The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Spartakusbund not rejected participation in elections? Even though Rosa Luxemburg disagreed with the majority
on this point, she defended an anti-unionist line:
“… [the unions] are no longer workers’ organisations; they are the most solid defenders of the state and
bourgeois society. Consequently it follows that the struggle for socialisation must entail the struggle to destroy
the unions. We are all agreed on this point.” 404
At the beginning the Komintern allowed within its ranks revolutionary-syndicalist militants, such as the IWW,
which rejected parliamentarism as well as the activity of the old unions. But these last ones rejected political
activity in principle and so also the need for a political party of the proletariat. This was not true of the militants
of the communist left, who moreover were usually hostile to the revolutionary-syndicalist current and who
opposed the latter’s admission into the International. 405
It was during 1919 that a communist current of the left, with a political, rather than a Unionist basis, was really
formed in the developed countries. The electoral question was the key question for the left in some countries. In
March 1918, the polish Communist Party – which was the descendant of the SDKPiL of Rosa Luxemburg and
Leo Jogisches – boycotted the elections. In Italy, the Naples Il Soviet was published on 22 nd December 1918,
edited by Amadeo Bordiga. In contrast with Gramsci and his syndicalist current, which defended participation in
elections, Bordiga’s current defended communist abstentionism with a view to eliminating the reformists in the
Italian socialist party and in order to form a “pure communist party”. 406 Formally the abstentionist communist
fraction of the PSI was formed in October 1919. In Britain Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation
declared itself against “revolutionary” parliamentarism in order to avoid “wasting energy”. 407 In Belgium the
‘De Internationale’ group of Flanders and War van Overstraeten’s group were against electoralism. 408 The
situation was the same in the more ‘peripheral’ countries. At the Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party in
May 1919 a strong minority distinguished itself in condemning parliamentary action in principle. 409
404 Quoted by A. Prudhommeaux, Spartacus et la Commune de Berlin 1918-1919 (Paris: ed. Spartacus, 1967), p. 55.
405 Bordiga was a very strong partisan of this separation between the political International and the International of economic
organisations. Only in 1920 did the Komintern accept within its ranks not only communist parties but also national and
regional unions, based on job description and industry. This lasted until the Red Union International (Profintern) was set up.
The KAPD wanted to set up an international of work-place organisations alongside the Communist International: these were
to have a political basis of antiparliamentarism, destruction of the counter-revolutionary unions, workers’ councils,
destruction of the capitalist state.
406 Letter of the abstentionist fraction of the PSI to the Moscow Committee of the 3 rd International, 10 th November 1919, in:
Invariance, No. 7, 1969.
407 S. Pankhurst, Communist thought and action in the III. International, published in Bordiga’s II Soviet, Napoli 20 th Sept.
1919.
408 War van Overstraeten (1891-1981), painter. Initially an anarchist, during the war he became the editor of the newspaper
of the Jeunes gardes socialistes: the Zimmerwaldian Le Socialisme. He was involved in the formation of the Communist
Group of Brussels in 1919, which was to publish L’Ouvrier communiste (De Kommunistische Arbeider in Flemish) on the
1 st March 1920. At the Second Congress of the Komintern he supported Bordiga’s anti-parliamentarian theses. He was one
of the main founders of the Belgian CP in November 1920, to which the Flemish Federation adhered in December (De
Internationale). At the 3 rd Congress of the Komintern his positions were very close to those of the KAPD. The Komintern
pressured him into accepting the “centrist” group ‘Les Amis de l’Exploité’ of Joseph Jacquemotte (1883-1936) and Charles
Massart in September 1921 at the unification congress (for the 1921 Congress, cf. Documents sur la fondation du parti
communiste de Belgique, reprinted in: Cahiers marxistes, Brussels, 1971). Unlike Bordiga he continued to defend
antiparliamentary positions. He was hostile to ‘mass’ parties and to ‘Bolshevisation’ and in 1927 took part in the ‘Groupe
unifié de l’Opposition’. He was excluded with the Opposition in 1929 and became close to Hennaut’s Ligue des
communistes internationalistes (LCI), which was founded in 1931 after the separation between it and the trotskyist wing. In
Spain from 1931 to 1935, he was in contact with the groups of the communist left. He afterwards withdrew from all political
involvement.
409 A strong opposition was formed in 1919 within the Bulgarian CP around Ivan Ganchev, editor of Rabotnitcheski Vestnik,
Pavel Deliradev, Nikolai Kharlakov (?-1927) – an old leader of a splitting group dissident from the ‘tesnyaki’ in 1905,
which had reintegrated the party –, and Ivan Kolinkoev. Ivan Ganchev, a brillant intellectual and journalist, took on the task
of translating into Bulgarian a number of Gorter’s works.
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