The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Chapter 6 THE BIRTH OF THE GIC (1927-1933)
The period from 1927 to Hitler’s coming to power is a key one in the history of the Dutch communist left. In
Germany, what remained of the Essen Current had literally disintegrated: the KAI was only a shadow of its
former self, to the point where its executive moved to Holland in 1927. 683 But the KAPN, which was in practice
the only real section of the KAI, died slowly. The Essen tendency, which no longer even had the backing of
Gorter, was no more than a moribund group in Holland.
This period was unfavourable to a development of left communism in the workers’ milieu. After the defeat of
the miners’ strike in Great Britain in 1926, then of the Chinese proletariat in 1927, the post-war revolutionary
wave was broken. The policy of the Komintern had been a conscious policy of defeat which destroyed the
revolutionary aspirations of workers in all countries. The formation of the Anglo-Russian Committee 684 at the
time of the English miners’ strike, the alliance of the Komintern with the Kuo-Min-Tang of Chang Kai-Chek are
so many milestones of defeat for the world proletariat which led directly to Hitler’s triumph in 1933. The final
adoption in 1927 of ‘Socialism in one country’ by the Komintern signed its death sentence. 685 Stalinism
triumphed, along with its policy of defence of the USSR. The stalinist policy in Germany was to be the fatal
blow for the international proletariat. With the crushing of the German proletariat by nazism, abetted by the
policy of the Komintern and the KPD, the way to revolution was barred for decades. The counter-revolution
triumphed worldwide and the course toward World War II was opened. This period however, with the brutal
explosion of the crisis of 1929, was also a striking confirmation of the theory of the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism’
defended by the Dutch-German communist current. The ‘objective conditions’ of the proletarian revolution had
arrived; the crisis so much expected and announced had arrived. But the ‘subjective conditions’ for the
revolution were missing. The groups in the tradition of Dutch-German left communism remained unaware of this
contradiction between the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective conditions’ of the revolution.
The break with the KAPD
For reasons which were as much political as circumstantial, the GIC, from 1927, separated from the KAPD,
eventually to split from it.
a) The evolution of the KAPD after 1923
The revolutionary political milieu, to the left of the KPD, was still far from negligible in 1923. It numbered some
20,000 members’ organised both in the Unionen and in the KAPD and its various splits. 686 The KAPD, which
had about 2,000 members, remained stable. It had been one of the rare revolutionary groups, in 1923, to oppose
683 The Dutchman Lo Lopes Cardoso, a member of the KAPN, became secretary of the KAI, which held a conference in
Amsterdam (20 th -26 th Feb. 1927). At the beginning of the 1930s, the KAI was no more than an office in Amsterdam,
managed by the publisher Emanuel Querido (1871-1943), whose publishing house had brought out Gorter‘s poetry. The
Emmanuel’s brother, Israël (1872-1932) was a famous novelist and critic, who wrote a novel, influenced by Zola’s
naturalism on the Amsterdam Jordaan workers’ district, De Jordaan (1924).
684 On Stalin’s initiative, an alliance was created between the Russian unions and the British trade unions.
685 In 1926, Stalin defended this theory in his book Foundations of Leninism: “socialism in one country” was “the
construction of a fully socialist society in our country, with the sympathy and support of the proletariat in other countries,
but without the prior victory of the proletariat in other countries”.
686 See: F. Kool, Die Linke gegen die Partei-Herrschaft (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1970), p. 145.
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