The Birth of the Gic (1927–33)

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chapter 6 The Birth of the gic (1927–33)

The period from 1927 to Hitler’s coming to power is a key one in the history of the Dutch communist left. In Germany, what remained of the Essen current had literally disintegrated: the kai was only a shadow of its former self, to the point where its executive moved to the Netherlands in 1927.1 But the kapn – which was, in practice, the only real section of the kai – died slowly. In the Netherlands, the Essen tendency, which no longer even had Gorter’s backing, was effectively moribund. This period was unfavourable to the development of left-communism amongst the working class. After the defeat of the miners’ strike in Great Bri- tain in 1926, then the defeat of the Chinese proletariat in 1927, the postwar revolutionary wave was broken. The Comintern’s approach had been a con- scious policy of defeat that destroyed the workers’ revolutionary aspirations in every country. The formation of the Anglo-Russian Committee2 at the time of the English miners’ strike, and the Comintern’s alliance with Chang Kai-Chek’s Kuomintang were so many milestones in the defeat of the world-proletariat, leading directly to Hitler’s triumph in 1933. The ultimate adoption of ‘Socialism in one country’ by the Comintern in 1927 signed its death-sentence.3 Stalinism triumphed, along with its policy of defence of the ussr. The Stalinist policy in Germany proved to be the fatal blow for the international proletariat. With the crushing of the German proletariat by Nazism, abetted by the policy of the Comintern and the kpd, the path to revolution was barred for decades. The counter-revolution triumphed worldwide and the way was cleared for the

1 The Dutchman Lo Lopes Cardoso (1892–1944), a member of the kapn, became secretary of the kai, which held a conference in Amsterdam (20–26 February 1927). At the beginning of the 1930s, the kai was no more than an office in Amsterdam, managed by the publisher Emanuel Querido (1871–1943), whose publishing-house had brought out Gorter’s poetry. Emanuel’s brother, Israël (1872–1932) was a famous novelist and critic, who wrote a novel, influenced by Zola’s naturalism, about the Amsterdam Jordaan workers’ district, De Jordaan (1924). 2 On Stalin’s initiative, an alliance was created between the Russian unions and the British trades-unions. 3 Stalin defended this theory in his 1926 book Foundations of Leninism: ‘socialism in one country’ was ‘the construction of a fully socialist society in our country, with the sympathy and support of the proletariat in other countries, but without the prior victory of the proletariat in other countries’.

Second World-War. However, this period, with the brutal explosion of crisis in 1929, was also a striking confirmation of the theory of the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism’ defended by the Dutch-German communist current. The ‘objective conditions’ for proletarian revolution were realised: the crisis that had been so greatly expected and predicted now arrived. But the ‘subjective conditions’ for the revolution were missing. The groups in the tradition of Dutch-German left- communism remained unaware of this contradiction between the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ conditions of the revolution.

1 The Break with the kapd

For reasons that were as much political as circumstantial, from 1927 the gic separated from the kapd, eventually to split from it.

1.1 The Evolution of the kapd after 1923 The revolutionary political milieu to the left of the kpd was still far from negligible in 1923. It numbered some 20,000 members, organised both in the Unionen and in the kapd and its various splits.4 The kapd, which had about 2,000 members, remained stable. In 1923, it was one of the few revolutionary groups to oppose the nationalist, even anti-Semitic policy of the kpd.5 It strongly opposed the policy of ‘workers’ governments’, which it characterised as anti-worker governments.6 It moreover condemned the kpd’s formation of

4 See Kool 1970, p. 145. 5 See, for example, Paul Frölich: ‘Those who share the national interest must ally themselves with the fighting proletariat, must want the revolution … We do not deny the necessity of national defence, when it is on the agenda …’ (Rote Fahne, ‘Nationale Frage und Revolution’, 3 August 1923). Or Ruth Fischer, addressing Nazi students: ‘Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class-strugglers, even if they do not know it. You are against Jewish capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stamp on them’ (from a meeting of 25 July 1923, reported in Die Aktion No. 14, 1923). The kapd presented a compilation of this kind of nationalist prose in its pamphlet Die kpd im eigenem Spiegel. Aus der Geschichte der kpd und der 3. Internationale: see kapd 1926, pp. 59–79. 6 See kaz No. 75, September 1923, ‘Zur Frage der Arbeiter und Bauernregierung:’ ‘We are not a legal party and we have never yet accorded any value to legality. If necessary, we would fight the “workers’ government” from conspiratorial hiding-places, like the Bolsheviks fought Tsarism’. Finally, the kapd, in kaz, No. 71, September 1923 (‘Neues Blutbad der sächsischen Arbeiter und Bauernregierung’) recalled that the ‘workers’ government’ in Saxony had fired on a demonstration of the unemployed, leaving three dead and thirty wounded.