The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

a big impact in the unemployed movement: its anti-trades union propaganda was listened to all the more readily
because Czech workers had to join the trades unions in order to receive the dole. In January 1932, five KAP
delegates were elected by the action committees and unemployed assemblies to a regional conference of the
unemployed. 735 Attacked by the police, the Czech KAP had been virtually illegal since 1931. Conscious of the
need for underground work, with the rise of nazism in the Südetenland, it joined up with the German Rote
Kämpfer group of Schwab and Schröder. The latter went underground in 1932, to prepare its ‘cadres’ for the
illegal struggle.
The dispersal of all these groups, which taken as a whole had no political homogeneity, made a real international
regroupment impossible. The proposal by the Hungarian left communists in 1932 to hold an urgent international
conference of council communist groups was accepted by the KAU, but never realised. The nazi dictatorship put
this project on hold. It fell to the GIC, in 1935, to carry through the one and only attempt by council communists
to regroup (see Chapter 7).
The attempted regroupment of council communists in the Netherlands (1932-33)
The regroupment of council communists in Germany had a dynamic effect in Holland. Different groups began to
intervene alongside the GIC. The seriousness of the situation had a large part to play in this. It was less the rise
of nazism than opposition to the policies of the Komintern which served to catalyse this regroupment.
The Komintern had decided to hold an ‘anti-war congress’ in Amsterdam in September 1932. 736 Officially, the
idea of this pacifist congress had been launched by writers like Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Gorky and Dos
Passos. This congress was a turning-point for the Komintern. A pacifist and anti-fascist ideology was to be
developed within the workers’ movement to ‘defend the USSR’. By appealing to democrats’, it heralded the
policy of the popular front.
The council communists of Germany, France, Holland, Hungary and Denmark’s distributed during this congress,
and in the factories of their respective countries, an appeal to the international proletariat. 737 Under the headline
‘Proletarians Remember!’, the appeal denounced the foreign policy of the Russian state and the Komintern since
1920, “a policy of military alliance with the imperialist states” having nothing to do with “the revolutionary
struggle of the Russian proletariat in 1917”. The international council communists distinguished several stages in
the C.I.’s abandonment of internationalism:
• 1920: the Russo-Polish war, fought not for the ‘world revolution’, but “for the support of Russia
allied to German imperialism”;
• 1922: the declaration by Bukharin at the Komintern’s 4 th Congress, in favour of “national defence”
and of “a military alliance with bourgeois states” 738 ;
• 1923: the elaboration of the theory of “the exploited German nation” and the delivery of grenades by
the Russian state to the Reichswehr; the theory of ‘national liberation’ against the Treaty of
Versailles, leading to an alliance in Germany with the fascists;
735 See: ‚Die KAPD in Tchechoslowakei’, in: KAZ, No. 4, January 1929. See also: Spartakus, Zeitschrift für den
Kommunismus, Prague, No. 1, Jan. 1932.
736 See: I. Cornelissen, G. Harmsen [et al.], De taaie rooie rakkers (‘the tough red rascals’) (Utrecht: Ambo-Boeken, 1965).
737 ‘Het Anti-oorlogscongres der 3° Internationale’, in: Spartacus, organ of the LAO, No. 7, 23 Sept. 1932. The KAPD had
supported the Red Army in 1920 during the Russian-Polish war.
738 Bukharin’s speech (1922): “Can proletarian states forge military alliances with bourgeois states?... We can conclude a
military alliance with one bourgeoisie to smash, by means of this bourgeois state, another bourgeoisie...” The same leader of
the Komintern added: With this form of national defence, of military alliance with bourgeois states, it is the duty of
comrades in those countries to make a bloc for victory [Protokoll des IV. Kongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale.
Petrograd-Moskau, 5. November bis 5. Dezember 1922 (Hamburg: Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1923],
p. 240.]
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