The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

anarchist group like the BAS was characteristic: it proved that the demarcation between council communism and
anarchism was not very sharp. This was clear to the GIC, but not to the other groups.
The conference did however have positive results, in the immediate if not in the long term. It established
selection criteria in the council communist movement: the participation in economic struggles was the principle
criterion. As a result, the majority of the KAPN left the movement, to bring out its own review: De
Arbeidersraad (‘The Workers’ Council’) in 1933. Although a partisan of the party, like the old KAPN, this
group progressively evolved towards trotskyist and even anti-fascist positions (see Chapter 7). The second
positive result was the publication of texts in the different reviews, coming from the movement as a whole, as
well as the joint distribution of pamphlets. 744 Finally, the election of a joint commission of the groups apparently
showed an active concern to regroup in the future.
However, this unique attempt at uniting groups with a ‘councilist’ orientation was to be a failure. The opening of
a counter-revolutionary course, after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, only accentuated the centrifugal
tendencies within the Dutch movement, as it did elsewhere in the international ‘councilist’ movement.
Hitler’s coming to power and its consequences. – The GIC and the German situation
Exclusively preoccupied with questions agitating the ‘Unionist’ movement in Germany, the GIC paid little
attention to the rise of nazism, a striking sign of the counter-revolution on the march. The questions of
organisation of the Unionen, of the economic crisis, and the more theoretical ones of the peasantry and the
period of transition (see below) seemed more important. This weakness faced with a political problem as urgent
as the rise of the counter-revolution was the result of a failure to evaluate the historical period thoroughly. Class
movements would necessarily be born from the world crisis, in the form of wildcat strikes, which would lead
directly to the revolution.
As a current of the communist left, the GIC considered the nazi movement as the expression of the offensive of
‘monopolist capitalism’ against the proletariat, whose social base was the petty-bourgeoisie proletarianised by
the crisis. To combat nazism, the only proletarian tactic was the resurgence of massive class struggle, in the form
of spontaneous anti-union movements. Any attempt at anti-fascist alliances with the left parties would lead to the
betrayal of proletarian principles. To beat nazism, the German proletariat could only count on itself and above all
on the resurgence of international class struggle in the main centres of capitalism. The GIC, like the German
revolutionary groups (KAPD, KAU), and the council communist groups in the USA and elsewhere,
intransigently rejected the anti-fascist united front. 745 For them, German social democracy and the KPD had
taken part in the crushing of the proletariat: the SPD physically in 1919, and the KPD ideologically in competing
from 1923 on with the nazi movement on the nationalist terrain. At the end of 1932, the KAPD stressed that
“Hitler encompassed the heritage of Noske, the party of Hitler the heritage of social democracy”. 746 As for the
744 Anti-parliamentary pamphlets were distributed by the GIC, the LAO, and the Radencommunist group: 3,000 copies of
Kiest Kobus onze man!, and an (anonymous) pamphlet by Pannekoek, De arbeiders, het parlement en het communisme
were distributed in 1933.
745 Thus the KAZ wrote in 1932: “A United Front with ‘each and every one’ of such people, completely forgets each and
every SPD act since 1914; this would mean forgetting the sea of proletarian blood – no less than that spilt by the brown
plague – that the SPD has spilt in the interests of capital... fascism is not opposed to bourgeois democracy: on the contrary it
is its continuation by other means. Every party which has a bourgeois policy, even if one finds workers’ groups in its ranks,
is an accomplice of fascism and at the same time one of its fractions. A united front with these gentlemen, for the sole
reason that they claim to defend “workers’ interests” is to abandon socialism and push the workers into the fascist
bandwagon” [‘Einheitsfront und Einheitsfrontstaktik’, in: KAZ (Berlin), No. 7, July 1932]. Although Kampruf, the organ of
the KAU, had the same position as the KAPD, locally some sections of the KAU gave in to the temptation of the antifascist
united front. Thus in 1932, the Leipzig section joined the SAP in an anti-fascist front. It was the same for the Pirna section
in Saxony [see KAZ No. 7, July 1932] with the SPD and the KPD.
746 KAPD pamphlet, Der Totentanz des Kapitalismus, Berlin, 1932, p. 7. (Web: )
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