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The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

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<strong>The</strong> Fundamental Principles have the merit of underlining the importance of economic problems in the period of<br />

transition between capitalism and communism, all the more so because this had been approached very rarely in<br />

the revolutionary movement. Without a real and continuous increase in workers’ consumption, the dictatorship<br />

of the proletariat has no meaning, and the realisation of communism would be a pious wish.<br />

But the GIC’s text suffered from a certain number of weaknesses, which did not go unnoticed by other<br />

revolutionary groups. 857<br />

<strong>The</strong> Fundamental Principles actually only deal with the evolved phase of communism, where the government of<br />

men had been replaced the ‘administration of things’, according to the principle of “from each according to his<br />

abilities, to each according to his needs” enunciated by Marx. <strong>The</strong> GIC believed that it would be immediately<br />

possible, as soon as the workers’ councils had taken power in a given country, to proceed to an evolved form of<br />

communism. It started off from an ideal situation, in which the victorious proletariat has taken over the<br />

productive apparatus of the highly developed countries and has been spared all the costs of the civil war<br />

(destruction, a large part of production going towards military needs); moreover, it assumes hat there will be no<br />

peasant problem standing in the way of the socialisation of production since, according to the GIC, agricultural<br />

production was already completely industrial and socialised. 858 Finally, neither the isolation of one or several<br />

proletarian revolutions, nor the archaisms of small-scale agricultural production, constituted a major obstacle to<br />

the establishment of communism: “Neither the absence of the world revolution, nor the unsuitability of the<br />

individual agricultural enterprises in the countryside to state management can be held responsible for the failure<br />

of the Russian revolution [...] at the economic level”. 859<br />

Thus, the GIC distanced itself from the marxist vision of the period of transition, which distinguished two<br />

phases: a lower stage, sometimes described as socialism, in which the “government of men” determined a<br />

proletarian economic policy in a society still dominated by scarcity; and a higher phase, that of communism<br />

proper, a society without classes, without the law of value, where the productive forces develop freely, on a<br />

world scale, unencumbered by national boundaries. But even for the lower stage of the period of transition, still<br />

dominated by the law of value and the existence of backward-pulling classes, Marxism emphasised that the<br />

condition for any economic transformation in a socialist direction is the triumph of the world revolution. <strong>The</strong><br />

beginning of any real economic transformation of the new society, still divided into classes, depends in the first<br />

place on the proletariat affirming itself politically in the face of other classes.<br />

<strong>The</strong> GIC’s ‘economist’ vision is connected to its inability to grasp the problem of the existence of a state –<br />

according to Engels, a ‘semi-state’ – in the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, at the beginning of the<br />

transitional stage. This semi-state constitutes a danger for the proletarian power, since it is a force for social<br />

conservation, “arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it”. 860<br />

<strong>The</strong> GIC’s theory of the period of transition seems close to the anarchist theory, denying the existence of a state<br />

and thus of a political struggle for the domination of the new society. <strong>The</strong> basically ‘technical’ role that the GIC<br />

gives the workers, who are charged with keeping account of the average social labour time in production, was an<br />

implicit negation of their political role.<br />

As with the anarchists, the GIC saw the building of a communist society as a more or less natural and automatic<br />

process. Not the culmination of a long, contradictory process of class struggle for the domination of the semistate,<br />

against all the conservative forces, but the fruit of a linear, harmonious, almost mathematical development.<br />

857 A critique of the GIC’s text was published in Bilan from No. 11 to No. 38, written by Mitchell, a member of the Belgian<br />

LCI (his real name was Johan van den Hoven). Hennaut, for the LCI, made a resume of the Grundprinzipien in Bilan, Nos.<br />

19, 20, and 21.<br />

858 This thesis had been put forward in 1933 by the GIC, in the pamphlet Ontwikkelingslijnen in de landbouw, pp. 1-48. B.A.<br />

Sijes was the author of this pamphlet.<br />

859 Grondbeginselen der communistische productie en distributie, 1935, as reprinted by ‘De Vlam’, 1970, p. 10.<br />

860 Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1946), p. 194.<br />

225

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