The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

itself at the head of the state by progressively substituting itself for the powers of the workers’ councils. 796 The
Dutch communist left had the same positions as the Bolsheviks on the national question in that it called not for
workers’ revolution in the Dutch East Indies but for the ‘national independence’ of the colonies. As for the
economic measures of the phase of ‘war communism’, they were greeted with some enthusiasm by these same
lefts.
The Theses on Bolshevism seemed in fact to be the expression of the profound disappointment, even
demoralisation, experienced by these groups in the face of a revolution which had turned into its opposite. Not
wanting to recognise that a revolution could turn into a counter-revolution in an isolated country, after the failure
of an international revolutionary wave, the GIC denied the very existence of a proletarian revolution in the
Russia of 1917. For them there was no workers’ revolution and no counter-revolution. There had been a
‘bourgeois revolution’ and Stalin was its direct and final incarnation, in a ‘Thermidorian’ manner, on the model
of the French revolution. 797 According to the GIC, this Thermidor, which did away with the attempts at workers’
management of the factories and the experience of war communism replacing them with state capitalism, had in
any case begun before Stalin, under Lenin and Trotsky. 798 For example, the GIC refused to consider the
Kronstadt uprising as a crime which pulled the leaders of October and their party in a counter-revolutionary
direction through the use of systematic violence within the proletariat. The stalinist terror, culminating in 1934-
38, was put on the same level as Kronstadt in 1921. For the GIC, ‘Bolshevism’ perpetuated itself under Stalin; it
was the same bolshevik party as in January 1918. Far from seeing Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev as
victims of a process in which they acted blindly, these figures were placed in the camp of the hangmen, in 1920
as in 1934-38: “The Kronstadt workers were massacred on the orders of Lenin and Trotsky because their
demands went against the interests of the bolshevik state of 1920. For us it matters little whether executions are
ordered by Stalin or Trotsky...” 799
It is remarkable however that the GIC saw the 16 old Bolsheviks shot by Stalin as the “heroes of October” and
considered the “communist groups in the Russian sense of the term” to be on the same level as the Kronstadt
rebels. 800
On this point, as on many others, the GIC was full of contradictions; it hesitated to accept all the political
implications of the Theses on Bolshevism.
The contradictions of the GIC
It is symptomatic that, despite everything, the Russian revolution remained a revolutionary reference point for
the GIC. Two years after the publication of the Theses, Pannekoek underlined the world-wide significance of the
Russian revolution:
“Like a shining meteor, the Russian revolution illuminated the Earth. But the workers needed another kind of
revolution. After filling them with such hope and energy, the dazzling light of the Russian revolution blinded the
workers, so that they could no longer see what route to take.” 801
796 The idea that the party should take power appeared in the Spartakist programme, written by Rosa Luxemburg in
Dec. 1918: “If Spartacus takes power it will only be through the clear and indisputable will of the great majority of the
proletarian masses”.
797 Although the GIC never uses the term Thermidor to analyse the evolution of the internal situation before Lenin and
Stalin, there are certain points of contact with Trotsky’s theory. The analogy with the Thermidor of the French Revolution
did not contradict the idea that the Russian Revolution, like the one in 1789, was a ‘bourgeois’ revolution. But whereas the
French Thermidor marked the stabilisation of the bourgeois revolution, Leninism and stalinism signified the definitive end
of the revolutionary dynamic in Russia and the installation of a state capitalist system of exploitation.
798 The GIC’s Grundprizipien showed a certain fascination for the experience of war communism between 1918 and 1920.
799 Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 20, Dec. 1936; PIC, No. 18, Nov. 1936, ‘Het tegenwordige Rusland’; ICC, No. 2, Feb. 1937.
800 Ibidem.
801 John Harper, ‘On the communist party’, in: International Council Correspondence, Vol. II, No. 7, June 1936, pp. 11-12.
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