The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

In 1945-46, the Bond examined several theoretical questions which had remained vague during its period of
clandestinity: the Russian, national and trades union questions. The questions of the workers’ councils, of the
class struggle in the post-war period, of barbarism and science, and the characteristics of the period following
World War II, were all considered in the light of Pannekoek’s contribution.
• The Russian question
The Bond had not really dealt with the nature of the Russian state since its formation. The conferences of 1945,
and a theoretical article on the question, made it possible to take up an unambiguous position. 1219 While it
rendered homage to the MLL Front’s position of revolutionary defeatism during the Russo-German war in 1941,
it noted that “the Front’s attitude towards the Soviet Union was still hesitant”. In fact, in 1942-44 they had
shared this hesitation with the Bond. By 1945, this was no longer the case.
For the article’s author, revolutionaries “could not and would not believe that the revolutionary Russia of 1917”
had been transformed into a power similar to other capitalist countries.
The Bond, unlike the GIC during the 1930s, did not define the Russian revolution as ‘bourgeois’. It tried to
understand the stages of the revolution’s transformation into a counter-revolution. Like the Italian Communist
Left of Bilan, it detected a counter-revolutionary process above all in the Russian state’s foreign policy, which
marked its integration into the capitalist world. This process had several stages: the Rapallo treaty in 1922; the
alliance with the Kuomintang in China; the USSR’s entry into the League of Nations in 1934. However, the
Bond considered that Russia had only become truly imperialist in 1939. The definition it gave of imperialism
was a purely military one, not economic: “Since 1939, it has become clear that Russia also is engaged in a phase
of imperialist expansion”.
However, the Bond also showed the internal counter-revolution, where “a state bureaucracy was born under
Stalin’s leadership”. The class nature of the Russian bureaucracy was bourgeois: “The ruling bureaucracy fullfils
the function of a ruling class, whose essential goals correspond to the role of the bourgeoisie in modern capitalist
countries”.
It should be noted here that the Russian bureaucracy is seen as bourgeois by its function, rather than by its
nature. It is an agent of state-controlled capital. Although it is clear in the rest of the article that this
‘bureaucracy’ is the form taken by the USSR’s state bourgeoisie, this gives the impression that in fact it is a
‘new class’, especially when we read that “the bureaucracy has become the new ruling class”. A few years later,
perhaps under the influence of the book of Milovan Djilas (The New Class,1957), this “ruling class” was to
become “a new class”, a “managerial class”.
The Bond showed that there existed two classes in Russian society, within capitalist relations of production
based on “the accumulation of surplus-value”: the working class and the “ruling class”. The existence of state
capitalism – as a collective capital – explained the Russian state’s imperialist policy:
“The state itself is the sole capitalist, by excluding all the other autonomous capitalist agents; it is a monstrous
organisation of global capital. Thus, on one side are wageworkers who make up the class of the oppressed; on
the other, the state which exploits the oppressed class, and whose domination is widened by the appropriation of
the surplus value created by the working class. This is the foundation of Russian society; it is also the source of
its imperialist policy.”
1219 ‘Het russisch imperialisme en de revolutionnaire arbeiders’ (Russian imperialism and the revolutionary workers), in:
Maandblad Spartacus, No. 12, Dec. 1945.
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