German Communism, Workers' Protest, and Labor Unions

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.

Larry Peterson is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Chair from 2003-2009. He is a co-author of the best-selling networking textbook Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (6e), which is now available as open source on GitHub. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and operation of Internet-scale distributed systems, including the widely used PlanetLab and MeasurementLab platforms. He is currently working on a new access edge cloud called CORD, an open source project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), where he serves the CTO. Professor Peterson is a former Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and served as program chair for SOSP, NSDI, and HotNets. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACMSIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D.from Purdue University in 1985.O-uz Sunay is currently the Vice President for Research & Development at ONF, where he leads all mobile-related projects. Prior to that, he served as the Chief Architect for Mobile Networking at ONF. Before joining ONF, O-uz was the CTO at Argela-USA, where he was the innovator of a Programmable Radio Access Network Architecture (ProgRAN) for 5G that enabled the world's first dynamically programmable RAN slicing solution. He has also held prior industry positions at Nokia Research Center and Bell Laboratories, where he focused on 3Gand 4G end-to-end systems architectures and participated and chaired various standardization activities. O-uz has also spent over 10 years in academia, as a professor of electrical and computer engineering. He holds many U.S. and European patents on various aspects of 3G, 4G, and 5G, and has authored numerous journal and conference publications. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. from Queen's University, Canada, and his B.Sc.Hon from METU, Turkey.

1: Labor Unions and the German Left before 1920.- One: The KPD, the Labor Unions, and Economic Movements in Rhineland-Westphalia, 1920-1924.- 2: The Unified KPD's Offensive in the Labor Unions and the March Action: Brithpangs of an Industrial Strategy.- 3: Heran an die Massen! The United Front in the Unions.- 4: Hyperinflation, Rank-and-File Action, and Revolutionary Politics.- 5: 1923: The Almost Revolution.- 6: The Crisis of the Unions and the KPD.- Two: Structure, Organization, and Political Program.- 7: The Social Structure of the Communist Opposition.- 8: The Industrial Road to Revolution.- 9: Rank-and-File Organization.- 10: Social Transformation of the Unions.- 11: The United Front.- Notes.