The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

“as part of a mass movement”: “In this framework, the audacity of the bravest finds expression in personal acts
of courage, while the clear understanding of the others directs these acts towards their goal so as not to lose their
fruits”. 778 Separated from mass action, all individual acts, far from weakening the bourgeoisie, can only reinforce
it. This was precisely the case with the burning of the Reichstag:
“The bourgeoisie has not been the least affected by the burning of the Reichstag; its domination has in no way
been weakened. The government, on the contrary, has used the opportunity to considerably reinforce its terror
against the workers’ movement.” 779
Ideologically such action had no value “against abject electoralism” and bourgeois democracy. Democratic
illusions could always take “another track”; for example, when the ‘right to vote’ is suppressed, then the
mystification of “the conquest of real democracy is put forward” by the “democratic” bourgeoisie. In the second
place, historically, individual terrorist action has no mobilising effect on the class struggle. It corresponds to a
bygone age, that of the ‘bourgeois romanticism’ of the revolutions of the 19 th century, where some leaders
thought to mobilise the ‘passive masses’ by providing the ‘spark’ for the social explosion. The proletarian
revolution, by contrast, “has nothing in common with the explosion of a powder-keg”. Finally, terrorist action
can only confuse the workers’ class consciousness: it reduces them to passivity. Individual action becomes a
substitute for mass action. Its effect is thus totally negative:
“Even if such an act hit and effectively weakened the bourgeoisie, the only consequence would be to develop
among the workers the conviction that such personal acts could liberate them... which would drive them still
further from autonomous action as a class.”. 780
Consequently, the proletarian movement must reject all forms of terrorist action. which is nothing other than a
revival of nihilism from the end of the 19 th century. The GIC and Pannekoek thus showed clearly that the future
of the revolutionary movement could only lie in mass action. This vision was not always understood by some
militants of the Dutch councilist movement. 781 *
* *
After February 1933, the GIC in practice assumed the leadership of the international council communist
movement. The German groups, reduced to the strictest clandestinity, entrusted the publication of the
international review Proletarier to Amsterdam, as the expression of the whole movement. There was only one
issue. Proletarier was succeeded by the German-language theoretical review Räte-Korrespondenz from 1934-
1937.
During the 1930s, this was one of the rare organs – like Bilan for the Italian Communist Left and International
Council Correspondence in the USA – which tried to make a balance-sheet of the ‘long night of the counterrevolution’
which battened on the entire revolutionary workers’ movement after 1933.
778 Idem.
779 Idem.
780 Idem.
781 During the 1930s, some individuals like Frits Kief took part in an individual action of ‘expropriation’, and were arrested.
See: AA.VV., Rood Rotterdam in de jaren 30 (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij Raket, 1984), pp. 197-198.
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