The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

One very important idea is set out in the Theses. The party is not only a programme; it is made up of men
animated by revolutionary passion. It is this passion, which the Bond called ‘conviction’, which would preserve
the party from any tendency towards degeneration:
“This self-activity of the members, this general education and conscious participation in the workers’ struggle
makes any emergence of a bureaucracy impossible within the Party. On the organisational level, it is impossible
to adopt effective measures against this [danger] should this self-activity and education ever be lacking; in this
case, the party could no longer be considered as a communist party: the truly communist party, for which the
class self-activity is the fundamental idea, the party in which this idea is incarnated, in flesh and blood, right
down to its every member... A party with a communist programme may degenerate; a party made up of
communists, never.”
Traumatised by the Russian experience, the Bond thought that militant will and theoretical training were
sufficient protection against the threat of degeneration. It thus tended to set up the image of the ‘pure militant’,
not subject as an individual to the pressure of ‘bourgeois ideology’. In their conception of the party as a sum of
individuals with “the highest demands”, the Theses expressed a certain voluntarism, or even naïve idealism. The
separation between a programme, the fruit of constant theoretical research, and militant will, led to the rejection
of the idea of the party as an organic and programmatic body. If the party was only a sum of individual wills,
there was no longer any need for an organ that unified all the militant cells. Two years later (see below), the
Bond was to push this separation to the extreme.
• The ‘link with the working class’
Born of the proletariat’s mass action, in the end the party’s only guarantee lay in its ties with the proletariat:
“When this tie does not exist, when the Party is an organ situated outside the class struggle, it has no other
choice than to place itself – in a defeatist way –outside the class, or to subject the workers to its leadership by
force. Thus, the party can only be truly revolutionary when it is anchored in the masses such that its activity is
not, in general, distinct from that of the proletariat, other than in the sense that the working class’ will,
aspirations and conscious understanding are crystallised in the party.”
In this definition, the ‘link with the class’ seemed contradictory. The party catalysed the consciousness of the
class in struggle, and simultaneously should merge with the proletariat. The Bond only sees the contradiction
between party and class in a process of degeneration, where the ‘tie’ is broken. This springs from the way in
which all revolutionaries of the day were haunted by the fear of seeing a repetition of the horrors of the counterrevolution
in Russia. Nonetheless, we cannot help remarking that the conjunction of the proletariat’s historic
goals with those of the party is not the same thing as a fusion between the two. The history of the workers’
movement, and especially of the Russian and German revolutions, was the turbulent history of relations between
the party and the class. In a revolutionary period, the party may disagree with the action of the class; thus the
bolsheviks disagreed with the Petrograd proletariat when it wanted to seize power in July 1917. It may also, like
Rosa Luxemburgs Spartakus Bund, agree with the ‘will of the masses’ in Berlin, in their impatience to seize
power, and be decapitated for its pains. In reality, there is rarely a ‘fusion’ between the party and the masses.
Especially in the counter-revolution, but even in the revolutionary period, the party is more often ‘against the
current’ than with it. Being – as the Theses show – a ‘part of the class’, it is distinct from the totality of the class
when its principles and activity are not totally accepted by the mass of workers, or even encounter their hostility.
• Party and State in the Revolution
The Theses published in December 1945 did not deal with the relationship between party and state during the
seizure of power. The question was raised inside the Bond, and in March 1946 a pamphlet was published, which
included a chapter devoted to the problem: ‘From slave-holding society to workers’ power’ (Van
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