The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

It was symptomatic that he made a separation between the revolution of the councils in the industrialised
countries, and the call for support for “national liberation struggles”: “There can be no socialist policy in Europe
and America without the proclamation of complete independence for the colonised peoples”.
On the colonial question, Poppe took up Lenin’s position on the “right of peoples to self-determination”. Poppe’s
positions do not seem to have reflected those of all the militants: in 1940, Jan Vastenhouw – then a member of
the MLL Front firmly attacked Lenin’s conceptions in an internal bulletin.
However, Poppe went a long way in his analysis; not only did he consider that “the task [of revolutionary
socialists] is naturally to call the workers of all countries to chase the Japanese out of the territories they occupy
in China, and Indonesia since 1942”, he also proclaimed the necessity for this “liberation” to be carried out under
the banner of the USSR. Poppe meant, not the USSR of Stalin, but a USSR freed from stalinism by the workers
and peasants thanks to the seizure of power by the councils in Europe. From this viewpoint – a mixture of
fantasy and faith – there would be a revolutionary war of “national liberation”:
“If the socialists are not wrong in their forecasts, then this means that the Soviet Union will become the most
important factor in the struggle against Japanese imperialism. A Soviet Union able to rely on an alliance with the
power of the councils of other peoples instead of dubious treaties with capitalist governments; a Soviet Union
that knows its rear to be protected by a European Union of councils and the solidarity of a proletariat guided by
revolutionary socialism should also be able – without the help of British or American armies – to chase the
Japanese imperialists out of Manchukuo [Manchuria, 1932-1945, under Japanese rule] and from other territories
of the Chinese republic, as well as from Indonesia.”
This idea of a ‘revolutionary war of liberation’ was similar to the theory of revolutionary war launched in 1920
by the Komintern. However, we cannot help remarking here that the ‘liberation’ at bayonet-point advocated by
Poppe was more national than revolutionary, since it proposed to restore in its entirety the territorial integrity of
the ‘Chinese Republic’. It appears as a bourgeois national war, like the wars of the French Revolution, which
sets up the national framework, rather than destroying it. Poppe’s theory of the workers’ councils was a national
theory of councils federated in Unions. Here, the conception of the “national liberation struggle” was the
corollary of a national conception of the workers’ revolution which would produce the workers’ councils.
The positions of Poppe and the Communistenbond were thus still far removed from those of council
communism. They were still a syncretic mixture of Leninism, trotskyism, even Gramscism. This was all the
more true in that the Bond remained incapable until the summer of 1944 of adopting a theoretical position on the
nature of the USSR.
In the end it was through discussions conducted during the summer of 1944 with old members of the GIC, that
the Communistenbond Spartacus moved definitely towards council communism. 1191 A few members of the Bond
made contact with Henk Canne-Meijer, Ben Sijes, Jan Appel, Theo Maassen, and Bruun van Albada, to ask them
to work in their organisation. They agreed to contribute theoretically through writing and discussions but they
wanted neither to dissolve their own group, nor join the Bond straight away. They were still very suspicious of
the new organisation, marked by its ‘Leninist’ tradition; they wanted to wait to see how far the Bond would
move towards council communism. Little by little, they took more part in editorial tasks and intervention, with
the hybrid status of ‘guests’. 1192 They avoided taking position on the Bond’s organisational issues, and took no
part in meetings where these issues were raised. At the beginning of 1945, they became full members of the
1191 On the history of the merge between the ex-GIC and the Communistenbond, some useful details are to be found in a
letter written by Henk Canne-Meijer (30 th June 1946) to the paper Le Prolétaire (RKD-CR). In 1944, Canne-Meijer wrote a
discussion text on workers’ democracy: Arbeiders democratie in de bedrijven, in Spartacus No. 1 (January 1945). Bruun
van Albada published a study on Marxist method as a dialectical and scientific method of investigation: Het marxisme als
methode van onderzoek.
1192 As Canne-Meijer notes in the same letter: “... they were only “guests”, doing all the work [...] in common with the
comrades of the Bond, but they avoided any organisational interference”.
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