The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Chapter 9 THE DUTCH INTERNATIONALIST COMMUNISTS AND THE EVENTS IN SPAIN
(1936–1937)
While the civil war in Spain did not cause a crisis in the GIC, it nonetheless had a profound importance in the
group’s history. It was the test-bed of the Dutch group’s revolutionary theory, confronted with a civil war which
was to prepare the Second World War, in the midst of revolutionary convulsions and an atmosphere of ‘antifascist’
Popular Fronts.
Although often identified with anarchism, Dutch ‘councilism’ vigorously set itself apart from this current and
denounced, not its weaknesses but its ‘passage into the camp of the bourgeoisie’. The GIC defended a political
analysis of the ‘Spanish revolution’ close to that of the Italian Communist Left.
Finally, the events in Spain gave rise to the GIC’s last attempt before 1939 to confront the revolutionary political
milieu to the left of trotskyism in Europe. This attempt was not without confusion, and even political ambiguity.
Following the creation of the Republic, the internationalist Dutch communists followed the evolution of the
Spanish situation with great care. In 1931, the GIC denounced not only the Republican bourgeoisie, which
supported the Socialist Party of Largo Caballero, but also the anarchist movement. The CNT abandoned its old
‘principle’ of hostility to electoralism, and had its adherents vote massively for Republican candidates. Far from
seeing the CNT as a component of the workers’ movement, the GIC insisted that anarcho-syndicalism had
crossed the Rubicon with its “collaboration with bourgeois order”. The CNT had become “the ally of the
bourgeoisie”. As an anarcho-syndicalist current, and thus a partisan of trade unionism, the political action of the
CNT could only lead to a strengthening of capitalism. If it were to take power, it would establish nothing other
than state capitalism: “[the CNT] is a union aspiring to the conquest of power by the CNT. That necessarily leads
to a dictatorship over the proletariat by the leadership of the CNT (state capitalism)”. 1033
Faithful to the positions of the German Left on the nature of revolutionary Syndicalism, the GIC saw nothing
revolutionary in Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. As a union, the CNT could only take on the management of the
capitalist economy and not the destruction of the state. That is why any attempt to ‘renovate’ the CNT in order to
give it a ‘revolutionary’ orientation was doomed to failure. Its left-wing, along with Durruti’s FAI, were nothing
other than attempts to revive the corpse of syndicalism. The GIC declared forcefully that “anarchist opposition is
a deceitful illusion” (idem).
When the election of 16 th February 1936 gave power to the parties of the ‘Frente popular’, the GIC denounced
the United Front of all the parties of the left for diverting the class struggle away from its own objective: the
formation of a “general workers’ class front”. The Spanish workers were “prisoners of the United front”. They
could only regain their autonomy through a merciless fight against “their mortal enemy” (the parties of the
United Front), and by setting up their own organs: “It is not parliaments which must take the power in hand, but
ourselves, in our action committees, in our workers’ councils. It is only as a power of organised councils that we
can conquer”. 1034
In July 1936 the military pronunciamiento broke out. Against the will of the Popular Front, which was quite
ready to reach an understanding with the military, the workers of Barcelona and Madrid took to the barracks.
They armed themselves and formed militias. In the town and countryside, above all in Catalonia, some industrial
and agricultural ‘collectivisations’ were put in place under the leadership of both the anarchist union, and the
Socialist union, the UGT (Unión General de los Trabajadores). But the workers had not overthrown the
Republican government of the left bourgeoisie: the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia survived with the
1033 ‚Die Rolle der CNT in der spanischen Revolution’, in: PIC, Dec.1931, in German.
1034 ‘Verkiezing en eenheidsfront in Spanje!’, in: PIC, No. 3, Feb. 1936.
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