The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The history of the Dutch and German communist left appears to present itself as a series of rejections:
• rejection of opportunism and reformism within the 2 nd International, as a strategy for the
parliamentary and trade union integration of the proletariat into the state;
• rejection of the strategy of the ‘peaceful conquest’ of the state in the name of a ‘western’,
‘democratic’ path for the ‘developed proletariat’; thus, rejection of any ‘gradual’ evolution towards
socialism;
• rejection of all nationalism and all national ideology within the proletariat, and consequently,
rejection of ‘progressive’ national wars and of the world war during the first great war;
• rejection of the trade union and parliamentary tactics, of the ‘United Front’ and support for ‘national
liberation movements’ advocated by Lenin and the 3 rd International with the aim of more rapidly
‘conquering’ the masses for the revolution;
• rejection of the big mass parties on the model of the 2 nd International, and thus rejection of the
attempts to form mass communist parties by fusing with the ‘centrist’ currents of social democracy;
• rejection of any party dictatorship over the working class after the seizure of power; rejection of the
dictatorship of the communist party over the workers’ councils or of seeing the latter as mere
transmission belts for the party; rejection of substitutionism, which sees the communist party as the
general staff and the proletariat as a passive mass blindly submitting to the orders of this general
staff;
• rejection of state capitalism as a ‘socialist transition’ to communism;
• rejection of the stalinist barbarism and of Russian state capitalism; consequently, rejection of the
‘defence of the USSR’ in the name of the ‘progressive’ character of the ‘degenerated workers’
state’; rejection of the trotskyist political analysis of the USSR;
• rejection of anti-fascist ideology as an ideology of a united front with the left wing of the
bourgeoisie and as a strategy for derailing the class struggle;
• rejection of popular fronts as decisive moments in the ideological defeat of the proletariat and in its
integration into the preparations by the ‘democratic states’ for generalised war;
• rejection of any support for the Spanish Republican state during the civil war and the call for its
overthrow by the proletariat; rejection of the conceptions and practices of anarchism in Spain, as a
form of collaboration with the Republican state and an inevitable path to the defeat and crushing of
the Spanish workers;
• rejection of any participation in the second world war in the name of the defence of ‘democracy’
against fascism; proclamation of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in both camps and the rejection of any
participation in the Resistance, which was denounced as a “military instrument of the imperialist
war”.
This long – and impressive – series of rejections is not unique to the Dutch left and its international counterparts.
The same rejection can also be seen in the bordigist’ current organised in the Italian Fraction around Bilan
in the 1930s. The position of these small groups can be summarised by the title of a series of articles in Bilan in
1936: “The watchword of the day: don’t betray!” These groups had made a conscious choice, despite their
growing isolation, not to betray their original internationalist positions.
The left communist current cannot however be defined only as a series of rejections. It was above all the
affirmation of a new strategy and tactic for the workers’ movement in the epoch of imperialism. This new epoch,
that of the ‘decadence of capitalism’, had profoundly modified the workers’ movement educated by social
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