The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

seems to have come from an ex-member of Rote Kämpfer, Helmut Wagner 1082 , who worked with Mattick’s
group; it made a bitter critique of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. But in contradiction with the GIC’s analysis of
the CNT’s politics, it declared: “Our intention is not to make the anarchists responsible for the evolution
followed by the anti-fascist struggle and its diversion towards a bourgeois dead-end”. 1083
Above all, the text defended a point of view very close to that of Union Communiste, by affirming that the
Spanish workers should not weaken the military fronts, but should first of all accept arms from abroad, “in order
to save their lives”: “The Spanish workers cannot struggle effectively against the unions because that would lead
to a complete collapse on the military fronts. They have no other alternative: they must struggle against the
fascists in order to save their lives; they must accept any help regardless of where it comes from”
It is true that the article concluded that “the character of the revolutionary struggle is undergoing enormous
transformations and instead of tending towards the overthrow of the bourgeoisie it is leading to the consolidation
of a new capitalist order”. 1084
The GIC and the Paris International conference on Spain (March 1937)
The same lack of rigour on the part of the Dutch international communists is to be found in their participation in
a conference on the Spanish question of international groups closer to the POUM and trotskyism than to the
international communist left. 1085 This conference, which took place in Paris on the 6 th and 7 th of March 1937, had
the task of discussing the situation in Spain and the evolution of the international situation. 1086 Invitations were
sent to the official trotskyist groups and to the POUM, who did not turn up. Finally, apart from Miasnikov 1087
1082 Helmut Rudolf Wagner (1904-1990?), born in Dresden, was a former member of the left wing of the SPD. With
Schröder and Reichenbach, he constituted the fraction of Rote Kämpfer. He was excluded from the SPD in 1931. He was
the author of the Theses on Bolshevism. Exiled in Switzerland in 1934, and in contact with the GIC, he edited in Zürich the
periodical Der Internationale Beobachter (‘The International Observer’) and moved to the USA in 1940. From Switzerland,
he collaborated with American and German council communist periodicals. He became a university professor (New York)
in the 1950s and abandoned all political activity. He published in 1983 an important academic book on Alfred Schutz:
Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), devoted to the Austrian Alfred Schutz
(1899-1959). This one was an eminent representative of the social phenomenology, author of The Phenomenology of the
Social World (Vienna 1932), a work for which the philosoph Edmund Husserl praised him as “an earnest and profound
phenomenologist”. Helmut Wagner, who had been an assistant of Schutz on the Graduate Faculty of the New York School
for Social Research, died in the late 80s.
1083 Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 21, April 1937.
1084 Idem.
1085 Despite its critiques of Trotsky and trotskyism, as a marxist group the GIC felt itself closer to this current than to
anarchism. Whereas it proclaimed the passage of anarchism into the ‘bourgeois camp’, the GIC recognised in trotskyism an
undeniable ‘revolutionary spirit’: “Among the currents of revolutionary spirit who exercise an influence on the workers,
trotskyism is really the one with which we must seriously debate at the level of principles” (Trotski en het
radencommunisme, in: Radencommunisme, No. 1, August 1938). The GIC, despite of its disagreements with this latter
current, published a text of the French trotskyist Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste (Workers’ Internationalist Party, POI), on
the strikes of 1938 (Manifest der Trotskisten, in: PIC, No. 3, May 1938).
1086 Account given in the introduction to Chazé’s book. See also the letter of Hugo Oehler (1903-1983), who participated in
the conference addressed from Paris, 7 th March 1937, to Streeter [Brandeis University, Goldfarb Library, Special Collection,
No. 506844; Collection of documents, reports and communications relative to POUM activities during the Spanish Civil
War, by Hugo Oehler and Russel Blackwell [ps. Rosalio Negrete] (1904-1969)]. Oehler said there ware thirty participants at
the Paris conference. He wanted to constitute a regroupment with the POUM and some trotskyist groups of the left. This
hope was quickly dashed due to the non-participation of the POUM.
1087 Gavril Miasnikov (1889-1945) represented the old Russian Opposition (Workers’ Group) linked to the KAPD, then to
Ouvrier Communiste in France [See: R. Sinigaglia, Mjasnikov e la rivoluzione russa (Milan: Jaca Book, 1973), and our
biography of Miasnikov to be published in the Maitron-Pennetier Dictionary, Dictionnaire du mouvement ouvrier français,
1940-1968, Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2005]. According to Jean-Pierre Joubert, Les révolutionnaires de la SFIO, Paris:
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