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KAPD. The GIC, followed by Pannekoek whose positions had evolved in the meantime, took position for the
AAU, of which it considered itself a part, within the international council communist regroupment.
The GIC and the international regroupment of council communists (1929-1932)
The GIC and the German council communist movement – the birth of the KAU (Communist Workers’ Union)
In 1929, the 9 th National Conference of the AAU decided to break all contact with the KAPD. The aim was to
put an end to the leadership exercised by the KAP. Significantly, and under the pretext of ‘factional activity’, the
Conference decided to exclude Adam Scharrer, the KAPD’s principal leader, and his brother-in-law Heinz Helm
(Heinzelmann). That meant that a militant of the KAPD could no longer be a member of the AAU. A split
ensued which weakened both the German and the international revolutionary movement, since in several
countries (see below) groups were linked to the dual KAP-AAU organisation.
This split can be said to have given birth to council communism at the international level. The KAPD – the
revolutionary current which incarnated the spirit of the party and which had been the only real pole of
regroupment of the internationalist left communist current – was pushed into the background. A few hundred
militants remained in the organisation which was isolated from the rest of the revolutionary political milieu
dominated by an anti-authoritarian ‘anti-chiefs’ ideology.
The evolution of the AAU was confused and contradictory. On the one hand, the Union adopted a more and
more ‘flexible’ tactic, to the point that for the first time in its history, it led a strike – exactly like a trade union.
In 1929, the Cuxhaven Union led a seamen’s strike. The KAPD saw this as the triumph of a “policy of horsetrading”,
which consisted of “haggling with the capitalists around the table, while waiting for the proletariat to
be strong enough to make the final assault”. 718 On the other hand, the AAU wanted to remain a political
vanguard in the class struggle. Discussions with the remains of the AAU-E were conducted with this in mind: a
merger conference was to be held in December 1931 in Berlin. All the ‘foreign’ council communist groups were
invited to contribute to the effort of clarification – the GIC and Pannekoek foremost amongst them.
Along with the Mattick group, which still worked within the IWW in the US (Chicago), the GIC was one of the
rare groups to make serious contributions to the internal debate on the programme of the international council
communist movement. The GIC’s main theoretical contribution was the collective elaboration of Jan Appel’s
work on ‘The fundamental principles of communist production and distribution’: Grundprinzipien
Kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung was published by the AAU in Berlin in 1930. It was the first draft
of a text which the GIC continued to work on during the 30s (see Chapter 7). The texts on the function of
revolutionary organisations were more immediately relevant in criticising the programme of the AAU.
The GIC, not without reason, rejected the AAU’s pretension, expressed in its draft programme, to become a
‘mass organisation’. The AAU could be neither a union nor a party. It should be considered as a collection of
“revolutionary factory nuclei”, whose main task was to propagandise for “an association of free and equal
producers”. 719 At no time could the ‘factory nuclei’ compete with the trades unions by putting forward economic
demands. Their task was, at the outbreak of wildcat strikes, to contribute to the formation of a united ‘class front’
across trades, “free from any party or union”. Only in mass struggle could ‘factory organisations’ become a real
‘class organisation’.
718 Letter of 19 th June 1929 from the KAPD to the communist workers’ groups of Czechoslovakia, in: L’Ouvrier
communiste, No. 4/5, 1929. In this letter the KAPD noted, not unjustly, that “The recent crisis of our movement shows one
more time how the lack of working class activity entails a disorganised agitation of dispersed agregates of the revolutionary
movement. They compensate the lack of proletarian mass activity with displays of skill, with “tactical subtlety”“.
719 PIC (in German), July 1931 (?), Richtlinien über revolutionäre Betriebskerne. These theses on the revolutionary factory
nuclei were presented as a contribution of the GIC on 5 th July to the congress of ‘Alarm groups’ at The Hague. These
anarchistic groups rejected participation in economic struggles.
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