The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

It is true that the GIC’s views on organisation had political consequences. Since it saw political organisations as
a regroupment of discussion circles, it allowed for the expression of opinions, in the form of discussion articles,
which did not necessarily reflect its political positions. This explains why, on the question of fascism, the GIC
allowed the publication of a discussion article which gave De Arbeidersraad the chance to scream about the
“pre-fascist” tendencies in the GIC. An article in PIC in 1935, while attacking both fascist and anti-fascist
ideologies, contained the following considerations on the ideology of fascist state capitalism. 968 According to the
author, the negation of individualism by state capitalism left the field free to a “collectivist’ ideology favourable
to communism: “Fascist and communist ideology both have in common the fact that individual interests are
subordinated to collective interests, that men are not fixated on their own petty personality but are drawn into a
wider unity. In this sense we can consider fascism ideologically as a precursor of communism”.
This somewhat tasteless assertion was totally foreign to the positions of the GIC, who declared three years later
that “in our opinion this is totally false. It is certainly true that both fascism and communism reject bourgeois
individualism and refer to collectivities. But such an analogy in no way makes fascism a precursor to
communism”. 969 The GIC emphasised that “this discussion article in no way reflected the GIC’s opinion”. But
in affirming that everyone had the right to their opinion, in a spirit of pure democracy, it made room for
ambiguities that were exploited by its political adversaries.
The Question of State Capitalism
The generalised crisis of the world economy obliged states to take measures of planning and nationalisation
which, apart from the period of the First World War, had not been seen before in developed capitalism. Hitherto,
only the Russian State had adopted such measures, subjecting the entire economy to state control and
suppressing the private sector. After 1933, in the big liberal capitalist countries, the state began to step in more
and more in economic life, controlling or even nationalising key sectors. In nazi Germany, although the private
sector was not suppressed, it came under state control. A form of state capitalism was installed that could
accommodate itself quite easily with the existence of a private sector. In countries like France and Belgium, the
communist parties openly advocated the Russian model, but the left political parties, especially the ‘left
socialists’, extolled the virtues of a ‘planned economy’, and ‘state socialism’. 970
The phenomenon of state capitalism had been analysed as early as 1918 by the Left Communists in Russia. The
left of the bolshevik party around Osinski had warned of the danger of equating state capitalism with
socialism. 971 From the 1920’s, the German and Dutch lefts had argued that the Russian economy was a form of
state capitalism which had nothing to do with socialism. Because of the existence of wage labour, where the
workers were subjected to a state boss which carried out the accumulation of national capital, the Russian state
was capitalist, albeit in a new form. For lack of other examples, the communist left did not inquire whether
Russian State capitalism expressed a general, irreversible, trend in world capitalism.
One of the first theoreticians of council communism to investigate the phenomenon of state capitalism in more
depth was Otto Rühle. In a remarkable pioneering book, published in 1931 in Berlin under the pseudonym Carl
workers in Holland. Those that we know are not spies but revolutionary workers who adhere to Trotsky’s bolshevik views.
We are not in agreement with this point of view, on a matter of principle” (Spartacus, No. 43, 1938).
968 ‘Fascisme en Arbeidersklasse’, in: PIC, No. 7, July 1935.
969 PIC, No. 3, May 1938, pp. 15-20.
970 The De Man plan in Belgium was characteristic of the ‘planning’ tendency which could also be seen with the SDAP in
Holland.
971 N. Osinski, ‘Stroitelstvo socialisma’ (‘On the building of Socialism’), in: Kommunist, Nos. 1 & 2, April 1918. Osinski
was the pseudonym of the soviet economist Valerian Obolensky (1887-1938), who was to be shot by Stalin in 1938.
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