The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

ended up joining the Third International in April 1919. Rutgers was associated to the work of the Executive
Committee.
The left currents in the Komintern (Communist International) in 1919.
The left developed in the Third International during 1919 because of the influence of the German revolution. For
all the left currents this represented the beginning of the proletarian movement in western industrialised Europe.
In spite of the defeat suffered in Berlin in January 1919 when the proletariat was crushed by the Social
Democratic government of Noske and Scheidemann, the world revolution had never seemed so close. A republic
of soviets had been established in Hungary as well as Bavaria. The situation in Austria remained revolutionary.
Large mass strikes were shaking Britain and were breaking out in Italy. Even the American continent was shaken
by the revolutionary wave from Seattle to Buenos Aires. 401 The proletariat in the most developed countries was
on the move. Revolutionaries thought that the seizure of power would take place in the near future, so it was
necessary to examine what tactic should be adopted in the central capitalist countries where the revolution would
be more purely proletarian than in Russia.
The revolutionary wave, in other words the experience of the workers themselves when confronted with the
state, demanded a change in tactic because it marked the end of the peaceful period of capitalism’s growth. All
the revolutionary currents recognised the validity of the theses of the First Congress of the 3 rd International:
“1. The present period is one of the decomposition and collapse of the whole capitalist system internationally
and it will mean the collapse of European civilisation in general if capitalism, with its insoluble contradictions, is
not overthrown.
“2. The task of the proletariat now is to seize state power. Taking state power means destroying the bourgeois
state apparatus and organising a new apparatus of proletarian power. 402
In the new period it was the practice of the workers themselves that called into question the old parliamentary
and Unionist tactics. The Russian proletariat dissolved parliament after it had taken power and in Germany a
significant mass of workers pronounced in favour of boycotting the elections in December 1918. In Russia and
Germany the council form appeared as the only form for the revolutionary struggle, replacing the union
structure. But the class struggle in Germany had also revealed an antagonism between the proletariat and the
unions. When the unions had participated in the bloody repression of January 1919 and political organs of
struggle emerged – the Unions (AAU) – the slogan was not to re-conquer the old unions but to destroy them. 403
By founding the Komintern on the programmes of both the German CP and the Bolsheviks, the new
International in fact accepted the anti-parliamentary and anti-union left currents. Had the Congress of the
401 The IWW led the Seattle strike which spread to Vancouver and Winnipeg, in Canada. In the same year, 1919, powerful
strikes broke out among the metalworkers of Pennsylvania. These strikes were fought by the unions and harshly repressed
by the police of the bosses and the federal government. In Argentina, dozens of workers were killed during the ‘bloody
week’ in Buenos Aires. At the extreme south of the continent, the agricultural workers of Patagonia were savagely
repressed. For the USA, see J. Brecher, Streiks und Arbeiterrevolten, pp. 195-129 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
1975).
402 Letter of invitation to the Congress, in: P. Broué, op. cit., p. 40.
403 The first union (AAU) that was not anarcho-syndicalist – as they were in the Ruhr – appeared in Bremen in autumn 1919.
Its publication Kampfruf, Flugzeitung für die revolutionäre Betriebsorganisation stated clearly that it did not want to
“become a new union”. The AAU of Bremen declared itself “in favour of the seizure of political power” and denounced the
syndicalists as “enemies of the political dictatorship of the proletariat” (Kampfruf No. 1, 15 Oct. 1919, Was ist die AAU?).
The doctorate these of Hans Bötcher, written in 1919-21, gives impressive information on the birth of the German Unionen
and also on the American IWW. See: Zur revolutionären Gewerkschaftsbewegung in Amerika, Deutschland und England
(Jena: Verlag Gustav Fischer, 1922).
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