The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

“Revolutionary revolution” in every country?
The Dutch council communists rejected all calls for intervention of the ‘democratic’ powers to come to the ‘aid’
of the Spanish workers. There could be no military aid to the proletariat. Any military aid would be used in the
fight for domination by the rival imperialist powers to defend their own interests and “strangle the class
struggle” in Spain. 1063 This aid which in appearance “would save the Spanish workers” would give the “coup de
grace to the revolution”. The GI remarked bitterly that the class front had been transformed into the imperialist
front onto the military terrain: “The struggle in Spain is taking on the character of international conflict between
the great imperialist powers. [...] Modern weapons from abroad have displaced the struggle onto the military
terrain and, consequently, the Spanish proletariat has submitted to imperialist interests, above all to Russian
interests”. 1064
The task of the hour for the revolutionary proletariat was thus to “make an [imperialist] intervention impossible
by taking up the revolutionary struggle against its own bourgeoisie”. “It is only by taking this road that the
international proletariat will in practice be able to show its solidarity with the Spanish workers” 1065 . It is very
striking to see the viscerally ‘anti-Leninist’ GIG adopting the conception of Lenin in 1917 in order to
demonstrate the impossibility of socialism in one country. Through the ‘Spanish case’, the GIC was renewing its
ties with the tradition of the Dutch Left in 1917: as in Russia in 1917 – if the Spanish proletariat was to take
power – it would exist an interdependence between the revolutionary struggles of any particular country and
those of the rest of the world:
“Without world revolution, we are lost, said Lenin. That is particularly valid for Spain... The development of the
struggle in Spain depends on its development in the entire world; but the opposite is also true. The proletarian
revolution is international; the reaction equally so. Any action of the Spanish proletariat will find an echo in the
rest of the world; and here any explosion of class struggle is a support to the proletarian combatants of
Spain.” 1066
The GIC and the anarchist current
Unlike the council communists of the USA, who maintained a conciliatory approach towards the CNT, the GIC
undertook a bitter and uncompromising political struggle against the whole anarchist current. 1067 More than the
Spanish stalinist CP and the Socialist Party, which were clearly integrated into the bourgeois state apparatus, the
CNT appeared to the GIC as the main force responsible for the final defect of the Spanish proletariat. In 1936 the
CNT – the political current representing the most combative workers – joined the ‘Union sacrée’ of the
Republican parties. A reading of the GIC’s press shows that it attached a greater importance to a critique of the
anarchist current than to that of the trotskyists. Not that the latter was absent; but it was more rare, though no less
1063 ‘Lessen uit Spanje’, in: PIC No. 6, March 1937: “Through foreign intervention, this class struggle is more and more
asphyxiated and the designs of the imperialist powers predominate in the war [...] This is no triumph of the democratic
bourgeoisie, but in every case the dictatorship of big capital over the workers”.
1064 ‚Der Anarchismus und die spanische Revolution’, in: Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 21, April 1937. The article of Räte-
Korrespondenz, which seems to be by Helmut Wagner or by Paul Partos, copies entire passages, from different articles of
the PIC. Some additions have been made, which do not correspond to the vision or the GIC on the nature of the
government’s anarchism and the fight on the military fronts. Paul Partos (1911-1964), student in Berlin, became a close
friend of Karl Korsch. He emigrated to France in 1933 and was associated with anarcho-syndicalist groups; he worked for
the foreign propaganda section of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War.
1065 Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 18/19, op. cit.
1066 Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 22, July 1937, ‘Revolution und Konterrevolution in Spanien’, in: PIC, No. 10, June 1937.
1067 Karl Korsch, a collaborator of Mattick’s group, made himself the leader of the cause of anarchist collectivisation. Cf.
Economics and politics in revolutionary Spain, in: Living Marxism, No. 3, May 1938, ‘Collectivisation in Spain’, in: No. 6,
April 1939.
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