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The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

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<strong>The</strong> contribution by this group, which the GIC published in <strong>Dutch</strong>, advanced the idea that the coming war would<br />

be “a war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat”, aimed at destroying factories and the unemployed. 1029 Like<br />

the majority of the Italian <strong>Left</strong>, it talked about inter-imperialist solidarity between the different states against the<br />

proletariat: “All the bourgeoisies must unite to partially annihilate the proletariat”.<br />

Without opening a theoretical debate on the war economy, the GIC rejected the strange idea that arms production<br />

made it possible to ‘overcome the contradictions of capitalism’. For the GIC, the war economy was there to<br />

prepare World War. Arms production was not a new field for the accumulation of capital but a destruction of<br />

capital:<br />

“For the capitalists of all countries armaments constitute a large portion of their profits, but the billions devoted<br />

to weapons of war are just old iron if they are not used, the profits concealed in them are not realised if they do<br />

not produce new profits [...] to fail to do so brings bankruptcy and the collapse of their power.” 1030<br />

Thus even economically, war was inevitable in order to realise through military conquest the profits frozen in the<br />

arms industry. War was thus set in the logic of capitalism.<br />

This vision of an inevitable war might seem very pessimistic. Without saying so clearly and explicitly, the GIC<br />

recognised that the course towards revolution had been overturned. <strong>The</strong> proletariat could no longer prevent the<br />

war: “It is not a question of preventing the war, but of knowing whether the working class can overthrow the<br />

bourgeoisie and set up its own power”. 1031 *<br />

* *<br />

In fact, like the trotskyists and the Italian communist <strong>Left</strong>, the GIC still hoped that the war would lead to<br />

proletarian revolution, as it had at the end of World War I. Whatever the result of military operations, whether a<br />

triumph of the ‘fascist’ bloc or victory for the ‘democratic’ camp, the revolution would inevitably arise in the<br />

defeated countries:<br />

“We know for certain that the defeat of the fascist states will lead to a revolution in central Europe. [...] <strong>The</strong> fall<br />

of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes will give birth to a proletarian revolution which could only be crushed by the<br />

combined forces of world capital, and perhaps could not be crushed! Losing the war would mean the collapse of<br />

French capitalism; it would mean the loss of the French colonies, of French capital placed abroad and the<br />

revolution in France; it would mean the disintegration of the British Empire and the revolution of the British<br />

workers, the insurrection of the exploited masses in all the British colonies, perhaps revolution in the USA.<br />

Winning the war would mean a revolution in central Europe which would spread like wildfire to the wage slaves<br />

and soldiers of the victorious countries”. 1032<br />

1029 ‘Het revolutionair proletarische studiegroep over het oorlogsvraagstuk’, in: PIC, No. 11, Oct. 1935. In an introduction,<br />

the GIC criticised the article’s artificial attempts to create a new ‘Zimmerwald movement’. This had been the <strong>Left</strong><br />

<strong>Communist</strong> position in 1927, when Karl Korsch proposed to form a new Zimmerwald. Both the KAPD and the Italian<br />

<strong>Communist</strong> <strong>Left</strong> had rejected the proposal, since the historical conditions for the creation of a new International – a political<br />

decantation within the revolutionary movement – were not yet ripe. <strong>The</strong> GIC was opposed to any creation of revolutionary<br />

organisations or parties, any regroupment of the existing revolutionary forces, which appeared to it as a heritage of an oldfashioned<br />

Leninist conception.<br />

1030 GIC pamphlet 1939, De Wereld in slagorde (‘<strong>The</strong> world in battle order’), pp. 6-7.<br />

1031 Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 14, 1935, ibid.<br />

1032 De Wereld in slagorde, p. 15.<br />

254

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