes the focus is more on party building, sometimes more on anchoring it in the working class; sometimes the focus is on legal political work, sometimes more on illegal and military work; sometimes we have to go more externally into the class, sometimes we have to concentrate on solving problems internally, etc.

But we may need to think much further and question whether there can only be one correct political line at a given moment.

Here is an example from practical mass work: In view of the rise of modern fascism, which is currently often linked to the growth of the AfD in Germany, there are two challenges in mass work beyond the political resistance movement.

On the one hand, we should work within the spectrum of bourgeois democrats who believe that something must be done against the development of the right.

According to a sociological study, this includes around 5 to 7 million people or 8% of those over 18 with German citizenship. 12 On the other hand, we cannot speak of anchoring in the working class if the AfD in eastern Germany has become the regional people's party with 35% to 40% and we do not steal a larger part of its mass base from it.

But can you address different parts of our class with opposite statements (Nazis are stupid for the bourgeois democrats and AfD supporters are not stupid and not all Nazis) at the same time with one organization?

This will be rather difficult and this problem can be generalized.

As communists, we must both recruit the next generation of cadres who will fight in illegality (and who already have to deal with the fact that they are being tortured and raped as internationalists and international delegates in Israel, Turkey and Syria) and address non-revolutionary parts of the class for whom this level of class war is unimaginably far removed from the reality of their lives.

Is an organization with five levels, like Lenin's in What to Do?! or does the model of a new type of party need to be expanded?

And if so, which modifications would make sense and where?

I don't have an answer to such questions either, but social life forces us as a communist movement to deal with them and find answers.

Specific operational strategy challenges I would now like to address five areas that I believe are at the heart of our current challenges: organizational structure; cadre development; the necessary anchoring in all parts of the class; the unresolved problem of the province and the question of preparation for the transition to illegality.

With regard to organizational structure, we see, on the one hand, red groups that, precisely because of their continuity and the development of a leading center within, stand out from the description of the circles that Lenin described in What to Do?! gives.

In my opinion, however, they still form a specific form of circularity with all its negative phenomena.

This form of organization of political groups emerged in Germany in the political resistance movement after the paradigm shift in 1980.

At that time the red decade ended and there was a pendulum swing to the opposite extreme.

Marxism as the scientific thought pattern that had shaped the anti-capitalist left after 1968 was replaced by a new worldview whose philosophical basis was subjective idealism.

Politically, the transition from the K groups to the anti-capitalist movement of the 1980s meant giving up the fight for the revolutionary end goal in favor of establishing social niches that were designed according to one's own ideas.

This paradigm shift encompassed all dimensions of politics: from historical and dialectical materialism to subjective idealism; from democratic centralism to grassroots democracy; from communist parties to social movements; from revolutionary cadres to political activists; from collective change in society under socialism to individual self-realization under capitalism; from the working class as a revolutionary subject to a multitude of oppressed groups as a point of reference for democratic and social struggles, etc.

It may be that the comrades in red groups dogmatically try to imitate some historical or international role models, as Malik L. writes.

In fact, in my observation, they are much more likely to reproduce the political group that emerged as the hegemonic, if not the only, form of organization in the anti-capitalist left after 1980.

On the other hand, there are also attempts to build a new type of party (which, in my opinion, the comrades wrongly see as party fetishism, even if the dangers and negative deviations they mention are real).

The problem is not that they are following the model of a new type of party and Lenin's What to do?! oriented, but in the fact that they actually stick to the model of a pyramid and thus the understanding of a CP or adopt it for themselves from the traditional body of written culture, as was the case in the 20th century.

century has been hegemonic.

Perhaps Lenin today would say, analogous to his remarks in 1922, every word in What to Do?! is true, but we, today's communists, must learn to really understand it and apply it to our conditions.

Both forms of organization that actually exist in the communist movement in Germany in 2026 are clearly lagging behind social development.

Capitalism has advanced two to three stages of development in companies with matrix organization (from the 1960s), project organization (from the turn of the millennium) and today flexible project organization.

Even if such comparisons should always be used with caution as analogies, it is clear that we have about half a century to catch up in organizational theory and the practice based on it.

We have to keep in mind that certain development stages probably cannot be skipped arbitrarily.

This is also supported by the observation that more and more groups are now taking the step towards more solid forms of organization, even if they do not refer to the model of the new type of party.

It seems to me that it was necessary to first have a relatively centralized pyramid form in order to step out of the limitations of the circular form of the anti-capitalist movement of the 1990s and 2000s, before one can develop more flexible (project) organizational forms in the next step, which is now pending.

In any case, the model of the party in the 21st century is

Century a sphere with a center and a periphery and no longer the hierarchical pyramid with a narrow top and a wide base with rigid and sometimes very slow communication channels.

When it comes to squad development, I find Malik L.’s thoughts in the “Short pause along the way” section to be correct and helpful.

We must apply the dialectic to ourselves and scientifically examine what makes us tick.

This includes a sober and honest analysis of how and why (young) people come to us today.

If subculturalization and social community form a central motivation for comrades to organize themselves among the communists - which seems to me to be the case - then it only helps to a limited extent that the leadership, as experience from history, wants to avoid the trap of “subculture”.

The rational insight and strategic orientation then comes into contradiction with the (psychological, emotional, cultural, etc.) needs of the comrades.

But it cannot be defined away or excluded; in case of doubt, life will always be stronger than theoretical orientations.

The same applies to the problem of activists being overloaded, especially in the guiding functions and levels.

This was already discussed intensively in the KomIntern and KPD at the end of the 1920s during the Bolshevization of the KPD, without the challenges being solved.

I don't have an answer to that either.

But what we can say today with historical experience is definitely that it is a simple “Keep it up!” is not allowed to give.

Because that would actually lead us directly into an existential crisis, despite the strong current growth.

The K groups can be a warning example here.

Its growth phase from 1969 to around 1975/76 was followed by a crisis that reached existential proportions within just two years.

In this respect, I would like to underline a thought from Malik L. - which sounds downright revolutionary for German communists: "What we overlook is that the direct influence on our education, the formation of our personality, is our organizations themselves with their culture, way of working, their structures, programs, the ethics they (often unconsciously) convey. (...) This can also mean the dismantling of organizational structures, forms or entire organizations." To make it clear: If we notice that we are repeating the proverbial hydrocephalus in civil organizations as a bureaucratic aberration at management levels, then dismantling structures is certainly not a bad idea.

Even if that may go against German national culture.

If our cadres secretly transform into busy multi-functional workers who can only cope with the workload through capitalist self-optimization for a while, only to end up in burnout, then perhaps we need to change the way we work rather than just adding more and more because “the revolution demands sacrifices”.

By the way, a party organization that resembles the image of a sphere instead of a pyramid would certainly help.

Because then management cadres would not be permanently stuck at one level (with the prospect of further advancement, which in the worst case almost seems like a threat), but would move flexibly back and forth between the periphery and the center.

Let us come to the necessary anchoring in all parts of the working class, which forms the current counterpart to the discussion about gaining hegemony in the (social democratic and therefore non-revolutionary) majority of the working class from the discussions in 1921/22.

In fact, we are currently witnessing a repetition of historical experiences live: While the “right” are more likely to push for an anchoring in the working class and are falling into classic back-stabbing politics and theorizing corresponding positions 13, the “left” tends to interpret the strong influx into their ranks as a success and to fall into “business as usual” along with the first hints of a new offensive theory.

Lenin also said in his speech at the III.

World Congress pointed out that communists always strategically work towards the offensive, i.e. not always and everywhere just running off based on their own strengths.

Of course, in the face of increasing repression, we need to become more militant, generally speaking.

But that doesn't mean that we should take the easy route (focus on recruiting young comrades to quickly build and expand the organization) as an apparent shortcut, because - and I absolutely agree with the three previous contributions - this will predictably lead to a dead end.

A revolutionary movement, which may be fighting in a few years under the conditions of a world war and possibly fascism, cannot be based on one or two generations and reproduce only from people between 15 and 35.

It is obviously not enough to activate, politicize and organize masses through activities (demos, events, etc.) if we have to strategically prepare for the fact that at some point this will no longer be possible as we know it today.

If we only train cadres as political activists who can organize activities, but are unable to move successfully in unknown terrain (e.g. in the workplace, among single parents, with families with children, in the provinces) and, above all, are not able to do 1:1 contact work with non-revolutionary to reactionary parts of the class, then we must fail in the next strategic stage.

Anchoring in all parts of the working class is already necessary today, not in order to win hegemony (as I said, this will only be possible in the revolutionary crisis), but in order to understand what makes the highly differentiated class tick in its various parts.

This is the only way we can bring communism into the classroom in contemporary forms.

This is the only way we can gain the trust of our class members across the board, instead of “just” picking up a few young people.

From the perspective of revolutionary strategy, the province in Germany is the tough nut to crack.

As a very rough approximation, one can say that Germany is roughly divided into three parts.

A third of the people (and therefore also the workers) live in the (big) city, the small towns, medium-sized centers and in the village.

The small and medium-sized towns, together with the village, form the vast area of ​​the province, the sea, so to speak, in which the cities lie like islands.

The counter-revolution has been systematically anchored in the provinces since 1918, as a simple look at the Bundeswehr locations shows.

The revolutionary years after 1918 empirically prove that in this country (in contrast to Russia in 1917 and possibly in contrast to France, which is much more centralized with the Île-de-France), it is not enough to gain the capital and other urban centers.

In addition to the geography, the quantity also speaks against it.

If over half of our class lives in the provinces, then the revolution will only succeed with them.

Here in particular you can learn something from the K groups, which carried out systematic agricultural work and had an even broader impact than we do today.

The alternative movement (anti-nuclear power plants, etc.) of the 1970s was also strongly linked to the province.

Everything that followed in the political resistance movement was urban in character.

The greatest feeling in relation to the urban-rural contradiction was that it radiated from the urban strongholds into the surrounding areas and young people moved to the city, to the centers of the groups and the “left-wing” districts.

Even if in 2026 the strong growth of the last four years leads to the emergence of red youth groups in small and medium-sized towns, this spontaneous process does not replace long-term work in the province.

As a social space, it is structured significantly differently than the city in which we move almost exclusively.

The village also has a different history, as farmers lived in the 19th century.

Century when owners (family farms) were integrated into capitalism.

This makes Germany very different from England as a classic country of capitalism, which Marx described in World War I.

The volume of capital was therefore chosen as the subject of investigation into original accumulation, as well as Russia, where the Bolsheviks achieved hegemony among the peasant masses in 1917 with the famous slogan “Land, Bread, Peace”.

In short: There is still a lot of real research work to be done here, rather than simply repeating general statements from political economy about the emergence of the doubly free wage worker.

There is not much to say about preparing for the illegality or the need to work undercover, which already exists today.

Except that it is absolutely necessary to start with it, as history teaches that the transition can be very abrupt and the timing is not determined by us.

You also don't learn certain things at your desk, but in practice.

A banal example: getting from A to B without Google maps or, generally speaking, starting a trip without a cell phone triggers uncertainty and even fear in quite a few comrades.

As with everything else in life, if you don't know or can't do something, it's better to try it out in small steps and with exercises where failure has no further consequences.

Above all, you should practice it before you rely on it to work in an emergency.

Organizationally, this raises many questions that are not as banal as the example.

Above all, covert work requires resources and these must be made available consciously, as they will probably never be found spontaneously in activist organizations.

A glimmer of hope There were a lot of topics, almost all of which I was only able to touch on very briefly.

Some questions are being worked on elsewhere, and some topics can perhaps be discussed in greater depth publicly.

In any case, I would be happy if the article could contribute to a serious debate about our challenges in times of crisis and war.

In this respect, I am looking forward to your criticisms, comments and refutations.

Finally, I would like to share an observation that may not occur to younger comrades.

People often complain about our marginalized position in society, talk about the danger of failure, etc.

I experienced the time of apparent hopelessness after the epochal break in 1989/91 and back then you had to look for communists in Germany with a magnifying glass.

Compared to that, we are a “big” movement today.

But something else is more important than the positive quantitative development of the last few years.

I see a new quality emerging that is often still difficult to grasp.

But, among other things, this debate initiated by Lower Class Magazine, as well as similar initiatives in different structures and in different places, show that we are moving forward on the right path to the renewal of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism.

More and more younger comrades are no longer satisfied with the traditional traditions, the inherited written culture, the old textbooks, etc.

They question the traditional and seek out the new.

Today we are discussing subculturalization, identity, cadre development and other pressing questions.

This shows that, although not yet quantitatively, we are already making qualitative progress in some, perhaps even some, central elements than the KPD and K groups have reached in their development.

Of course, there is a risk that we will repeat history as a farce if we only quote instead of thinking for ourselves.

But above all, I see the opportunity that, learning from history, we will solve questions about the revolution in the imperialist center that no one has yet answered.

With this in mind: let us approach the tasks before us with revolutionary optimism.

You can find the previous debate contributions here: If things are to go further - A criticism of anti-revisionism in the communist movement If things are to go further, then with a keen eye on history - A response to David Meyn's anti-revisionism criticism The communists are finally back, but headless See the comments below on the offensive theory and winning hegemony in the majority of the working class ︎ Gisela Dutzi and edition cimarron, 1.

Edition 2026, Politicization, resistance, urban guerrilla in the 1970-80s in the metropolis, The subjective side - from the perspective of activists ︎ Hans Heinz Holz, 2011, Dialectics of problem history from antiquity to the present, Volume II Middle Ages, Scientific Book Society Darmstadt, p. 388 ︎ Nominalism was a philosophical current of late scholasticism in which the function of logical characters (language or

Terms, numbers) was the focus. ︎ ibid., p 408f ︎ https://www.marksistteori6.org/128-marksist-teori/sayi-50-eylul-ekim-2021/1070-yeniden-yap-lanma-zorunlulugu-ve-uec-farkl-yoenelim.html ︎ Marksist Teori, The need for reorganization; own translation ︎ A good summary of the dispute can be found in the section “Offensive Theory – The ideological struggles in the KPD and the III.

World Congress of the CI (1921)" in the recently published book History of the Communist and Workers' Movement in Germany, Volume 1: 1800-1956, Authors' Collective Class Education, Roter Stern Verlag ︎ Lenin, 1921, Speech in Defense of the Tactics of the Communist International, 1.

July 1921, Lenin Works Volume 32, pp. 491-500 ︎ Zetkin, letter to Lenin from April 14, 1921, quoted from: Letters from Germans to Lenin, Dietz Verlag 1990, p. 230 ︎ Lenin (1922): Five years of the Russian Revolution and the prospects of the world revolution, speech at the IV.

World Congress of the KomIntern, LW Vol. 33, p. 416 ︎ Matthias Quendt, No power of powerlessness - How we overcome crises and defend ourselves against fascism, Piper Verlag 2026 ︎ See the positions of Arbeit Zukunft / DIDF and the International Youth Association as well as the recent split from the Red Construction Hamburg, which recently published its first organizing text as the Communist Workers' Organization Hamburg 'The fight for peace - About the tasks and mistakes of the communists in the peace question and the necessity of the united front for peace in the Federal Republic of Germany' ︎ The article Turning the debate from its head to its feet - Thoughts on some of the challenges of the communist movement in Germany appeared first on Lower Class Magazine.