The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

From now on, parliament and unions expressed the “power of the leaders” over the “masses” – a somewhat
idealist terminology which evaded the fundamental question: what was the internal functioning, ‘the leaders’, or
the very structure of the unions which had become inappropriate to the revolutionary struggle? This
terminological confusion was sharply criticised by Lenin.
In Left Wing Communism, Lenin argued that it was necessary to use all available means, even the most
underhand, to penetrate the unions and take them over. He put them on the same level as the Zubatov
movement 505 in 1905, which the workers had joined: “We must be able... – if need be – to resort to various
stratagems, artifices, illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges, only so as to get into the trade unions, to
remain in them, and to carry on communist work within them at all costs.” 506
The response of the Dutch left was neither moral nor moralistic, but historical. The situation in 1920 was no
longer that of 1905. The unions in Germany, the most representative country in Western Europe, had gone over
to the bourgeoisie, and the only working class thing about them was the blood on their hands. It was not just a
question of ‘bad leaders’ – the union’s basic structures had participated in the repression of the revolution in
Germany in 1919:
“Recall in your mind, Comrade [Lenin], how things were in Germany, before and during the war. The Trade
Unions, the far too weak but only means, were entirely in the hands of the leaders, who used them as dead
machines on behalf of capitalism. Then the revolution broke out. The Trade Unions were used by the leaders and
the masses of members as a weapon against the revolution. It was through their help, through their cooperation,
through their leaders, nay, partly even through their members that the revolution was murdered. The
Communists saw their own brothers being shot with the cooperation of the Trade Unions. Strikes in favour of the
revolution were prevented, rendered impossible. Do you hold it possible, Comrade [Lenin], that under such
conditions revolutionary workers should remain in these unions? Especially when these latter are utterly
inadequate instruments for the revolution!” 507
In the revolutionary period, there are no longer any ‘apolitical’ or ‘neutral’ trade unions which limit themselves
to economic action on behalf of their members. “Every trade union, indeed every workers’ grouping, plays the
role of a political party for or against the revolution”. Unlike the Italian Left, which called for a “trade union
united front” while rejecting the “political united front”, the Dutch left rejected any kind of ‘frontism’.
The unions, originally “the natural organs for the unification of the proletariat” had gradually been transformed
into anti-working class organisations. Their bureaucratisation, the domination over the workers by an apparatus
of functionaries, corresponded to their semi-fusion with the state. The unions behaved like the capitalist state by
using their ‘law’ (rules, statutes) and naked force to crush any revolt against their ‘order’.
505 Sergei Zubatov (1863-1917), since 1895 head of the Moscow section of Okhrana, set up trade unions (as the Mutual
Assistance League of Workers in the Mechanical Industry) in order to push workers into conflicts with the private factory
owners instead of confrontations with the state. This attempt by the Okhrana to entrap the workers was short-lived; the
Zubatovist association disappeared in 1903.
506 Lenin, Left Wing Communism, 1965, Peking Edition, pp. 46-47.
507 Gorter, op. cit., pp. 434-435.
On the repression carried out by the German trade unions along with the ‘Freikorps’ in January 1919, see Illustrierte
Geschichte der Deutschen Revolution (Berlin: Internationaler Arbeiter-Verlag, 1929), p. 278. The social democratic and
union functionary Baumeister, and the editor of Vorwärts, Erich Kuttner (1887-1942), formed the Reichstag regiment
composed of Social Democrats, who alongside Noske’s Freikorps took part in the bloody crushing of the revolutionary
workers. From 1921 to 1933 he was SPD’s M.P.
[Kuttner, in Feb. 1933, went underground, soon forced to emigrate to the Netherlands; despite of his past, he became
member of the Gruppe Revolutionäre Sozialisten (left socialists of ‘Neu Beginnen’) in Amsterdam; took part in the Spanish
Civil War as a correspondent; wrote studies on German cultural and Dutch social history. Discovered by the Gestapo in
1942, he had been sent to Mauthausen, where he was executed. He is best known today for his book on the Dutch
revolutionary proletariat during the 1566 Dutch revolution: Das Hungerjahr 1566 (published in Dutch translation in 1949:
Het Hongerjaar 1566). In the writing of this book, he used the first Marxist rough outline of Sam de Wolff on the question,
from 1906, published in De Nieuwe Tijd, ‘Het proletariaat in de begin jaren van de strijd tegen Spanje’]
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