German and Dutch Left

In the two previous articles we showed that from the 1890s a proletarian opposition developed within the German unions. At the beginning it was against reducing the workers’ struggle to purely economic questions as the general confederations of the unions were doing. It then went on to oppose illusions in parliament and the SPD’s increasing confidence in the state.

This article is the last part of a study on the history of the Dutch Left between 1900 and 1914.

In this issue of the International Review we are publishing the continuation of the history of the Dutch Left. This part of the article deals with the period from 1903 to 1907.

The history of the international communist left since the beginning of the century, such as we've begun to relate in our pamphlets on the ‘Communist Left of Italy' isn't simply

The Dutch Left, 1919-1920, 2nd Part

The Third International

 

The German question

We look at how the ruling class used its most powerful weapons - not only armed repression, but also the ideological campaigns of the former workers' party, the SPD, to inflict a major defeat on the revolutionary movement. 

Part I Spartacusbond haunted by Bolshevik ghosts

The Spartacusbond,

The KAPD's Theses on the Party were written in July 1921 to be discussed not only in the party but within the Communist International, of which it had been a sympathising member since December 1920.

Cajo Brendel died at the age of 91 years on the 25th of June, 2007. He was the last of the Dutch "council communists". Cajo was a dear friend and a companion in struggle, who defended his positions fiercely but who was at the same time jovial, warm and cordial in companionship... Here we want to enter at some more length into his life and our ties with him.

As readers of our territorial press will know already, our comrade Marc is dead. In the December issue of our French territorial press, we published, as usual, the list of donations; one was accompanied with these words: “In reply to many letters which have touched me deeply, and for a first combat fought and won, this donation for the ICC’s press...” As always, our comrade fought against his disease with lucidity and courage. But in the end, it was the disease - one of the most virulent forms of cancer - that had the upper hand, the 20th December 1990. With Marc’s death, not only has our organisation lost its most experienced militant, and its most fertile mind; the whole world proletariat has lost one of its best fighters.

On the Fourth of May (1985), the last great figure of the Communist International, Jan Appel, died at the age of 95. The proletariat will never forget this life, a life of struggle for the liberation of humanity...

The war that the council communists had judged inevitable broke out in September 1939. Nevertheless, it took the Dutch Left two months to publish its theoretical review Raden-communisme, while its agitational review Proletenstemmen, had ceased publication in July...

A contribution to the history of the workers' movement.

Part 4

Council communism during and after the war
The “Communistenbond Spartacus”
(1939-1950)

Chapter 10

The disappearance and rebirth of Council Communism: From the “Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front” to the Communistenbond Spartacus” (1939-1942)

The article we are publishing below was written in July 1998, following the decision of the Dutch councilist group Daad en Gedachte to cease regular publication of its press. Since then, several meetings have taken place with the participation of Cajo Brendel, one of the group's leading members (we will give a full account of these later in the ICC's international press). Nonetheless, to date our fears as to the future of the group's publication have proven justified, since it has not reappeared.

The Dutch communist left is one of the major components of the revolutionary current which broke away from the degenerating Communist International in the 1920s. Well before Trotsky's Left Opposition, and in a more profound way, the communist left had been able to expose the opportunist dangers which threatened the International and its parties and which eventually led to their demise. In the struggle for the intransigent defence of revolutionary principles, this current, represented in particular by the KAPD in Germany, the KAPN in Holland, and the left of the Communist Party of Italy animated by Bordiga, came out against the International's policies on questions like participation in elections and trade unions, the formation of 'united fronts' with social democracy, and support for national liberation struggles. It was against the positions of the communist left that Lenin wrote his pamphlet Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder; and this text drew a response in Reply to Lenin, written by one of the main figures of the Dutch left, Herman Gorter.

With the publication of the 1920 programme of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), we complete the section of this series devoted to the communist party programmes which came out during to the communist party programmes which came out during the height of the revolutionary wave (see International Review no.93, the 1918 programme of the KPD; International Review no.94, the platform of the Communist International; International Review no.95, the programme of the Russian Communist Party).

The letters from Bordiga and Trotsky: presentation

In International Review n°s 98 and 99 we dealt with the defeat of the German revolution as a sign of the defeat of the world revolution; we now return to this question through the debates and srough the debates and struggles that took place within the Communist International at the time. The German question and the defeat suffered by the workers’ movement in Germany in 1923 were key questions of the day for the international working class. The eclecticism and tactical oscillations of the CI produced a disaster in Germany. This put an end to the revolutionary wave of the 20s and prepared the ground for the defeats that followed: in China (a situation we have already examined in this Review) and in Britain (the Anglo-Russian Committee and the General Strike). In the end it led to the irrecoverable loss of the International when it adopted the thesis of ‘socialism in one country’ and to the crisis of the Communist Parties which were sucked into the counter-revolution and the second imperialist war.

In this third part of the series, we are going to deal with one of the most important theoretical foundations of the Dutch Left. From its origin at the begin­ning of this century, the Dutch Left gave an interpretation of historical materialism which be­came a characteristic mark of the ‘Dutch Marxist school' (Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, H. Roland-H­olst). This interpretation of Marxist method is often called ‘spontaneism'. We will show in this article why the term is inappropriate. Gorter and Pannekoeks' position on the role of spontaneity allowed the Dutch Left to understand the changes imposed on the class struggle with the onset of capitalist decadence. At the same time, we can see certain weaknesses in Pannekoek which today's ‘councilists' have pushed to their most absurd conclusions.