The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Secondly, by trying at all costs to see the genesis of stalinism in the Bolshevism of 1917, the council communist
groups seemed to deny the revolutionary nature of the left wing of social democracy, before and after 1914. It is
perfectly evident that the left groups – Bordiga’s faction, Spartakism, Rosa Luxemburg’s SDKPiL in Poland, the
SPD of Gorter and Pannekoek, etc. – had the same positions as the Bolsheviks: against the war, for the
revolution, necessity for a Third International. All, without exception, from 1917 to 1921, supported the Russian
revolution, with criticisms, as the ‘first step of the proletarian revolution’. Pannekoek and Gorter fought against
Wijnkoop precisely because of his ‘lukewarm’ support for the October revolution.
Thirdly, the theory of ‘bolshevik machiavellianism’, which reduced history to a series of plots and tactical
manoeuvres by political parties, bore a curious similarity to stalinism’s ‘police’ vision of history and ended up as
a travesty of real historical events. It offers no explanation why the Russian revolution, a ‘bourgeois’ one
according to the councilists, encountered such enthusiasm, such a revolutionary echo, among the working
masses of the industrialised countries, which had already achieved their bourgeois revolutions. It does not
explain how and why the left communists of the European countries were in solidarity with the Russian
revolution. Unless one argues that the entire revolutionary movement of the day, which defended the same
positions as the Bolsheviks, allowed itself to be utterly taken in, without any reaction against this.
Again, the Theses on Bolshevism do not explain the policies of the bolshevik party, both the continuity and the
dangers within them, nor the orientation taken by the Russian revolution. If the party had been the bearer of a
‘Russian bourgeois revolution’, it is hard to understand the positions it took up in the Second International
against reformism, revisionism and war. If it was no more than an anti-feudal’ party, it would be hard to
understand why it opposed currents such as the populists, the right-wing Social-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks
and others, all of whom were more or less partisans of support for the Russian liberal bourgeoisie; the same goes
for its opposition to the Kerensky government which, on the pretext of fighting a national revolutionary war,
wanted to continue the imperialist war; similarly its action in favour of destroying the new bourgeois state set up
in February 1917, through the seizure of power by the workers’ councils. If Bolshevism had expressed the
necessity for a national bourgeois revolution, it would not have proclaimed the need for a world revolution,
which is by definition anti-national; it would not have advocated Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’, which was
the negation of Russian national interests. If ‘tactical’ internationalism had been the best card of the Russian
bourgeoisie in its bid for power, it is difficult to see why it made no use of it.
Finally, it was hard to explain why a ‘Jacobin’ current would have facilitated, through the formation of the
Komintern, workers’ insurrections in Europe which had they been successful would have given birth to republics
of workers’ councils that would by definition have been hostile to the national interests of a bourgeois
revolution. Unless you argue that for the first time in history there could be a State capitalist International, raised
above particular national interests, and, in a paradoxical manner, attacking the bourgeoisie itself in order to
establish the power of the ‘intelligentsia’. But how then would you explain the fact that this ‘intelligentsia’ was
insignificant in the communist parties, which were largely composed of workers? How would you explain the
hostility of the intellectuals, except for a tiny minority, to communism in 1920? The GIC had no answer to all
these questions of simple historical logic. 795
As for the policies carried out by the bolshevik party after 1917 – land to the peasants, self–determination for the
different nationalities, the running of the state and the gradual subordination of the councils to the state – it is
important to note that while all these policies were criticised by the Dutch and German lefts, it was not because
they saw them as the translation into acts of a ‘bourgeois revolution’. What these lefts did criticise was the
successive ‘tactic errors’ of the bolshevik party after 1917, linking them either to the ‘immaturity of the
international proletariat’ or to the ‘dramatic isolation of the Russian revolution’. Indeed they approved a number
of measures or slogans which later seemed to them to be fatal to the course of the revolution. While they were
hostile to the slogan ‘land to the peasants’, they did not really criticise the fact that a workers’ party could find
795 The GIC, to justify its thesis as to the historic role of the intelligentsia in the Russian Revolution, asserted that unlike the
petty-bourgeoisie, the ‘intellectuals’ formed an ‘ascendant’ social stratum, the bearer of ‘state socialism’. Cf. ‚Die
Intelligenz im Klassenkampf’, in: Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 3, Sept. 1934.
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