The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Bond arrived at the idea that the Russian workers had struggled for the “bourgeois revolution”, and so for their
own exploitation. If 1917 was nothing to the revolutionary movement, it was quite logical for Pannekoek to
assert that “the proletarian revolution belongs to the future”. As a result, the whole history of the workers’
movement ceased to appear as a source of proletarian experience, and as a point of departure for all theoretical
reflection. The whole of the workers’ movement, from the 19 th century on, became ‘bourgeois’ and was situated
exclusively on the terrain of the ‘bourgeois revolution’.
This theoretical evolution was accompanied by an ever-greater immediatism towards workers’ strikes. The Bond
considered that its task was to turn itself into the echo of all strikes. The class struggle became an eternal present,
without a past because there no longer was a history of the workers’ movement; and without a future because the
Bond refused to appear as an active factor able to influence positively the maturation of the workers’
consciousness.
The decline of Dutch ‘councilism’
During the discussion with Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Bond had not given up the concept of the organisation or
the party. As Theo Maassen wrote: “the vanguard is a part of the militant class, composed by the most militant
workers from every political direction”. But this ‘vanguard’ was in fact a nebulous collection of groups from the
revolutionary, and even from non-revolutionary milieus! This vague definition of the vanguard, that dissolved
the Bond in the ensemble of groups, nevertheless was a last flare up of the original principles of 1945. Although
the Party appeared to it as dangerous, because of ‘its own independent life’ and because it developed “according
to its own laws”, the Bond still acknowledged its necessary roles it had “to be a strength of the class”. 1261
But this “strength of the class” would have to disappear in the workers’ struggle so as not to break “their unity”.
This boils down to saying that the party – and the organisation of the Bond in particular – was an invertebrate
organism, that had to “dissolve itself in the struggle”.
This concept was the consequence of the workerist and immediatist vision of Dutch councilism. To this current,
the proletariat as a whole appeared as the sole political vanguard, the ‘teacher’ of the councilist militants, who,
consequently, defined themselves as a ‘rearguard’. The identification of conscious communist and combative
worker led to an identification with the immediate consciousness of the workers. The militant worker of a
political organisation no longer had to elevate the level of consciousness of workers in struggle, but had to deny
himself and to place himself at the level of an immediate and yet confused consciousness within the mass of the
workers: “[from this] it follows that the socialist or communist of our era has to conform and identify himself
with the worker in struggle”. 1262
This concept was defended by Theo Maassen, Cajo Brendel and Jaap Meulenkamp in particular. It led – amongst
organisational reasons – to the September 1964 split in the Bond. The tendency that defended the antiorganisation
concept of the GIC until the end became a periodical: Daad en Gedachte. This dislocation of the
Bond had in fact been prepared by the abandonment of anything that might have symbolised the existence of a
political organisation. 1263 At the end of the 1950s, ‘Communistenbond Spartacus’ had become Spartacusbond.
1261 Quotations from a letter from Theo Maassen to ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, published in No. 18, Jan.-March 1956, under
the title ‘Encore sur la question du parti’.
1262 Quotes from the pamphlet Van Beria tot Zjoekof, cited above.
1263 Jaap Meulenkamp (1917–1998) was expelled from the Bond in September 1964. Cajo Brendel (1915–…) and Theo
Maassen (1891–1974), with two of their comrades (Theo van den Heuvel (1892-1976) and Rinus Wassenaar), were also
excluded in December 1964. All formed the group ‘Daad en Gedachte’.The exclusion was not amicable: the Bond
recovered the machines and pamphlets belonging to it, although these latter had been written by Brendel and Maassen. See
the testimony of Jaap Meulenkamp, who speaks of ‘stalinist methods’: ‘Brief van Jaap aan Radencommunisme’, in:
Initiatief tot een bijeenkomst van revolutionnaire groepen, 20 th January 1981. Thereafter, and despite invitations from the
Bond, Daad en Gedachte refused to sit at the same table as the latter during conferences and meetings, such as that of
January 1981. [Other members were: Bart van Burink, Gerrit de Pijper (?–1990)].
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