The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

joined the left wing of the SPD or the SED-KPD, with contact – for some of them –with Western and Eastern
secret agencies. In the Eastern zone, after 1948-50, the SED was purged from the former members of the
KAPD/AAU, who known the “socialist prisons” in East Germany.
The Weiland’s circle – the GIS – published in 1947 the periodical Neues Beginnen, Blätter internationaler
Sozialisten (‘Beginning Anew. Papers of international socialists’) in Berlin from May 1947 until 1954, with a
circulation of 2,000 copies. The circle of Karl Schröder in East Berlin, refused to join. This periodical, which
Alfred Weiland and Fritz Parlow worked for, let claim to the positions of council communism. The circle rebuilt
also the former SWV (Sozialwissenchaftliche Vereinigung), active between 1923 and 1932, built by Paul Levi
and Karl Schröder, which tried after 1947 to regroup for the discussion the „left socialists“ in Germany.
They had links with the Dutch Communistenbond and published articles from Pannekoek, who contributed from
time to time. 1272 In fact Pannekoek indirectly supported a tendency whose violent anti-bolshevism, in the period
of the Cold War, was a barely concealed defence of the American bloc. 1273 His criticism of the SPD – to which a
good many of these ‘international socialists’ belonged! – could not hide an outspokenly left-wing socialist
orientation, which in the final analysis was a pro-Western one. The July 1949 issue declared: “A spectre haunts
the world, the spectre of the fifth column of Bolshevism...”. The February 1950 issue was full of praise for the
British Labour government, whose “silent revolution, full of consequences for world socialism and for liberty”
was “incomparably more revolutionary than the Revolution of October 1917”. 1274
In fact there were a multitude of small ‘anti-bureaucratic’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’ groups, whose members
worked inside social democracy and claimed continuity with the council communism of Otto Rühle. This was
the case with the ‘Thomas Münzer circle’ from Stuttgart, whose fusion with Neues Beginnen from Berlin in 1950
created the group ‘Funken’, who published a periodical of the same name until 1959: Funken, Aussprachshefte
für internationale sozialistische Politik. In 1949, in the midst of the Cold War, there appeared the periodical Pro
und Contra, with the subtitle: “Neither East nor West. For one single socialist world”. But all these periodicals
contained violent anti-Russian diatribes. And there is no doubt that they were used as instruments of propaganda
by the Allied authorities, while some former kapists have chosen to defend the “new socialist regime” in the
East. There were those, like Alfred Weiland, who believed rightly that an anti-Russian periodical like Pro und
Contra was infiltrated by the Russian NKVD for the purpose of provocation. 1275 People like Willy Huhn and
Henry Jacoby 1276 , who wrote for these periodicals, could well lay claim to continuity with Otto Rühle, but their
1272 Extracts of Pannekoek‘s correspondence in Neues Beginnen, without any mention of the author. He published articles
under the pseudonyms of Karl Horner and John Harper, as well as publishing under his real name in Funken ‘Über
Arbeiterräte’ (No. 1, 1952). ‘Die Arbeit unter dem Sozialismus’ (November 1952) ‚Arbeit und Masse’ (May 1955).
Although in the February 1950 issue, Pannekoek criticised the trotskyists’ ‘usurpation’ of the IKD label (the Bremen Left
Radicals of 1918). He said nothing about the ‘left-socialist’ orientation and activity of the members of the ‘Neues Beginnen’
and ‘Funken’ circles within German social democracy. On the contrary, he considered that the views of ‘Neues Beginnen’
were “in general” correct (letter from Pannekoek to Weiland, 9 th May 1950, quoted by H.M. Bock, op. cit., p. 176).
1273 O. Ihlau, Die roten Kämpfer. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik und im
Dritten Reich, op. cit., p. 143, claims that members of ‘Neues Beginnen’ were subsidised by the Americans during the 1948
Berlin blockade, in order to make it an instrument of ‘anti-bolshevik’ propaganda. For this reason, the ex-members of the
‘Rote Kämpfer’ ceased any work in common. This claim seems to have been true. In the height of the Cold War, the
Americans frequently offered subsidies to periodicals that stood to the left of stalinism and trotskyism. Juan Gorkin,
previously a leader of the POUM, was at the time an instrument of this policy, under the cover of the left wing of the
Komintern. According to Marc Chirik, former leader of this group, a similar offer was once made to the French Communist
Left (Internationalisme), ca. 1949-52 by Juan Gorkin. The GCF shrugged off this offer (interview by the author in the 80s).
1274 ‚Die Soziale Revolution und die Sozialisten’, in: Neues Beginnen, No. 2, Feb. 1950.
1275 This claim is made in a letter to Pannekoek [Pannekoek Archives, map 99/41] by Weiland, who was already being
watched by the Russian political police. Pro und Contra, edited by Willy Huhn and others, was violently anti-Russian. It
called for the “renovation of social democracy” and supported Tito’s Yugoslav experiment. It fell under trotskyist influence
(Ernest Mandel) from 1951 onwards. The same pro-Western tone is to be found in Funken, which in its October 1950 issue
denounced “the bolshevist peril”, and called for a united front of anti-fascists and democrats.
1276 Willy Huhn (1909-1970) was a member of the SPD in 1929, then of the SAP in 1931. He joined the ‘Rote Kämpfer’ (the
splitting SAP’s underground fraction). Despite brief periods of imprisonment, he remained a member of the RK from 1933-
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