The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The evolution of the Dutch GIC towards a fully-fledged kind of ‘councilism’ can only be explained in the
German and international context. The opening up of an anti-revolutionary course leading inevitably towards
world war was theorised by the GIC. The bankruptcy of the German workers’ movement in 1933 led it to
proclaim the bankruptcy of the organisational conceptions of what it called the ‘old workers’ movement’. In its
place a ‘new workers’ movement’ had to arise composed of small working groups, whose task was purely
propagandistic (see below). Through fear of taking on an ‘authoritarian’ and substitutionist vision of the party,
which it believed led straight to the conception of a single party-state, the GIC rejected any idea of a centralised
international organisation. Viewing Bolshevism and stalinism with the same opprobrium, seeing the second as
the logical successor of the first, the GIC was led to reject the Russian experience after October 1917. Sliding
from ‘anti-Leninism’ to ‘anti-Bolshevism’, a step the KAPD had never taken, the GIC took up the theses of Otto
Rühle. 789 Only the constant reference to the German council movement prevented the GIC from slipping
completely into a ‘classical’ anarchist vision. Nevertheless, in its basic principles, the GIC remained Marxist and
refused to follow the politics of anarchist groups, whose theory and practise it condemned. In the general milieu
around the GIC, however, other groups evolved more logically towards anarchism. 790
There is no doubt that the objective situation of the German council communist organisations, cut-off from each
other and reduced to small discussion groups under the pressure of clandestinity, had a profound influence on the
‘councilist’ evolution of the GIC. In its conception of a ‘new movement’ and in its practise, the GIC was already
theorising a situation forced on the movement by circumstances. On the other hand, the Dutch communists’
‘anti-bolshevik’ theses came directly out of a fraction of German council communism, the Rote Kämpfer, which
saw Bolshevism as being responsible for the triumph of the stalinist and Hitlerian counter-revolution. It is
perhaps not irrelevant to point out that the Theses on Bolshevism, adopted in 1934 by the GIC (see below), were
written in 1932 by a current closer to left socialism than to the KAPD.
The GIC’s theses, in turn, had the effect of creating much confusion in the German milieu. The refusal to accept
any international regroupment and any international council communist platform condemned the German and
Dutch groups to international isolation, and this was the cause of their ultimate atomisation and disintegration.
At the same time the GIC limited itself more and more to the Dutch context.
Nevertheless, during the 1930s, the GIC was able to maintain itself as a genuine revolutionary Marxist current.
Its political and theoretical contributions on decisive questions such as anti-fascism, state capitalism and war are
part of the common ‘heritage’ of the international communist left of that time.
The ‘councilist’ theory developed in the various groups that had emerged from or that still referred to the
German communist left was a theorisation of the most profound defeat suffered by the international proletariat,
and embodied in the victory of stalinism and nazism, although its seeds were already contained in Rühle’s
writings in the ‘20s. 791
Its influence on the German and Dutch revolutionary movement was held in check by the existence of the
KAPD, which defended the necessity of the party. The KAPD never rejected the 1917-20 Russian experience,
archives. Significantly, the KAU, in its June ‘33 issue of Arbeiterbrief, considered that the task was to “sweep away the
ruins of reformism, to help give birth to the revolutionary front of the proletarian mass struggle”. It was a question of
creating “communist cadres who act as the spores of the proletarian movement” through the setting up “new circles” and
“an educational work which will anchor communist ideology ever more deeply in the proletariat’. Unlike the remains of the
KAPD, it took a position “against the renaissance of Bolshevism”.
789 Programm der KAPD, Berlin 1923: “The Russian revolution was the first flame of the world revolution... The most
important task of the Third International was to spread the fire to the capitalist edifice in Europe with real and heroic
courage, our Russian brothers have resisted the attacks of all the counter-revolutionary armies. Despite the Kominternvil
war, the blockade, the scarcity of industrial products and means of communication, they made an attempt to reconstruct the
economy in a communist direction” (p. 25)
790 Such as the ‘Discussie’ group which came out of the GIC in 1935.
791 Cf. O. Rühle, Von der Bürgerlicher zur Proletarischen Revolution, 1924; English: From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian
Revolution, translation, 1974, by Socialist Reproduction’ in co-operation with the review Revolutionary Perspectives. Text
published on the Web:< http://kurasje.tripod.com/eng/start.htm>.
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