The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

In fact, it was not the GIC, but the Communistenbond Spartacus – a split from the important Sneevliet group –
which in 1942 assumed the political continuity with the Dutch Communist Left, prompting former members of
the GIC to merge with it. The “Spartacus” group was the only Dutch internationalist group which, from 1942 to
1945, carried out a continuous and organised activity against the world war, and against both military camps.
However, its links with the tradition of the German communist left (KAPD) were renewed only briefly, and the
Communistenbond soon adopted the “councilist” positions of the old GIC. Organised in federalist and
autonomous work groups, but also demoralised by the period after the war, in which the revolution had not
appeared, the Bond lost all the influence it had gained with a part of the Dutch proletariat. From being
numerically the most important revolutionary group in 1945, the Communistenbond transformed itself into a
“councilist” sect restricted to the Netherlands. With its disappearance in the 1970s, the Dutch councilist
movement in practice disappeared.
As an old current, connected to Dutch and German council communism, “councilism” had ceased to exist. There
is no longer an historical council communist current today. The “councilist” groups which appeared in the 1970s,
in Scandinavia or other countries, disappeared as quickly as they had emerged. Those councilist groups which
may continue to exist, or which may appear in the future in the form of study circles, are in fact closer to
anarchism than to the tradition of Dutch council communism.
The lack of knowledge about the Dutch Communist Left today is not solely due to the geographical framework
in which it developed. For nearly 60 years, the movement which Lenin termed “leftist” fell into oblivion. Very
few historians of the workers’ movement recalled that German-Dutch Communist Left had had the “honour” –
with the “bordigist” left – to be the target of Lenin’s 1920 polemic Left-Wing Communism: an infantile disorder.
The once celebrated names of Gorter and Pannekoek were now only known by rare specialists of the history of
the Communist International. Occasionally referred to in the notes of Lenin’s collected – incomplete – works,
these names were now the target of the translators’ invective who were careful to keep silent on the activities of
the theoreticians of the German-Dutch Communist Left after 1921. In the Netherlands itself, the name of Gorter
was only remembered as the great poet which he had been at the end of the last century. That of Pannekoek was
only mentioned in reviews and specialist works of astronomy.
It was above all the period after May ‘68 which allowed the rediscovery of the existence of the Communist Left
both in Germany and The Netherlands. In many countries, from the USA to Mexico, in Argentina and in
Germany, France and Italy, in Scandinavia, the reprints of the principal texts of Gorter and Pannekoek
multiplied.
References to the workers’ councils, before and after 1968, by the situationists and “councilists”, but also by
groups which claimed descent from the Communist Left, gave them a great importance. These groups, often
born in the student protests, showed a renewed interest in the left communism of the 1920s. The rise of vast
social movements in the European countries, at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, pushed a
number of militants from post-’68 – this was also the case with several rare historians of the workers’ movement
– to study this little known history. The rejection of parliamentarism and of the union apparatus by these
militants led them to take up again the thread of this history. A radical critique of the left parties, in particular the
stalinist communist parties, was all the more possible as the myth of the existence of “socialist states”, like
Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, lost its strength. The social movements in the state capitalist countries of the
Russian glacis – like Poland in 1970, 1976 and 1980 – the ideological and theoretical critique of state capitalism
in all countries created a favourable climate for the rediscovery of the German (the Communist Workers’ Party
or KAPD) and Dutch Communist Left of the 1920s. This left unknown only the history of the GIC and of the
Dutch Spartacusbond, in the Netherlands.
Several pioneering studies have provided at least a sketch of the history of Gorter and Pannekoek’s current, but
only for the period of the 1920s, and within the framework of a history of the KAPD and of the German Unionen
movement. Some examples are the books of Hans-Manfred Bock and Frits Kool, which do not, however really
interest themselves in the origins of the Dutch Communist Left, and even less in its evolution during the 1930s.
In France, the publication of a collection of texts by Pannekoek, translated, selected and annotated by the council
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