German Communism, Workers' Protest, and Labor Unions - The Politics of the United Front in Rhineland-Westphalia 1920-1924 (Hardcover, 1993 ed.)

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."

General

Imprint:	Springer
Country of origin:	Netherlands
Series:	Studies in Social History, 14
Release date:	February 1993
First published:	1993
Authors:	Larry Peterson
Dimensions:	235 x 155 x 31mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	551
Edition:	1993 ed.
ISBN-13:	978-0-7923-2111-8
Categories:	Books > Humanities > History > World history > 1750 to 1900 Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Industrial relations & safety > Industrial relations > Trade unions Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
LSN:	0-7923-2111-1
Barcode:	9780792321118

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!