The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

appeal to the international proletariat was just one aspect of a whole policy aimed at winning international
support for the Russian revolution.” (Thesis 50)
Thus, from the beginning, according to the GIC, the Bolsheviks’ internationalism, which took concrete form in
the foundation of the Komintern, was just a ‘trick’ dictated by power politics. Bolshevism ‘tricked’ the workers
of the whole world when it talked about world revolution. Bolshevik internationalism calling for the overthrow
of the bourgeoisie in all countries was in fact “the peasant internationalism of a bourgeois revolution carried out
in the era of world imperialism” (Thesis 53). The goal was to place the Russian bolshevik party “at the head of a
world bolshevik system in which the communist interests of the proletariat would be combined with the
capitalist interests of the peasants” (Thesis 55). Finally, the national independence granted to the minorities of
the former Russian Empire was another trick; it wasn’t an application of the bolshevik programme of ‘the right
of peoples to self-determination’ against the interests of the Russian state, but simply a use of “the national
instincts of the peasants and oppressed national minorities of the Russian empire, with the aim of overthrowing
Tsarism” (Thesis 53). Finally, the Bolsheviks fooled not only these ‘national minorities’ but also themselves, by
sacrificing the very ‘Russian national interests’ they were supposed to represent in the framework of the
‘Russian bourgeois revolution’.
Thus Bolshevism, which in 1917-20 had been hailed by the Dutch Left, by Pannekoek and Gorter, as the most
determined and radical element in the Revolutionary movement, took on a very different colouring for the GIC
of 1934. The Theses turned a proletarian current into a ‘petty-bourgeois’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘peasant’ or ‘Jacobin’ one.
The anti-Bolshevism of the GIC and the councilist currents led them to reject the Russian revolution after
October 1917. This was no longer seen as a proletarian revolution carried out by millions of workers, the
prologue to the revolution in western Europe, but a long-delayed ‘bourgeois revolution’, prolonging into the 20 th
century the anti-feudal revolutions of the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Russia, which in 1914 was the fifth industrial
power in the world, was assimilated to the France of 1789, where the feudal system still predominated:
“serfdom, in various forms, survived in practice for the immense majority of the Russian peasantry, and held
back the development of the capitalist type agriculture which was just at its beginnings” (Thesis 6). But given
the important development of capitalist industry that had taken place, the GIC was obliged to consider Russia as
a ‘mixed’ system, neither fully capitalist nor fully feudal: “feudal type agriculture and capitalist industry
mutually impregnated each other with their essential elements and combined into a system which could not be
governed according to the principles of the feudal system, nor develop along the capitalist road.” (Thesis 6).
The consequence of this view was that the task of the revolution in Russia had not been to destroy the capitalist
system as in the other industrial powers, but to develop it: “the economic task of the Russian revolution was, first
of all, to do away with feudal agriculture and the exploitation of the peasants through the system of serfdom by
raising commodity production to a more modern level; in the second place, to make possible the autonomous
creation of a real class of ‘free workers’, by ridding industrial production of all feudal vestiges; in other words,
the task of Bolshevism was to carry out the bourgeois revolution.” (Thesis 7).
It was not Bolshevism which engendered the ‘Russian bourgeois revolution’, it was the other way round. For the
GIC, the bolshevik party represented the Hegelian Zeitgeist of an inevitable evolution towards the bourgeois
revolution in any underdeveloped country: “In its principles, tactics and organisation, Bolshevism was a
movement and a method of the bourgeois revolution in a preponderantly peasant country”. (Thesis 66)
The Significance of the Theses on Bolshevism
The Russian revolution was not the ‘first step towards the world revolution’. All the other revolutions, in
Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, etc., were, in the logic of the Theses, just the tail-end of the ‘Russian
bourgeois revolution’. Finally, the ‘councilist’ groups claimed that a proletarian revolution could not be on the
agenda. They, more or less consciously, seemed to adopt the positions of Russian Menshevism in 1917.
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