The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

• 1927: during the conflict between Poland and Lithuania, the Komintern called Lithuanian workers to
“defend their country’s independence”. 739
The appeal, directed against the politics of the 3 rd International, also denounced those of Trotsky. The latter
spread the illusion that the ‘Red Camp’ was “still a factor for the world revolution”. Now, however, Russia
would not come to the aid of the “proletariat threatened by fascism”. For the workers, the question was neither to
struggle for peace nor to defend the USSR, but to struggle for the proletarian revolution against their own
bourgeoisie, by revolutionary mass action and the sabotage of war production. The road of world revolution,
with the creation of workers’ councils, was the only way to prevent world war.
This common appeal of international council communists was one of the few to be distributed simultaneously. In
the same year, it led to one of the rare attempts at regrouping the council communist current in Holland. The
appeal was signed by the GIC and the LAO, and supported by other Dutch groups.
A joint conference of Dutch council communists (the first and the last) took place on 12 th -13 th November 1932 in
The Hague. 740 Several groups were present, to take position on the class struggle and on intervention in the
economic struggle:
– the remains of the KAPN; the latter were profoundly divided on participation in wage struggles. The
majority, in Amsterdam, around Bram and Emmanuel Korper and Frits Kief, considered that economic
struggles led workers to defeat after defeat. The minority, in The Hague 741 , like the GIC, asserted forcefully
that “each wage struggle, because of the capitalist crisis, carries in itself the germ of a revolutionary
movement”. 742 At the beginning of 1933, it separated from the moribund KAPN to publish De
Radencommunist (‘The Council Communist’). The latter was the expression of the Councils Group in The
Hague;
– the ‘Linksche Arbeiders Oppositie’ (LAO – Workers’ Left Opposition) appeared in July 1932 with the
publication of its organ Spartacus. 743 It was active in Rotterdam and Leiden. The LAO was very workerist,
and implicitly defended the theory of ‘minority violence’. Its concern was to “provoke class conflicts”. This
councilist organisation was dominated by the personality of Eduard Sirach (1895-1937). During the first
world war, this latter had been one of the leaders of the mutinies which broke out on the battleships ‘Regent’
and ‘Zeven Provinciën’. For that he had been condemned to a long prison sentence. He escaped from prison
and went to Germany in Dec. 1918, where he took part of the revolutionary fights. Living afterward in
Amsterdam and Rotterdam, then without any stable work, he joined in 1924 the CPN – which presented him
as a candidate in the elections – and the NAS. He joined the RSP of Sneevliet, but was expelled. In Leiden,
the LAO was in close contact with Van der Lubbe, who took part in its activities. Clearly seduced by the
theory of minority violence, he burned down the Reichstag some months later. The question of ‘exemplary
acts’ provoked lively debates in the council communist movement (see below).
Other groups or unorganised individualities were also present. Alongside the concentration of council
communists in Utrecht, was an anarchist organisation: the Bond van Anarchisten-Socialisten (BAS). This
dispersal was typical of a strongly localist movement, allergic to any idea of centralisation. The presence of an
739 “The popular masses of Lithuania have a great task before them: to defend the independence of their country... Arm
yourselves to repulse the Polish imperialists... Soldiers of the Lithuanian Army! Arise to defend the independence of
Lithuania ... Down with the conquest of Lithuania by Polish imperialism...” [Inprecorr, No. 71, 1927, p. 1620.]
740 ‘De Radenbijeenkomst in Den Haag’, in: PIC, No. 19, 1932.
741 The Hague group was a small group of workers whose main ‘personalities’ were Arie Bom, from the KAPN, and Rinus
Pelgrom, who had belonged to the LAO. Cajo Brendel, a future member of the Daad en Gedachte group which survived
until 1998, was a member of the Hague group from 1934.
742 INO – Presse-Korrespondenz, No. 23, 1 st December 1932.
743 For the history of the LAO, which Rinus van der Lubbe either joined or worked with, see: H. Karasek, Der Brandstifter,
(Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1980).
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