The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

‘revolutionary uprise’. The Dutch workmen were taken between the hammer and the anvil: repression nazi and
of her collaborators and adhesion with nationalist movements of resistance, which tried to divert the workers’
strikes which had burst in 1943. The Dutch working class left her substance by the deportations and reinforced
repression.
In February 1943 Dutch authorities have been carried out to recruit by force workmen to work in Germany.
March 11, 1943, a decree was published ordering to the students to sign a declaration of ‘honesty’ and their will
to work in Germany once finished their studies. March 24, 1943 the Dutch doctors resigned their functions to
protest against the German pressures on their profession.
Himmler in February 1943 decided to re-intern 300,000 soldiers of the old army, which had been demobilized in
June 1940 (decree published on April 29). In answer wild strikes broke out, with extension to the main sectors of
the country, except the railwaymen. May first was proclaimed the state of emergency and there were bloody
reprisals by Gestapo: shootings in the streets, executions of workmen, and even arrests of directors of factory to
make them responsible for the break of work. In Maastricht and in the South (Limburg), the catholic clergy
encouraged the strikers’ movement, in collaboration with illegal Orangist groups. The labour movement
remained prisoner of its insertion in a vast ‘interclassist’ front of resistance to the wild requirements of the
occupant, who had a solid apparatus of repression.
May 7, 1943 more than 80 death-sentences had been carried out and 60 people were killed by random shootings
in the streets. The same day, was published an order of the authorities of occupation obliging the men from 18 to
35 years to be recorded in “the offices of work exchange”. 1186
The last important strikes rose in 1944, but under the control of Dutch Resistance and the Orangist government
of London. September 17, 1944, the railwaymen stopped work on instructions of the Dutch government in
London. 1187
The action of the members of Spartacusbond during this time was especially theoretical, fault of being able to
form part of a fight of class against the war. This is why the texts of the Bond concentrated over the historical
period lived by world capitalism.
Stan Poppe’s pamphlet on The perspectives of imperialism after the war in Europe and the task of revolutionary
socialists was written in December 1943 and published in January 1944. 1188 The text was strongly influenced by
Lenin’s Imperialism, highest stage of capitalism, and claimed to represent the ‘scientific socialism of Marx,
Engels and Lenin’, not of Rosa Luxemburg. It tried to define the course of capitalism and the revolutionary
perspectives for the proletariat.
The cause of the world war was “the general crisis of capitalism” since 1914. Poppe followed Lenin in defining
the new period of crisis as imperialist and monopolist: “Lenin defined this final and highest stage as imperialist.
Imperialism is the political side of a society that produces under a capitalist-monopolist mode”.
This reference to Lenin is particularly interesting when we think that the ‘councilists’ of Spartacus were to
define themselves as anti-Leninist.
However, we can already see a certain theoretical reflection appearing under the text book reference to Lenin.
Poppe understood the crisis as one of overproduction. This is expressed in state capitalism, which is the
conclusion to the monopolist phase, and whose expression is the war economy. The latter invades the productive
1186 P. J. Bouman, De april-mei-stakingen van 1943 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950); see in this book also the large
chapter by Sijes on the strikes in the textile centre of Twente.
1187 A.J.C. Rüter, Rijden en staken, de Nederlandse spoorwegen in oorlogstijd (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). [with
an English summary].
1188 De perspectiven van het imperialisme na de oorlog in Europa en de taak van de revolutionair-socialisten, Dec. 1943. It
is remarkable that this pamphlet, ideas of which are far removed from council communist, should be cited as the Bond’s
political basis in 1945, without any criticism of its content. See: ‘Beschouwingen over de situatie: de balans’, in: Spartacus,
May 1945.
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