The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

the Communist Party of Italy – the German-Dutch current was politically and organisationally incapable of
regrouping behind their banner. The “ultra-left” fractions of the KPD decomposed rapidly. The “bordigist”
current, expelled from the CP and the Komintern by 1926, followed its own path, to form its own international
tendency in exile, around Bilan and Prometeo. As for the Trotskyist current which belatedly formed around
1928-1930, as an opposition and not a fraction, its own political positions (unionism, parliamentarism, defence
of the USSR as a socialist state) were too alien to those of left communism for it to be influenced by the latter.
By 1927, what remained of the German-Dutch current had little left in common with the KAPD and Gorter,
which had incarnated western Linkskommunismus. With the progressive decline of the Berlin KAPD and the
Dutch KAPN of Gorter, it consisted of council communist groups, both in Germany and in the Netherlands,
more and more influenced by the anti-party theories of Otto Rühle. The Dutch GIC – Group of Internationalist
Communists – which was formed in 1927 around Canne-Meijer, Appel and Pannekoek (who had returned to
revolutionary activity) progressively formed itself into the main pole of the international “councilist” movement.
It is the GIC in the Netherlands that best incarnated the council communist movement after 1933. Linked at first
with the movement of the German Unionen (KAU), the GIC found itself faced with the heavy responsibility –
following the triumph of nazism in Germany in 1933 – of assuming the practical and theoretical tasks of the
German council communist movement, which had been forced completely underground. The group around
Mattick in the USA, itself also council communist, was too far away to work for a regroupment of the scattered
forces. But the action of the GIC in this sense could be seen as ‘negative’: its negation of the political function of
a revolutionary organisation; its rejection of all centralism for a loose federalism in its functioning; its refusal of
an international organisation of council communists, all contributed – but it was not the only reason – to the
dislocation of the international movement of the Rätekommunisten. The GIC’s opposition to the basic positions
of the German Left, which survived in clandestine groups in Germany (the decadence of capitalism, the
necessity of a political organisation) led to a definitive split between these groups and the GIC. From 1935
onwards, following the failure of the Copenhagen joint conference, one can no longer speak of the existence of a
German-Dutch council communist movement. The Dutch Communist Left, in the form essentially of the GIC,
withdrew to the Netherlands. It only broke out of its isolation on the occasion of the war in Spain and, very
temporarily, in 1937, when it forged links with groups in Belgium and France which had split from Trotskyism
but which had approached council communism.
Despite obvious organisational weaknesses and political ambiguities which placed it strangely close to the
anarchist movement which in other respects it had rejected, the GIC remained a Marxist revolutionary group. In
practice, it remained an intransigent Marxist group by not being content to be merely a group for study or
“marxological” work. Internationalism for this small group meant remaining faithful to the cause of the world
proletariat in preparing itself for a resurgence of the world revolution, in a future it hoped would be near. In a
historically unfavourable period for revolutionary groups, when it was “midnight in the century”, it was one of
the very rare organisations which deliberately chose to swim against the tide, at the price of increasing isolation
from the proletariat. The GIC always refused to support democracy against fascism. It rejected the defence of the
USSR and all nationalist movements of “national liberation”. In the sombre and tragic period of the 1930s, when
the whole of society was turning towards “inevitable war”, it ceaselessly advocated internationalist outlook in all
the belligerent blocs. It untiringly defended the necessity of a ‘world workers’ revolution’, as the only solution in
a world which was sinking into barbarism, where daily life was one of economic misery, of war, of massive
terror. At the time of the civil war in Spain, the GIC was one of those very rare groups – along with the Italian
Communist Left – which called on the Spanish workers to struggle not on the military fronts but on the ‘class
front’, for “the overthrow of the Spanish republican bourgeoisie”.
The internationalist positions of the GIC were in fact the historic legacy inherited from the German left
communist current. That which was distinctive about the Dutch Communist Left in the 1930s – anti-Bolshevism,
the refusal to constitute an international political organisation – prevented it from making a true and profound
balance sheet of the revolutionary period of the 1920s. Badly prepared for underground work and the struggle
against the war, lacking a solid organisational framework, the Dutch Communist Left vanished in May 1940,
with the first shots were fired in the Netherlands.
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