The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

process, and “the [capitalist] system can only be saved by war and by war production”. However, Poppe’s
reasoning stopped there. At no time did he speak of Russia as being state capitalist. On the contrary, he claimed
that the USSR was “not subject to the grip of capitalist monopoly production and the domination of the market”;
that it was “the only state-organised adversary of imperialism”. This position is all the more surprising in that
Poppe was one of those within the MLL Front who described the USSR as state capitalist. The text’s
denunciation of state capitalist measures in every country “whether democratic, autocratic, republican or
monarchist”, except the USSR, was thus contradictory.
The analysis of the European conflict was clearer: “The war is coming to an end. The military defeat of Germany
and her allies is not speculation, but a fact.” In a stylistic paradox, Poppe considered that World War II would be
prolonged into a third World War in Asia, between Japan and the Anglo-American camp, the domination of the
colonies.
Rather like Bordiga after 1945, Poppe considered that the war would lead the fascisation of the Western
democracies on the political level: “In foreign politics, imperialist war is the other side of the monopoly
exploitation of labour power, while in domestic policy, bourgeois democracy, the form of life of the same social
order, is like fascism”. 1189
In the event of a revolutionary crisis, the democracies would find in fascism “their own future” or else a form of
neo-fascism would be imposed on the economy: “fascism will no longer exist in words, but in reality; we will
live through its second golden age. At the heart of the neo-fascist social policy will be the degradation of
working class income, as a necessary consequence of the policy of deflation”.
Poppe’s belief that the open capitalist crisis would continue after the war was based on the example of the 1930s;
there would be no “conjuncture of reconstruction, unless it be very short and extremely modest”.
The alternative for the proletariat laid “between socialism and the plunge into barbarism”, in other words
between proletarian revolution or war. But while making this observation, the text avoided any predictions. He
insisted that a war “for the reconquest and preservation of Indonesia and the Far East” would involve “the
inevitable perspective of a war against the Soviet Union itself” either during the “third” war in the East, or
during a “fourth” world war.
Nonetheless, “the general crisis of capitalism is ripening the revolutionary crisis of the system”. This did not
imply the “automatic upsurge of the revolution”: the latter “depends on the conscious intervention of the
revolutionary class during the [revolutionary] process”.
Theoretically, Poppe defined the revolution as the setting up of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the
dissolution “of this dictatorship and of the state itself”. The dictatorship would be that of the factory councils
which would form “the central councils of the power”. It is interesting to note that peasants’ councils are
excluded here. In the “struggle for power”, which is nothing other than “the struggle for and with the councils”,
the factory proletariat is the heart of the revolution. Poppe’s vision was very ‘factoryist’, indeed ‘Gramscist’, and
he gave factory occupations, along the lines of Italy in the 1920s, as an example of the revolutionary struggle for
power. 1190
1189 ‘Le prospettive del dopoguerra in relazione alla piattaforma del partito’ (Perspectives for the post-war period in relation
to the Party’s platform), in: Prometeo, No. 3, Milano, Oct. 1946. In this article, Bordiga claimed that “the Western
democracies are evolving progressively towards totalitarian and fascist forms”. Like the Dutch Left, Bordiga meant these
words to emphasize the tendency towards state capitalism in the countries of Western Europe.
1190 In its theoretical periodical Maandblad Spartacus (Nos. 9 and 12, 1945), the Bond published a study on the factory
occupations in Italy: ‘Een bedrijfsbezetting’ (A factory occupation). The article declared that in 1920 “the factories formed a
unity attached neither to party nor to trade union. The movement ended with a compromise between unions and bosses.” It
showed that factory occupations are not enough, and that workers’ councils must appear, whose “first task is not the
organisation of industry, but the organisation of the struggle. The period is then one of war: civil war”. This critical vision
of the Italian factory occupations is very different from the factoryist vision of ‘production management’ by the councils
defended later by the Bond and by Pannekoek.
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