Critique of revolutionary impatience
[This is an unofficial translation, the original text by the Anti-Imperialist Movement (Spanish State) can be read in Spanish here.]
“Dimitrov (pointing at van der Lubbe): The unknown provocateur made all the preparations for the conflagration. This Mephistopheles succeeded in disappearing without a trace. Now this stupid tool, this miserable Faustus is here in the dock, while Mephistopheles has disappeared. It is most probable that the link between van der Lubbe and the representatives of political provocation, the agents of the enemies of the working class, was forged in Hennigsdorf.”[1]
On the night of February 27, 1933, the Reichstag, seat of the German parliament, was set on fire. Seventy-six years after that event, January 10 marked the 75th anniversary of the execution of the only person who had taken the decision to carry it out, Marinus van der Lubbe (1909–1934). However, the solitude of the act, both in its scant preparations and in its actual execution, was buried by the dialectical struggle between two powerful organizations, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the Communist International, which took advantage of the event to continue their particular confrontation on the ideological battlefield represented by the Leipzig trial. Marinus’s actions allowed the Nazi policy of exterminating the political opposition, especially and first and foremost the German Communist Party, the KPD, to leap from an incipient state of provocation to one of acceleration with the argument that the KPD was to blame for the fire, attributing it as wanting to signal the start of the insurrection for the seizure of power. The communists knew how to respond quickly and accurately to this authentic Nazi plot. The fire not only did not correspond to the policy pursued by the KPD up to that point, but the falsity of the accusation would be dismantled step by step from its very foundations. Georgi Dimitrov[2], the main detainee and member of the International, denounced the act as a conspiracy orchestrated by the Nazi leadership to generate a new provocation and criminalize the communist movement, thus justifying its definitive repression. The NSDAP’s policy of continuous clashes and provocations against the labor movement and the left-wing political opposition throughout the previous year made the Nazi plot plausible and gave great credibility to the communist defense, which relied on this argument to turn the plot against them. The outcome of the trial was twofold: first, the NSDAP achieved its goal on German soil, virtually annihilating what was until then considered the most powerful communist party in the world after the Soviet one. Secondly, the public trial ended brilliantly with the acquittal of the accused communists, after winning the sophistry battle that, in a trial riddled with irregularities and rigged from the start, pitted the court, faithful executor of the anti-communist plot hatched by the Nazis, against Dimitrov, who represented his own defense and that of the other accused comrades, in the name of international communism. This international media victory would ensure that the Nazi plot prevailed for decades, a version that was favored by the growing global anti-fascist sentiment of the ’30s and, following the end of World War II, would be endorsed by Western historiography, which also embraced the communist version out of shared interest.
A life of struggle… individual struggle[3]
But, as we have already said, a single person was both intellectually and materially responsible for the fire. Marinus van der Lubbe, who did not live to be 25, was a young Dutch proletarian from humble origins and a broken family. Orphaned as a child, he soon found work, becoming a brickmason. Largely self-taught, he passionately embraced communism, joining the Young Communist League at the age of 16. Two work-related accidents in quick succession will cause progressive blindness, leaving him unable to continue working regularly. He will receive a reduced disability pension, which he will combine with occasional work. But his main activity was as a communist, dominated by street action, graffiti, leaflets, and clashes with the police, which led to his imprisonment on several occasions. The bolshevization of the Party, following the dictates of the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, as well as the “bureaucratic” discipline that prevailed within the organization and criticism of the direction the revolution was taking in the USSR, led, not without regret, to his final abandonment of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, after several previous attempts that failed due to his own indecision. Marinus’s libertarian radicalism led him to disagree with the overly rigid organizational structure, clashing with the discipline imposed by the hierarchical organization of the Leninist Party, which, in his view, limited and controlled direct action and the spontaneous initiative of the masses, for which he felt a particular weakness. In 1931, the local Party organization reprimanded Marinus for initiating and preparing, on his own, a trip to the USSR[4], which became the final cause of his definitive abandonment of the Party.
Inclined as he was to more informal relations than to the militant discipline characteristic of Bolshevism, he joined the Group of International Communists (GIK), an organization of the councilist current of the communist left led by Pannekoek and Gorter, enthusiastically setting to work on the development of spontaneous actions of the proletariat, since, according to him, the struggle against capitalist oppression and exploitation must come by itself. The secondary value he gives to theory leads him to also abandon this group to found the Left Workers’ Opposition (LAO). The GIK focused its action on propaganda to develop the mass movement, while the LAO sought to accelerate the process through direct class struggle. Marinus was finally able to realize his own ideal of action without encountering opposition from his comrades or the organization’s structure. He will continue his work of publicly denouncing the unnecessary and limiting leadership of the proletariat, both politically and in trade unions, among workers, and will insist that workers must learn to act on their own without waiting to be directed.
The Reichstag fire
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor. Throughout 1932, unrest in Germany had been on the rise, and Hitler’s proclamation only exacerbated this. The widespread coverage of the political events unfolding in Germany by the Dutch working-class and revolutionary press stimulated Marinus’s appetite for action, which favored his decision to become involved. Marinus, freely and independently, decides to go to Berlin, even though his comrades do not consider it necessary to intervene and refuse to accompany him. He feels a radical rejection of capitalism and is obsessed with avoiding another world war. He is not particularly anti-fascist, considering fascism part of the capitalist social system, which must be fought against wherever possible. For him, as for many at that time, Germany represents the most solid bastion of the European proletariat after the USSR, and he places his hopes for revolution in its working class. He wants to be present when this happens, believing the uprising against capitalism, now led by the Nazis, is imminent. However, he will be deeply disappointed. Although, in addition to the army, there were four different party militias in Germany at that time (Communists, Social-Democrats, Nationalists, and Nazis), open combat was only on the minds of the Nazis, who carried out the violent offensive in the streets. The working masses did not respond, they resisted, following the directives of their organizations. While the SA (the NSDAP’s Assault Detachments) infiltrate, provoke, and attack the labor movement[5], the KPD directs its attacks against the social-fascist German Social-Democratic Party, the SPD, trying not to fall into Nazi provocations[6]. Marinus notes that the proletariat is following the slogans of its parties and trade unions, which contain the struggles to halt the spiral of violence, he thinks a stimulus is necessary to force the situation, so that the masses can overcome the inaction of their leaders. Just like after his first few days in Berlin, where he arrived on February 18, forcing the debate in search of the complicity of workers and the unemployed failed to achieve his goal, he decided that he must act, even if alone, and carry out some spectacular act that would serve as a trigger to awaken the masses from their lethargy so that they could take action on their own, taking control of the events themselves. He will buy, then, the incendiary material he considers necessary and, after having tried unsuccessfully to set fire to several buildings that house representative institutions of the bourgeois state[7], disappointed and almost penniless, he will prepare to return to the Netherlands. However, two days after these failed attempts, he decided to try his luck once more, heading towards the Reichstag. After spending part of the day studying the building, at nightfall, he entered through a window and, this time successfully, set fire to several buildings, including the amphitheater, which houses the parliamentary session chamber. Pursued through the building, Marinus was arrested and taken to the police station, where he proudly confessed his act of protest in detail.
Significance and implications of Marinus’s action
Indeed, faced with the powerlessness in which Marinus perceives the German working class finds itself, held hostage by the leaderships of its parties and trade unions, he decides to do something, an act of protest against this situation in which the system finds itself, an act of individual protest[8]. Although the news of the fire was initially received with sympathy and even joy in various revolutionary circles across Europe, the individualist nature of the act would encourage its use and manipulation by much more powerful forces.
The usefulness of an action is measured by its outcome. Marinus, too, seemed to understand this criterion, yet he did not consider the likeliest outcome. Direct, immediate, spontaneous action, the result of a poorly thought-out outburst and provoked as an instantaneous reaction to a negative stimulus, has rarely had a result that, at the very least, could have brought any direct benefit to the cause in whose name it is carried out.
This is the first problem posed by Marinus’s action, an act of individual spontaneity, isolated from the proletariat and therefore easily exploitable. The outcome of the act will be the opposite of what he himself intended. The confrontation between communists and Nazis will dominate the trial and spill over into the international media spotlight. Marinus’s initial intention as an act of protest will go unnoticed. Even if, as an historian claims[10], Marinus acted in the hope of sending a signal for a proletarian insurrection against the capitalist system, this objective could not have been further from the intentions of the German workers’ organizations and the broad masses aligned with them.
On the other hand, glorifying Marinus’s desperate act does not help to establish its correct summation. Nico Jassies, author of the book under review, echoes the efforts and arguments that the van der Lubbe Committees[11] presented in their Red Book[12], in which they pointed out, in a free interpretation, that Marinus “was,as it were, driven to the building that for the German working class in particular and the world proletariat in general was the symbol of all economic and political enslavement and disenfranchisement: the Reichstag building! . . . The spark is the deed. On the night of February 27 to 28, Marinus van der Lubbe sets fire to this temple, this palace of treason.”[13] On the contrary, the burning of the Reichstag is merely the successful outcome of the fourth try to start a fire, two days after attempts were made against other buildings housing bourgeois institutions, all of them of a lower emblematic and institutional status. He had not planned to set fire to the Reichstag when he began his endeavour. It is a decision he makes on the fly, once he’s already set out on his way back to the Netherlands: “He’s almost out of money, his attempts to do something in Berlin have yielded nothing and he is disappointed with the attitude of the people. Early in the evening he reports, as was customary at the time, to the police station in Henningsdorf, a village outside Berlin, to spend the night in the homeless cell. But during the night he changes his mind. He wants to try it one more time. On Monday morning he returns to Berlin on foot and buys four packets of firelighters there in the afternoon. Then he goes to the Reichstag building to examine it well from outside.”[14] The motivation was not to serve as a signal, nor was the building specifically chosen to adequately serve that purpose. The spark is not the deed, if that deed is not only individual and removed from any plan, but also isolated from revolutionary organizations and the proletarian masses that support them. The criterion of the result should be sufficient to treat this action as useless and even counterproductive, where the first result is the fall and elimination, useless in fact, of a revolutionary worker like Marinus.
The fire will pave the way for the public trial to be held in Leipzig. From there, the true and immediate consequences of Marinus’s actions will be broadcasted to the rest of humanity. The propaganda of two groups, that of the Nazi Party and that of the Communist International, will clash. On the one hand, the Nazis will exploit the fire to accuse the communists of having signaled an armed insurrection and they will unleash a virulent anti-communist campaign that will resonate throughout the country, justified in the public opinion, would be the prelude to a “general offensive against the revolutionary movement of the German proletariat” to curb international Bolshevism[15]. Immediately after the fire, and based on the possibility provided for in the Weimar Constitution, Nazi pressure forced the approval, the very day after the fire, of an emergency Decree[16] suspending basic constitutional rights and freedoms, allowing, in the name of public safety and the state, the search and detention of any suspect. The arrest of thousands of communists and their allies will begin, followed shortly by repression against opponents from other parties. Although the harassment of communists had begun before the fire, the promulgation of the Decree would serve as the legal basis for the indiscriminate and massive increase in repression, the outlawing of the KPD, and the subsequent subjugation of the rest of the political and trade union organizations, accompanied by consensus and support among the masses, especially the broad middle class, and the majority of public opinion, which the Nazis had not yet fully controlled shortly before. On the other hand, the solid alibi of Dimitrov and the other two arrested Bulgarian communists, combined with his outstanding speech, which dismantled the court’s accusations against him, establishing anti-fascist principles of democratic unity as a basis for his argument rather than revolutionary ones, will rally the entire Western anti-fascist democracy to defend the arguments of the Nazi provocation plot. Dimitrov will leverage his skills as a well-prepared leader and good orator. Facing Nazi-fascism as a powerful enemy, the primary task will be to defeat it, so the essence of its bourgeois democratic discourse of renouncing the revolution will be pushed into the background, unnoticed by the majority of the proletarian masses and, worse still, justified by them. He will present at the trial the program of the Communist International that will end up being sanctioned at the Seventh Congress in 1935. This anti-fascist approach managed to push to the background the capitulationist and defensist behavior of the KPD, which had no intention of fighting for power or preparing for it. By the ’30s, the Communist International had already largely renounced revolution[17], postponing it until conditions of pressure and temperature that were difficult to achieve were met, as they were determined by agents and circumstances deliberately left out of the organizational and leading action of the revolutionary political subject, the Communist Party. When the time came, after the former was dissolved in 1943, it would write its epitaph with the forced surrender of partisan weapons in Western Europe at the end of the war in 1945, its dramatic prelude being its betrayal of the revolution in the civil war of 1936–39 in the Spanish state, in direct application of the new strategy.
The end justifies the means
Indeed, when the end is legitimate, so are the means used to achieve it. One can debate indefinitely whether this phrase, elevated to the status of a precept, enjoys a moral and ethical standard more or less in line with the dominant thought pattern of each era, but the Byzantine discussion on the subject itself demonstrates its continued application at all times, even playing its high-sounding denial as a Machiavellian justification for the most widespread and indiscriminate repression against the most basic rights, as can be seen daily in the so-called “fight against terrorism.”
In the 1930s, the struggle was increasingly focused on combating fascism as it rapidly spread throughout the world. The publication, in early August of 1933, of The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror brought together for the first time information on concentration camps, racist persecution, and other acts of terror perpetrated by the Nazis[18]. The book explains the Nazi plot and Marinus’s alleged involvement in it. The goal was to inform the masses, warn them, and prepare them for action in the face of what was coming. It had an educational mission, which it achieved quite successfully; however, these teachings were partly based on false arguments and unverified facts, most notably the case of the Reichstag fire. The book, widely distributed by the Allies, introduced the guilt of the Nazis into the common consciousness of the world’s population, along with the acceptance of all the arguments put forward in support of it. A humanity horrified by the experience of war could only unswervingly accept the explanations that recent events had only dramatically confirmed. After the end of the war, the Nazi plot and the falsifications regarding the fire persisted for a long time because it suited both sides of the Cold War. The main argument for maintaining this falsification was in the name of so-called “people’s education,”[19] as it was impossible to whitewash the responsibility of the Nazis for the conflict that had devastated the world, something that could diminish the other crimes they committed. Only from the ’60s onwards, when the Nazi question was already more distant and seemed definitively resolved, when the points of friction in the world were of a different nature and the interest of the masses was directed towards them, did the events of the Reichstag gradually begin to be treated with new rigor, more objective and in line with the reality of the proven facts. However, the decline in the level of public awareness of the Second World War allows the victorious version of the Nazi plot to persist at best, if not to the extent of its complete ignorance.
The significance of the construction of the Nazi plot lies in the fact that its definitive clarification calls into question the political responsibility of each of the Allies at the start of the war. To a greater extent, it points to the guilt of Western democracies for having allowed German rearmament in the hope of turning it against the East and, not least importantly, it exposes the shift of the communists, with the Soviet Union at the forefront, who opted for a practice based on the political realism of the anti-fascist and inter-class alliance based on the practice of political diplomacy, instead of developing the class struggle and preparing to transform the imperialist war into a struggle for ultimate power. The shedding of light on what really happened in the Reichstag calls into question the policies of both the KPD and the Communist International at the time. This is what prevented the reversal of the trend unleashed by the initial falsehoods, aggravated by the war, and institutionalized by the new world order of dividing the world into two victorious blocs. The means employed to achieve the noble goal of damaging the image of National Socialism to the maximum extent possible will affect the subsequent development of policies based on the exaltation of “democracy” as the pivotal axis of both blocs. The democratic and pacifist profile demanded by both blocs could only be undermined by the questioning of the official facts popularized during the Leipzig trial. Now, the need to take stock of the October Cycle requires questioning policies and events in order to extract the true lessons from the entire period.
Nico Jassies, the book’s author, a supporter of Marinus’s romantic memory and a proponent of the most radical councilism, in his opinion on the role of the conspiracy in history, strives to discredit organizations of the Leninist type for an alleged distancing from the revolutionary commitment that would be intrinsic to their very nature. He seeks false arguments to denounce the drifts that the communist parties will take in their progressive distancing from the revolutionary path, attributing it to the Leninist conformation of the Party of a New Type. This search leads him to stumble upon the same type of analytical nonsense that he incurs when he opts to glorify Marinus’s action in order to try to dismantle them. Jassies claims that organizations that practice terrorism are, for him, exponents of the Leninist party model[20], which is false, since organizations that practice terrorism are, at the very least, deviations from the Leninist model of organization that are poorly restructured for conspiratorial direct action and, at the most, are a direct product of the tendency within the workers’ movement that chooses to follow the path, wrongly called anti-authoritarian, that fights to impose anarcho-council doctrinarism based on workers’ autonomy, attempting to reconcile Marxism with libertarian utopianism. Therefore, bringing up, as an argument in support of his opinion, the experience of the Italian Red Brigades to demonstrate the failure of the Leninist party, can only backfire on him, since they, precisely, have their origins in the fusion of petty-bourgeois radicalism, originating in the university Unitary Base Committees, with the workers’ struggles led by proletarian autonomism between the late ’60s and during the ’70s. The Brigades were born out of the first stagnation of the autonomist movement. At that time, the Italian communist movement was in the hands of the all-powerful revisionism of the Communist Party, the PCI, which, in application of the theses of so-called Eurocommunism, strove to achieve a historic compromise with Christian Democracy and definitively open the peaceful Italian path to socialism. Since the mid-’60s, the main issue within the ranks of the communist movement has been the formation of a genuine revolutionary communist party that would hunt down the PCI’s revisionism and put it back on the revolutionary path, a task fostered above all by the international struggle led by the Chinese Communist Party against Soviet revisionism. However, the extreme left undertook the fight against the conciliationism of the PCI and its “bureaucratic structure” by gradually renouncing Leninism, trying to avoid the path of peaceful class conciliation by emphasizing self-organization and grassroots participatory democracy and renouncing the constitution of a vanguard political organization, and its inclination towards direct and increasingly spontaneous action thus hindered the formation of a revolutionary party of the Leninist type, actively obstructing this task, which was being carried out by other sectors split from the left of the PCI. In the midst of this struggle on the Italian far left, the Red Brigades organization emerged as a more consistent escape route toward radical anti-system utopianism. Their actions, subject to a policy that would have as its central axis the replacement of armed struggle with the violence of direct action from the outset, would come to dominate the political initiative in the country. The assassination of Aldo Moro and the increase in repression not only led to the definitive abandonment of the objective of the historic compromise between the PCI and the Christian Democrats, but the repression was directed above all against workers’ autonomism, provoking organic disunity and the dismantling of the process of struggle against the capitalist system, and also destroying, at that time, the possibilities of reconstituting the Communist Party and recovering the revolutionary path, and tilted the Italian state and public opinion to the right, forcing the demobilization and gradual deactivation of all the experiences of workers’ and students’ struggles of those years.
It is precisely the impotence of the anarcho-councilist struggle to break the system that leads to armed struggle being confused with terrorist practices. As an extreme case of deviation, an individualistic action in the complete absence of organization, as the case of Marinus demonstrates, is, on every occasion, supplanted and manipulated precisely by organizations that have the power, the strength and the capacity to assimilate the act to events based on their interests.
The revolutionary impatience of Marinus
The cult of spontaneity generates individualism, and individualism in turn favors spontaneity. Hardline workerism cannot escape the level of consciousness of the average worker except through individual actions with the vain pretense of serving as an enlightening trigger for those average working masses.
Marinus is deeply affected by this cult of spontaneity. The revolutionary impatience that leads to professing this cult has its origins in a weak understanding of Marxism, a disdain for political and social reality, and a rejection of scientific objectivity. The inability to adopt a plan leads to abandoning the pursuit of objectives without taking into account the specific conditions, the laws of the revolutionary development of society, and the steps and stages through which any profound transformation must be undertaken. It does not take into account the unevenness of humanity’s social evolution, marked by advances and setbacks, which is expressed in uneven development. The poor understanding of the evolution of the specific situation leads to occasional battles, without order or method, reducing the action to strikes and riots which, due to the principled rejection of the political organization of the class, are carried out without plan or concert, confusing the means employed with the desired objective. Thus, radical thought is represented through political slogans for immediate consumption, replacing real circumstances with mere will as the driving force for the development of events. Marinus’s individualistic and contradictory behavior is represented by his smashing of the windows of the Social Aid Office in Leiden, where he had twice applied for help to set up a library for workers and the unemployed, only to have both requests denied[21]. This will not stop him, and so, several months later, he will resubmit the same application with the exact negative result. This time he protested by going on a hunger strike, being hospitalized a few days later, a stance he abandoned in exchange for promises that were never kept. It is contradictory to prefer to beg for a subsidy from a capital institution and reject the creation of a powerful communist organization independent of the system that can, through its own means, provide the proletariat with the necessary infrastructure and resources and whose objective is revolution and the seizure of power. However, he showed considerable initiative in seeking funding for his personal political trips[22], without resorting to institutional begging.
To be revolutionary, hatred of capitalism must be deeply rooted in the individual, but this hatred must deny the condition of being exploited and also the way in which this exploitation is expressed, the real form of existence of the class. Marinus’s scheme of thought captures the contradiction between, on the one hand, vehemently hating capitalist exploitation, especially in its most directly evident manifestations of injustice and oppression, and, at the same time, rendering an unreflective cult towards the exploited masses and their spontaneous action, which can never overcome the economic framework of their action, that is defined by their objective material position in the social organization of the system, a position of wage-earner that is only questioned in the most immediate and superficial aspects, but which never affects the underlying foundation behind these aspects and which resides in the social division of labor. The Marxist revolutionary must position himself intellectually outside of this contradiction to combat it from a position of independence, the only position from which the system can be revolutionized to negate this contradiction. In Marinus, as in all anarchist movements, the divorce between the ideal and the final objective and the interpretation of the social and material reality in which revolutionary action must unfold to achieve the goal is perpetuated ad aeternum. Hatred of capital cannot, and should never, cloud reason, but rather must incite the fusion of organization and ideology as a basis for action. The revolutionary process is proving to be slow, sometimes unbearably slow, but anxious voluntarism cannot obscure the will based on patient and conscientious reflection and study that allows us to firmly establish the steps that must be taken to carry out the necessary tasks that the state of the revolution demands.
The wishful thinking that sometimes leads to an unwavering hatred of capital moves away from communism, which aims to link emancipatory thought with the real movement of society, and brings it closer to anarchism, which elevates revolutionary impatience to an axiom.
A praxis to be banished
If we analyze the practical result as a criterion to clarify the suitability of a given praxis, we must come to the conclusion that, not only Marinus’s action, but also the verification of the model proposed by council communism has turned out to be a failure from the beginning, proving incapable, not only of unmasking before the proletariat the “lies of the Stalinist propaganda machine,” nor of causing serious problems to the capitalist system, much less of managing to defeat it.
Councilism, by keeping the proletariat at its lowest and most spontaneous level of ideological and political organization for fear of interfering with its supposed free will (something completely nonexistent, depending on the immediate problems posed by the bourgeois relations of production in which it operates), regresses to pre-Marxist conceptions and for this reason is so similar to the different anarchist and utopian currents. It does not accept that reality surpasses the idealization of a revolutionary process of emancipation which, precisely because it originates in a society corrupted by the particular interests resulting from the division of labor, cannot emerge as an aseptic conception, inoculated against the very system from which it springs. It is essential to accept the uneven development of humanity, otherwise, propaganda without an organizing vocation, intruding on this spontaneous system, and action that does not take into account the different levels of consciousness of the masses or seek connections with them based on the level of action to be carried out, leads to isolation from them, as events have ultimately demonstrated throughout history.
In the case at hand, the struggle for recognition of the truth about who set fire to the Reichstag and why has only served to further isolate Marinus’s actions, rendering them meaningless, and ultimately removing even his political responsibility from history, thus nullifying his very act of protest[23]. With this, the weakness, not only numerical but above all ideological, of the van der Lubbe Committees ends up losing the battle for the dignification of Marinus’s revolutionary utopianism and the individualist action, full of romanticism and petty-bourgeois radicalism, manifests itself to the intellect as an act of terrorism, not of revolutionary violence, losing its last support and taking away the only meaning it could have as a proletarian protest.
The problems that Marinus’s action caused to the councilist movement itself forced Pannekoek himself to denounce it in an article as “completely worthless,”[24] correctly highlighting that it was the German bourgeoisie that was most interested in liquidating parliamentarism, so that the action objectively served the interests of fascism, thereby adding to and contributing to the climate fostered by the rise of Nazism. Pannekoek recognizes that individual action can only be effective within the framework of the “mass action of the entire working clas”[25]; but councilism rejects the idea that this framework cannot be operational if the proletarian political party does not structure it, effectively rendering the movement and, consequently, its capacity for action useless.
The necessity to draw the right lessons
That the burning Reichstag failed to awaken the masses and provoke the long-awaited uprising does not indicate the weakness of the German working class[26], as Marinus’s friends claimed, but rather its high level of integration within its party, its degree of organization and discipline and, on the contrary, it exposes its leadership, which was mostly reformist, reluctant to the revolutionary efforts required by a determined struggle for power and which, in its eagerness to maintain bourgeois legality, consciously neglected clandestine preparations. There is indeed a revolutionary weakness in the working class, but this revolutionary weakness is reinforced, among other causes, by the councilists’ insistence on artificially keeping the proletariat disconnected from its vanguard, which does not help to understand the links established between the predominantly reformist leadership of the class and the masses, thus preventing their overcoming.
The move to illegality will trap the KPD without being able to put up any resistance, with a few honorable exceptions. A harbinger of this suicidal behavior of the KPD is the behavior of the spokesman for the communist parliamentary group, Ernst Torgler, the last to leave parliament that night before the fire and wanted by the police as an instigator. He voluntarily surrendered to proclaim his innocence, but was ultimately arrested.
It is painful to witness the defeats, neglect, ineffectiveness, and betrayals in the workers’ struggles and to see the nature of reactionary politics based on the spontaneity of the masses. There are several alternatives that can be used in the response of someone who considers himself a revolutionary. You can grow discouraged and abandon the struggle, you can accept defeat as inevitable and join the ranks of revisionist opportunism, you can go underground and be patient, analyze what has happened, and work tenaciously to follow the appropriate steps and tasks or you can choose to flee forward, desperately, hoping that what you perceive as correct in the specific situation will also be understood by the masses through the mere fact of carrying out a spectacular action so that the overwhelming example of dedication and personal sacrifice will catch on among them as well.
It cannot be said that Marinus is faithful to the interests of the working class, because Marinus is only faithful to his anti-capitalist instinct dominated by impatience. Marinus does not count on the class for anything he does, expecting it to respond to his calls simply for the sake of making them, and yet he shuns any commitment that might force the revolutionary path and imply, in turn, disciplined integration into a combat organization. Marinus’s propaganda work is not surpassed by the act of the arson, as it has the same objective character, without real connection to the class and, therefore, easily exploited against it.
The model of insurrection that van der Lubbe wanted to provoke had its final heterodox expression in the Bolshevik Revolution. October 1917 marked the definitive transition from a model of revolution that had always been fruitless for the proletariat to a new, authentically proletarian model that paved the way for power. We went from a model of revolution that obeyed the specific circumstances of the historical moment, the result of the worsening of the socioeconomic or political circumstances that said situation determined, and that made the signal of the popular uprising depend on an act of individual terror, or a localized coup d’état, as the trigger for a social explosion that would spread like wildfire, provoking the longed-for general mass insurrection, to the Leninist revolution, which replaced that model with that of its prior preparation and organization, hence the need for the Party of a New Type and the conscious establishment of tasks, which seeks to adapt the specific situation to revolutionary demands and which will make it the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard that gives the order for a general insurrection, acting at all times as the center and general staff of the revolution[27].
All subsequent insurrectionary failures —two of which took place in Germany, in 1918 and 1923— already demonstrated the impossibility of carrying it out without a Party and without a plan. Unfortunately, it will take a long time for the communist and revolutionary movement to realize this. On the other hand, in those same years, the People’s War was already making its way in the East, announcing the definition of the new strategy for the conquest of power, while the international communist movement largely renounced it, relegating it, at best, to a month of Sundays after the invention of chimerical intermediate stages. It will still take a long time for the definitive universalization of the People’s War as a strategy for world revolution. The battle to establish this strategy in the rest of the decomposed international communist movement continues.
Marinus, correctly placed in his rightful place in history by the facts, can finally join the ranks of the millions of proletarian fighters who gave the best of their lives, as they understood it at each moment. Ever onwards to victory.
Anti-Imperialist Movement
(Spanish State)
September 2009
Notes
[1] Quoted from the “Minutes of the Speech Before the Court. Delivered on December 16, 1933,” in Georgi Dimitrov. Selected Works in Three Volumes, volume 1. Sofia Press. Sofia, 1972; p. 399.
[2] Dimitrov, a Bulgarian exile in Germany, was denounced by a waiter at the bar where he met with other exiles, following the hysterical campaign unleashed by the Nazis to capture those considered materially and intellectually responsible for the fire, along with Marinus.
[3] The biographical references are based largely on Nico Jassies’s book, Marinus van der Lubbe en de Rijksdagbrand [Marinus van der Lubbe and the Reichtag Fire]. Uitgeverij de Dolle Hond. Amsterdam, 2002. Translation of all excerpts our own. A PDF of this version can be found at: https://socialhistoryportal.org/sites/default/files/raf/0519330228_0.pdf
[4] He tried to reach the USSR on his own initiative on three occasions, always without success.
[5] Dimitrov, op. cit., p. 378.
[6] Nicos Poulantzas. Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism. Verso Editions. London, 1979; p. 182 et seq.
[7] On February 25, Marinus attempted to set fire to the Neukölln Social Aid Office, the Town Hall, and the Royal Palace, all of which were soon extinguished without causing excessive damage.
[8] “My view was that something had to be done to protest against this system. Since the workers did not want to do anything at that time, I simply wanted to do something. I considered setting fire somewhere to be a suitable means.” (From his confession to the police. See Jassies, op. cit., p. 24).
[9] Ibidem, p. 55.
[10] See Fritz Tobias. The Reichtag Fire. Martin Secker & Warburg, Ltd. London, 1964.
[11] At the initiative of his comrades in the LAO, several Marinus Support Committees were created in different countries to defend his actions as an act of proletarian dignity: “Among the millions of bent backs of willingly obedient voting cattle, a proletarian stands up and smashes his fist into their Judas faces [meaning those of the socialists and communists].”(Jassies, op. cit., p. 30).
[12] The Red Book, written by members of the van der Lubbe Committees, will be published to refute the lies about Marinus that were spread in the Brown Book, induced by the Communist International, which spread the theory of Nazi provocation, to the effect that Marinus was contaminated by fascist ideas and had served their purposes with his arsonist action, in addition to deplorably stigmatizing him by denouncing an alleged homosexuality that would make him voluntarily submit to the Nazis. The Brown Book was a weapon that both sides repeatedly resorted to during the trial (See “Welches Ziel verfolgten die Nationalsozialisten mit der Inszenierung des Reichstagsbrandprozesses?” [What Was the Goal of the National Socialists in Staging the Reichstag Fire Trial?], in Georgi Dimitroff. Leipzig 1933. Sofia Press, Sofia, 1972; p. 249. Available at: http://www.max-stirner-archiv-leipzig.de/dokumente/DimitroffLeipzig1933.pdf).
[13] Jassies, op. cit., p. 32.
[14] Ibidem, p. 21.
[15] “Das Signal für die Generaloffensive gegen den Marxismus” [The Signal for the General Offensive Against Marxism], in Dimitroff, op. cit., p. 250.
[16] Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State of 28 February 1933. Available at: https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=2325
[17] “Mass work, mass activity, mass opposition and the united front —no adventurism— these are the alpha and omega of Communist tactics. . . .
This appeal contains no mention of any immediate struggle for power. Such a task was put forward neither by the German Communist Party, nor by the Communist International. It is of course true that the appeal of the Communist International does not preclude the possibility of armed insurrection.” (Dimitrov, op. cit., pp. 390, 393).
[18] Jassies, op. cit., p. 28.
[19] Malanowski, Wolfgang. “»Die Bude Hätte an Allen Ecken Brennen Sollen«” [“The Place Should Have Been Burning From All Corners”], in DER SPIEGEL, April 13, 1986. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/die-bude-haette-an-allen-ecken-brennen-sollen-a-44a8e8c9-0002-0001-0000-000013517606
[20] Nico Jassies, Marinus van der Lubbe y el incendio del Reichstag. Alikornio Ediciones. Barcelona, 2008; p. 65. [The postface of the book is not present in the Dutch edition, the Spanish version can be found at: https://materialesxlaemancipacion.espivblogs.net/files/2025/02/MarinusvanderLubbe_incendioReischtag_NicoJassies_proesp2024.pdf – Translator’s Note]
[21] Jassies, op. cit., p. 15.
[22] Examples of this initiative include the printing of postcards with revolutionary motifs under the legend “a workers’ sports and study tour through Europe and Soviet Russia,” or the attempt to swim across the English Channel to collect the prize money for “proletarian purposes.”
[23] After a long trial to clear the family’s name, in 1983 Marinus was acquitted posthumously of the main political charges against him that led to his execution: conspiracy and insurrection, leaving him as a mere arsonist.
[24] Jassies, op. cit., p. 30.
[25] Ibidem.
[26] Ibid., p. 31.
[27] See “90 aniversario de la Revolución de Octubre” [90th Anniversary of the October Revolution], in El Martinete, #21, September 2008, p. 16.
Fuentes: