The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The unions also resemble the state and its bureaucracy in this, that despite the democratic regime they boast of,
the union members have no way of imposing their will on the leaders; an ingenious system of rules and statutes
stifles the least revolt before it can threaten the higher levels.
Just like the capitalist state, the unions could not be conquered: they had to be destroyed. Any idea of
‘reconquering’ the unions or transforming them into ‘communist organs’ was the worst kind of reformist
illusion. In several places Gorter compared Lenin to Bernstein. Lenin’s tactic of forming a communist opposition
in the unions was a non-sense, because “the bureaucracy knows perfectly well how to strangle an opposition
before it becomes a threat”. In the absurd hypothesis of the opposition taking over the leadership by chasing out
the bad leaders’, it would then start behaving exactly like them: “Replace the bureaucracy of the old unions with
new personnel and in no time at all you will see that the latter will take on the same features which elevated
them, distanced them and detached them from the masses. 99% of them will become tyrants, serving alongside
the bourgeoisie.” 508
It was not therefore the content of the union organisation that was bad (‘bad leaders’ and ‘labour aristocracy’ in
Lenin’s conception) but the very form of organisation, which “reduced the masses to impotence”. The revolution
was thus not a question of injecting a new, revolutionary content into the old forms of proletarian organisation.
In the view of the communist left, form could not be separated from its revolutionary content. Form was not a
matter of indifference. 509 In this sense, the revolution was also a question of the form of organisation, as much as
a question of content – of the development of class consciousness.
This form could only be, in a revolutionary period, the workers’ councils, or more precisely, the factory
organisations. The latter were a step beyond the corporatism of the old professional unions and were the only
basis for the unity of the working class. Their ‘men of confidence’, in contrast to the practice of the unions, were
revocable at any time. On this point the Dutch left was simply taking up the Russian example, where it was the
factory-based councils and not the unions who had carried out the revolution. However, certain statements by the
Dutch Left gave rise to ambiguities and revealed a lack of coherence:
– while preaching the destruction of the unions, it asserted that the councils would provide “the basis for new
unions”;
– it confused the German Unionen with the factory assemblies that were part of the structure of the workers’
councils;
– it vaunted the example of the American IWW, a form of revolutionary syndicalism, and the British Shop
Stewards’ Movement, despite rejecting any trade union form;
– it advocated a form of factoryism in which the factory was everything: “the revolution in the West can only be
organised on the basis of the factories and in the factories”; the question of forming territorial organs that go
beyond the framework of the factory was not raised.
508 H. Gorter, Offener Brief an den Genossen Lenin (Hamburg: Verlag Association, 1974), p. 37.
William Gallacher was leader of the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC), and in his role as CWC chairman was imprisoned
for sedition in 1916 and again for incitement to riot after the events of Bloody Friday in 1919. At the Second Congress of
the Komintern, he illustrated from his own experience as a worker the vacuity of the tactic of ‘entryism’ in the old unions:
“We have worked in the British unions for 25 years without managing to revolutionise them from the inside. Every time we
succeeded in getting one of our comrades to be a union leader, it turned out that instead of there being a change of tactic, the
union corrupted our comrade ... It is thus as senseless to talk about conquering the unions as about conquering the capitalist
state” [Der Zweite Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale (Hamburg: Carl Hoym, 1921), pp. 627-629]. Later on
Gallacher renounced his revolutionary positions. He was elected as Communist MP for West Dunfermline in 1935 and
remained one until 1950. From 1943 to 1965, he was the official ‘president’ of the CPGB.
509 This is not what the ‘bordigist’ current thought, in the 70s. In: Programme communiste, No. 56, 1972 (‘Marxisme contre
idéalisme, ou le parti contre les sectes’), the ‘bordigists’ said, “Marxism never theorises a form of organisation as being
‘the’ revolutionary form which by nature will serve the insurrection and the seizure of power. In 1871 it was the Commune;
in 1917, the soviets; in Italy, the “labour centres” could have done the same job”.
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