The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Unlike the Paul Mattick group in the USA, it thought optimistically “the proletarian struggle for liberation has
gained a new impulse internationally”. 1015 This difficulty in recognising the breadth of the proletariat’s defeat,
the opening up of a period of counter-revolution, was not limited to the GIC. The hope of new revolutionary
wave, emerging even out of a world war, animated all the revolutionary groups in the 1930s.
The ‘Inevitable War’. – War and war economy
Unlike the majority of the Italian Left, who thought a generalised war impossible, but expected a succession of
localised conflicts, the GIC from 1935 on had argued that world war was inevitable. In an article significantly
sub-titled: ‘The Second World War is inevitable’, the Dutch group analysed the ‘localised’ conflict between Italy
and Abyssinia as the start of the coming Second World War:
“Superficially the war between Italy and Abyssinia looks like a war between two countries, in which Abyssinia
is defending its independence. In reality, this is a conflict within world capitalism, in this case between Italy and
Britain. Up till now this war has been a rehearsal for the coming Second World War; but it could be the spark
that sets the whole world on fire. But it is by no means certain that its immediate consequence will be world
war.” 1016
It is clear that for the GIC, world war could “begin at any moment”. Whatever the nature of these localised wars
– ‘national liberation wars’ of China against Japan, a war between two big imperialist states – every conflict was
“at the same time a precursor of the Second World War”. 1017
Faced with the danger of war, the Dutch Left, along with the Italian Left, Mattick’s group in the USA and a few
others, was one of the rare groups laying claim to revolutionary Marxism to define the coming war as an
imperialist war, where the workers of both camps would be called upon to sacrifice themselves for the nation.
The Second World War would be no different from the first: it would be an imperialist war on both sides,
‘democratic’ and ‘fascist’, for the re-division of the world. There was no ‘progressive’ camp to defend, the ‘antifascist’
any more than the ‘fascist’. All the countries were imperialist and had to be fought in the same way by
the proletariat, which had to take up Liebknecht’s cry that “the main enemy is at home”.
According to that vision, Anti-fascist ideology was being used to prepare the workers of the ‘democratic’
countries for the coming world war: “...the slogan ‘against fascism’ has become the rallying cry of all the open
or hidden partisans of the ruling class and is being used to enrol the broad masses into the war front”. But the
anti-fascist war ideology could not succeed without the effective aid given by what the GIC called the “so-called
workers’ movement”, i.e. the left parties, whose function was to “push the workers to stand alongside ‘their’
national bourgeoisie in the war”. 1018
In the end, it was the “defence of the USSR”, propagated by the trotskyist groups and Sneevliet’s RSAP, which
was the key to the bourgeoisie’s ability to enlist the workers for the war. For the GIC there was no question of
calling on the workers to defend the country of state capitalism in a war. In contradiction with its theory of a
‘juvenile’ and ‘progressive’ state capitalism in Russia, but in line with its internationalist principles, the GIC
called for the overthrow of the Russian bourgeoisie and for no support to it in case of war. This position, which
had been that of the German and Dutch Left since 1921, was recalled forcefully by the GIC in 1933, when
Trotsky proclaimed the need for a 4 th International: “The defence of the USSR can no longer be part of the
programme of a proletarian International. Today this can only mean working for the victory of the states allied to
Russia”. 1019
1015 Ibid.
1016 ‚Klassenkampf im Kriege’, in: Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 14, Dec. 1935.
1017 Idem.
1018 Idem.
1019 PIK, No. 5, Sept. 1933, p. 31.
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