The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

with the American IWW), anarchism and ‘councilism’. It considered itself not as a group but as a ‘letterbox’ for
all currents to the left of stalinism and social democracy. It made known in Australia the existence of the Dutch
Communistenbond as well as that of the ‘bordigist’ current. Due to the lack of an organised political framework
the Australian periodical disappeared in 1949 without leaving any successors. 1270
The evolution of the ex-members of ‘councilism’ in Germany, which was its cradle, is particularly significant.
At the end of the war, some council communist militants in Germany were not able to assume revolutionary
political independence. Some circles, as these of Alfred Weiland and Peter Utzelmann preferred to have contact
in 1942-44 with local KPD resistance in Berlin, like the group of Anton Saefkow, and probably the Goerdeler
circle, opponent – with Canaris – to Hitler in the nazi state-apparatus.
In May 1945, was formed in the occupied Berlin a circle of former militants of the KAU, which published illegal
circulars letters: Zur Information, as organ of the organisation. Very fast, in 1946, the circle decided to “not be
isolated from the workers’ masses”. The militants (ca. 150) joined the SPD and the SED, developing a policy of
“entryism’, in absence of “independent revolutionary movement”. Later, the circle became the Group of
international socialists” (GIS), where the Weiland’s house were the central point for the discussions between
militants from West and East Germany. Any contact with the trotskyist group of Oskar Hippe (1900-1990) in
Berlin failed.
Most of them worked in the apparatus of the SED, and were under Russian and Stasi secret police surveillance.
Some of them became police informants. All these circles were a political stake for the western and eastern
intelligence agencies.
In fact, with Germany’s division in two, the old councilist currents evolved separately.
In East Germany, in particular in Saxony, the old members of the group Proletarischer Zeitgeist (‘The
Proletarian Spirit’) – who had published the periodical with the same name from 1922 till 1933 under the
influence of the AAU-E – regrouped. Their centre was in Zwickau and they kept up contacts with the western
zone (Hamburg and Mühlheim an der Ruhr). But this ancient Unionen tendency did not hesitate to merge with
the anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist remainders of the former FAU. Here the ‘unionism’ of the AAU-E led
directly to anarcho-syndicalism, at last till 1926, when this organisation broke with the FAUD. Initially strong in
Saxony, from 1948 on they were decimated by the political police of the Russian zone. Their principal leaders,
like Willi Jelinek (1890-1952), ex-delegate of Western Saxony to the second congress of the KAPD in 1920,
then AAU-E and editor of Proletarischer Zeitgeist, disappeared into prisons (Bautzen) or camps, as
Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. 1271
In the western zone, and, more specifically, in West Berlin, after 1946-47, one cannot speak of the existence of a
true independent ‘council communist’ current, but rather of a ‘left socialist’ current with councilist sympathies.
In the conditions of the ‘Cold War’, there no longer remained any independent political tradition of the KAPD.
After the war, as said above, the majority of the old members of council communism (KAU, Rote Kämpfer)
1270 The March 1948 issue (No. 43) of the Melbourne Southern Advocate for Workers’ Councils (previously the Southern
Socialist International Digest) published articles from Battaglia comunista (the Partito Comunista Internazionalista), and
from Internationalisme, the organ of the Gauche communiste de France, as well as an article from Le Libertaire, a French
anarchist publication. For the political road of Dawson, see: Steven Wright, “Left communism in Australia: J. A. Dawson
and the Southern Advocate for Workers’ Councils”, Thesis eleven I (Melbourne 1980), pp. 43-77. Web: .
Dawson, during the First World War had joined an IWW club (the Detroit IWW tendency linked to
the deleonist [Daniel de Leon] Socialist Labor Party in the USA). For two years he edited the One Big Union Herald for the
Workers’ International Industrial Union. During the early 1940’s he set up the Workers Literature Bureau to counter the
flood of stalinist material, mainly with material by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and the Australian Socialist Party.
Dawson moved progressively closer to a council communist position, typified by the publication of Pannekoek‘s Workers
Councils. Paul Mattick put Pannekoek in touch with him, and Workers Councils was finally serialised in Southern Advocate
for Workers Councils in 1948-49.
1271 See: Hans Manfred Bock, Geschichte des ‘linken Radikalismus’ in Deutschland. Ein Versuch, Frankfurt/Main 1976,
pp. 173-185, for the period 1945-50 concerning the left councilist-socialist current.
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