The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

ourgeoisie in general, does not constitute a veritable class, but a collection of heterogeneous strata, oscillating
between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. If history is punctuated by innumerable peasant revolts, they have
never resulted in a peasant revolution building its own state. Marxism recognises only two forms of state under
capitalism, the bourgeois state and the transitional state, under proletarian control. The proletarian revolution can
degenerate, until it disappears, but in no case can it be transformed into a bourgeois revolution. All the Marxists
of the time, Gorter and Pannekoek included, had insisted, with Rosa Luxemburg, that the era of bourgeois
revolutions was over. But they never envisaged the possibility of a ‘petty-bourgeois’ revolution. As for the pettybourgeois
character of the Komintern, it seemed difficult to imagine that the petty-bourgeoisie, a collection of
strata attached to their own nation, could devote themselves to an international. It is true that the Komintern was
to lend credit to this idea, which was ‘new’ to the Marxist camp, by forming a peasants’ International. 593
A more serious discussion on the Russian question developed in the KAPD, in preparation for the party’s
extraordinary congress. It brought out a pamphlet, written by a member of the central committee, the young
Doctor Adolf Dethmann 594 responsible for the ‘Party scientific School’, and linked to the Schröder and Gorter
fraction: ‘The Soviet government and the Third International, in tow to the international bourgeoisie’. The
pamphlet was brought out in August which left little time to discuss it seriously before the congress in
September and was translated into Dutch by Gorter. It served as a basic reference for the whole left communist
current, from the Dutch to the Bulgarians. Gorter made extensive use of its theses to lay the foundations of the
KAI. 595
To explain the counter-revolutionary course followed by the state and applied by the Bolshevik Party, the KAPD
pamphlet defined the Russian revolution as a dual revolution: bourgeois and proletarian at the same time. This
theory, which was widely taken up and developed by the ‘bordigist’ current after 1945 596 , could be based on
texts by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which implicitly attributed a dual nature to the revolution: ‘bourgeois
democratic’ and ‘proletarian’. 597 The revolution was a dual one because, on the one hand it suppressed feudalism
to introduce capitalism to the countryside; on the other, the proletariat suppressed capitalism in the towns: “The
593 A peasant ‘International’ was founded in October 1923. Called the Crestintern, it was used to practice the united front
with bourgeois parties influential among the peasantry of under-developed countries.
594 Die Sowjetregierung und die 3. Internationale im Schlepptau der Intemationalen Bourgeoisie! (Berlin: Verlag KAPD,
1921). In 1922, Gorter had translated and published the anonymous Dethmann’s pamphlet in Dutch: De Sowjetregeering en
de Derde Internationale op sleeptouw der internationale bourgeoisie (Amsterdam: KAPN).
Adolf Dethmann (3.12.1896–6.8.1979), engineer, doctor in social sciences, was in charge of the ‘scientific section’ of the
KAPD in Kiel. He came back, with discretion, to the KPD ca. 1925, according to the KAPD (KAZ No. 46, June 1925, ‘Was
der ‘Vulkan’ zu Tage fördert’). He worked – since April 1929 – at the Junkers Hauptbüro (famous aircraft company). He
became managing director of Junkers & Co in December 1931 after Hugo Junkers had released the former directors. He was
very close to Hugo Junkers, who refused apparently any militarist orientation in his own enterprise, but had commercial
relationship with the Russian authorities since 1922. After the Nazis won the elections in March 1933, Dethmann was
arrested by the Gestapo, suspected of ‘communist policy’ within the company, and released two months later, without
possibility to come back to Junkers. He managed to find a job in a scientific library. After 1945, he came back to the KPD in
the West Zone (Schleswig-Holstein). Denounced as “titoist’, he was expelled from the ‘Party’ ca. 1948, and joined in 1951
the ‘Unabhängige Arbeiterpartei’ (‘Independent Workers’ Party’), an ephemeral trotskyist group in the 50s, subsidised by
Yugoslavian and American agencies. [See: Detlef (Siegfried), Der Fliegerblick. Intellektuelle, Radikalismus und
Flugzeugproduktion bei Junkers 1914 bis 1934 (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 2001).]
595 Die Kommunistische Arbeiter Internationale (Berlin-Mariendorf: KAPD, 1923).
596 Cf. Ph. Bourrinet, The ‘Bordigist’ Current 1919-1999, Italy, France, Belgium (Zoetermeer: ‘left-dis’, 1999).
597 Lenin wrote, for example: “...We are advancing towards the socialist revolution consciously, firmly and unswervingly,
knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeois democratic revolution by a Chinese Wall…”. Further on he talks of the
“bourgeois democratic content of the revolution” in which “the social relations (system, institutions) of the country are
purged of medievalism, serfdom, feudalism”. [Lenin, ‘Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution’, in: Collected Works,
Vol. 33, pp. 51-52.]
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