The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

workers find themselves thrown out of a ‘final crisis’. It thus took up its own version of the ‘mortal crisis’ of
capitalism that had been defended within the German Left, above all by the Essen tendency. 940 Rejecting
Luxemburg’s explanation about the saturation of the market, it saw the falling rate of profit as the sole cause of
the crisis. 941
The American council communists around Mattick in Chicago, tried to reconcile the theory of the ‘mortal crisis’
with Grossmann’s ideas. In 1933, Mattick wrote the programme of the IWW which adopted the ‘Grossmannite’
conception. 942 But, unlike Grossmann, he drew revolutionary conclusions from it. 943
The world crisis was not a cyclical crisis, but the “mortal crisis of capitalism” posing the “alternative:
communism or barbarism”. Like the KAPD in the 1920’s, Mattick declared forcefully that capitalism had
entered its “decadent phase” marked by “the general, absolute and continuous pauperisation of the
proletariat”. 944
The crisis of capitalism had become permanent. 945 However Mattick did not conclude from this that the
revolution was inevitable. It depended on the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat. The crisis merely
created the objective conditions for revolution: “The mortal crisis of capitalism means only that the objective
conditions for the proletarian revolution have been laid down. For the proletariat there is only one way out of the
crisis, the road which leads to the disappearance of the capitalist system”. And Mattick added that “in the period
of capitalist decadence” every strike has “a truly revolutionary significance”. The question was whether the
strikes that broke out in the 1930s were necessarily revolutionary, in the absence of the proletariat’s
revolutionary consciousness.
b) Crisis theory according to Pannekoek and the GIC
In reaction to Grossmann’s conceptions, which had been adopted by Mattick and a part of the GIC, Pannekoek
published a text on ‘The Theory of Capitalist Collapse’. 946 Pannekoek’s aim was to combat, as a marxist, any
idea of an automatic collapse of capitalism, and thus of a ‘spontaneous’ outbreak of revolution. Capitalism’s
collapse was not just economic, it was also social. Without the conscious intervention of the proletariat, in
struggle against the effects of this collapse, one could not really talk about a real collapse of the system, which is
situated above all on the political terrain:
“It is not because capitalism collapses economically and because men – workers and others – are pushed by
necessity to create a new organisation, that socialism appears. On the contrary: capitalism, as it lives and grows,
becomes more and more intolerable for the workers, pushing them to struggle continually, until they develop the
strength and will to overthrow the rule of capitalism and build a new organisation – and that is when capitalism
crumbles.” 947
To separate the objective conditions (crises) from the subjective ones (consciousness and organisation), was to
fail to understand that the collapse of capitalism is an economic, political and social unity: “The accumulation of
capital, crises, pauperisation, the proletarian revolution, the taking of power by the working class, all this is an
940 See: ‚Die Akkumulation des Kapitals’, in: Proletarier, Berlin, 1923.
941 See the 1932 GIC pamphlet mentioned above.
942 ‚Programm der Industriearbeiter der Welt’, in: Korsch–Mattick–Pannekoek, Zusammenbruchstheorie des Kapitalismus
oder revolutionäres Subjekt (Berlin: Karin Kramer-Verlag, 1973).
943 For Grossmann, the class struggle was reduced to the struggle for wages and working hours.
944 See the 1933 IWW pamphlet mentioned above.
945 The idea of a permanent crisis of capitalism since 1914, much clearer than the GIC’s economic theory was elaborated by
Mattick in: ‘The permanent crisis’, in: International Council Correspondence No. 2, Nov. 1934.
946 Pannekoek, ‚Die Zusammenbruchstheorie des Kapitalismus’, in: Räte-Korrespondenz No. 1, June 1934.
947 French translation in: Authier & Barrot, La Gauche communiste en Allemagne (1918-1921) (Paris: Payot, 1976), pp. 342-
361.
241