Philippe Bourrinet on the reaction of council communists in Holland to Marinus Van der Lubbe burning down the Reichstag in Germany, and on propagandistic acts in general.

It was the significance of Van der Lubbe’s torching of the Reichstag (27 Feb. 1933), more than Hitler’s coming to power, which focused the debates within Dutch council communism. The latter was profoundly divided on the question of ‘exemplary acts’ and of individual violence against symbols of bourgeois order.

Marinus Van der Lubbe, born in 1909, was a young mason worker from Leiden. He had been from 1925 till 1931 in the Dutch CP. He left on adopting anti-parliamentarist and council communist positions.

He was highly active in the unemployed movement and in the workers’ strikes that broke out in various towns, particularly after the textile strike of 1931.

After leaving the Unemployed Agitation Committee (WAC) – led by the CPN – he had been in Oct.-Nov. 1931 the main editor of the review for unemployed people in Leiden: Werkloozenkrant, which called for autonomous action committees, independent from any political party. Van der Lubbe was a worker wholly devoted to the proletarian cause and to the revolution. Pensioned off following an injury at work which threatened eventually to blind him, he devoted all his time to militant activity. He soon made contact with Eduard Sirach’s LAO (1) and helped in its propaganda work. If he had any contacts with the GIC in Leiden, (2) they remained personal. Van der Lubbe was never a member of the GIC, even if he sympathised with their positions and was a reader of the PIC.

After several trips to Germany and around Europe (Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria) to discover by himself the real state of the class struggle, Van der Lubbe decided to go to Berlin in February 1933, shortly after Hitler’s nomination as Chancellor (30th Janurary). He arrived to Berlin on the 18th. He took part to meetings of SPD and KPD and searched contact with homeless in Berlin (‘Obdachlosen’). It seems that he had political contacts (23 and 25.2.1933) with German council communists, with Alfred Weiland and some members of the KAU, wo eyed suspiciously the young Dutch worker. He was during a speech with Weiland very enthusiastic for the recent mutinery – near the coasts of Indonesia – led by the sailors of the Dutch battleship Zeven Provinciën (4-10 February), which was finally bloodly crushed by aviation, on order of the Colijn Cabinet.

In the night of the 25th February, he tempted to arson an city office for unemployed and a castle in Berlin, without any result. After leaving the capital, he returned to Berlin to arson the Reichstag. His decision to burn down the Reichstag may have been a personal one (3) motivated as much be the naive belief that his ‘exemplary action’ would ‘awaken’ the German proletariat as by personal despair (Van der Lubbe was condemned to imminent blindness). But above all, this personal despair expressed a growing political despair in the deepest layers of the proletariat.

We know what happened to Van der Lubbe. Dragged before nazi ‘justice’, he denied to have had contacts with the KPD, the ‘councilist’ milieu in Berlin. He was condemned to death (23rd December 1933) and decapitated on 10th January 1934, one of the first victims of nazi terror. For his friends, this execution was the logical continuation of the bourgeois terror which struck down so many workers under governments from Ebert to Hitler. But the worst for Van der Lubbe was to be dragged in the mud by the Stalinists, who accused him of being in the service of nazism and began a great campaign of slander. (4)

The Stalinists were his executioners every bit as much as the nazis, and had no hesitation in demanding his death. Dimitrov (Van der Lubbe’s supposed accomplice), who was to be acquitted and become one of the principal leaders of the stalinised Comintern, even demanded in open court that Van der Lubbe should be "condemned to death for having worked against the proletariat" (L’Humanité, organ of the French CP, 17th December 1933).

In the Netherlands, the CPH – despite Van der Lubbe’s having been an active party member – developed the same campaign of slanders. It propagated the lies contained in the ‘brown book’ published by the Münzenberg Trust – the latter being the Comintern’s great financial wizard – with the support of ‘democrats’ that included an English lord. To defend Van der Lubbe the council communists produced a ‘Red Book’ [Roodboek], which used a multitude of testimonies to dismantle point by point the accusations against him. (5) A Van der Lubbe committee was formed, made up of a member of the ex-KAPN, Lo Lopes-Cardozo, a member of the GIC, the psychiatrist Lieuwe Hornstra (1908-1990), and the proletarian writer Maurits Dekker (1896-1962). This committee had offshoots in several countries, including France. (6) It was in fact a cartel of groups and personalities, not very distinct from anarchism, since anarchists were included in it. (7)

The formation of this committee could not prevent a debate from emerging within Dutch council communism on the significance of ‘personal acts’ and of terrorism in general. On the one hand there were those who considered them ‘proletarian acts’, and on the other those who rejected all terrorist action on principle.

The first tendency, supported by the German council communists, (8) was motivated as much by a reluctance to ‘run with the hounds’ as by political confusion. It saw in the Reichstag fire, not an act of despair but a proletarian method which in other circumstances could ‘awaken’ the German proletariat and draw it into struggle. (9) The reaction of groups like the LAO and the Radencommunist grouping was typical in this respect.

Spartacus, organ of the LAO, while exalting Van der Lubbe – "an intrepid fighter, ready to sacrifice himself for communism" (10) – had an intermediary and contradictory position on the significance of individual terrorist acts. On the one hand, the LAO declared that: "We do not advocate individual terror as a method of struggle of the working class" (idem.). On the other hand, it implicitly supported it: "that does not mean that we reject every individual action..." (idem). In effect, the LAO ended up defending the position that individual terrorist action could bring the working classes into action: "The gesture of Van der Lubbe could be the signal for generalised workers’ resistance over the heads of the goons of the socialist and communist parties" (idem).

The position of the Radencommunist group was practically the same. It denied that the act of Van der Lubbe was one of individual desperation, corresponding to a profound disorientation in the proletariat: "Moreover this act must not be considered as an individual act, but rather a spark which, in this violently strained situation, could bring about the explosion". (11) In this way, the groups rejected the evidence of history: a terrorist action, individual or not, may be used by the dominant class to reinforce its oppression and its repression of the proletariat. In the final analysis, their position was very close to that of the Social-Revolutionaries before 1917 in Russia.

The second tendency sharply rejected the use of individual acts and terrorism as a method of class struggle. This was the case with the Arbeidersraad group (the Korpers’ group) – which came from the KAPN – and of the GIC. But their reasons were radically different. For De Arbeidersraad – it had been said at Van der Lubbe’s trial that he was a member of the KAPN – it was more a question of rejecting the person of Van der Lubbe than defending a classic position of the Marxist movement that "the motor force of the workers’ revolution has never been individual terror or putschism, but the crisis of capitalism itself". (12) By insisting heavily on the fact that nobody amongst them had "heard of Van der Lubbe", and that his action could have "a counter-revolutionary effect", it clearly refused any elementary solidarity with a victim of repression.

This ambiguous attitude heralded a political evolution which led certain members towards trotskyism, and finally the Communist Party. (13)

The attitude of the GIC was much less ambiguous. While declaring its solidarity with Van der Lubbe as a victim of nazism and stalinism, the GIC insisted that the young Dutch worker had clearly shown a "death wish in such an act", but that no-one should reproach him for it". (14) Once this solidarity was clearly proclaimed the GIC repeated the position of the German communist left in the 1920s.

"The task of a real revolutionary grouping can only be to reinforce the class by spreading a clear conception of social relations, of the questions of organisation and tactics. It is not up to us to make the masses move; that can only be the necessary result of social relations. Our task is only to help the masses in movement to find the right track" (GIC leaflet, in Spartacus no. 19, 9th March 1933).

More profoundly, Pannekoek – in an article in the PIC (15) – showed that any personal act’ like that of Van der Lubbe, could only obscure the class consciousness of the proletariat. The ‘personal act’ could only have value "as part of a mass movement": "In this framework, the audacity of the bravest finds expression in personal acts of courage, while the clear understanding of the others directs these acts towards their goal so as not to lose their fruits" (idem). Separated from mass action, all individual acts, far from weakening the bourgeoisie, can only reinforce it. This was the case with the burning of the Reichstag:

"The bourgeoisie has not been the least affected by the burning of the Reichstag; its domination has in no way been weakened. The government, on the contrary, has used the opportunity to considerably reinforce its terror against the workers’ movement." (PIC no. 7, March 1933).

Ideologically such action had no value "against abject electoralism" and bourgeois democracy. Democratic illusions could always take "another track"; for example, when the ‘right to vote’ is suppressed, then the mystification of "the conquest of real democracy is put forward" by the "democratic" bourgeoisie. In the second place, historically, individual terrorist action has no mobilising effect on the class struggle. It corresponds to a bygone age, that of the ‘bourgeois romanticism’ of the revolutions of the 19th century, where some leaders thought to mobilise the ‘passive masses’ by providing the ‘spark’ for the social explosion. The proletarian revolution, by contrast, "has nothing in common with the explosion of a powderkeg". Finally, terrorist action can only confuse the workers’ class consciousness: it reduces them to passivity. Individual action becomes a substitute for mass action. Its effect is thus totally negative:

"Even if such an act hit and effectively weakened the bourgeoisie, the only consequence would be to develop among the workers the conviction that such personal acts could liberate them... which would drive them still further from autonomous action as a class." (idem).

Consequently, the proletarian movement must reject all forms of terrorist action. which is nothing other than a revival of nihilism from the end of the 19th century. The GIC and Pannekoek thus showed clearly that the future of the revolutionary movement could only lie in mass action. This vision was not always understood by some militants of the Dutch councilist movement. (16)

Ph. Bourrinet (Feb. 2003)

Notes