The 1989 introduction by Wildcat contains many useful insights and historical information but there is an important aspect of it which we feel needs to be criticised: its comments on form and content.
“Throughout the section on the trade unions Gorter seems to be implying that the ability of workers to recall delegates at short notice is inherently revolutionary. This is a reactionary position. We do not just judge a movement by how it makes decisions but by what those decisions are, by the content of the movement.” (Wildcat Introduction)
This is a reasonable criticism of many who claimed to follow in Gorter’s footsteps, but it is not an accurate representation of the views Gorter himself expresses in the Open Letter. Gorter makes it clear that the organisational forms he describes and advocates are the ones appropriate to a particular task: communist revolution.
“There is strong centralisation, but not too strong. … This is individualism, but not too much of it. … The individual and the central board have just that amount of power, which this present period, in which the revolution breaks out, requires and allows.”
“…we wish to enable the masses themselves to become more intelligent, more courageous, self-acting, more elevated in all things. We want the masses themselves to make the revolution. For only thus the revolution can triumph here in Western Europe. And to this end the old Trade Unions must be destroyed.” (Part II of the Open Letter)
The problem with Gorter is not that he separates form from content but that he defines the content too narrowly – as the self-activity of the masses. This is the whole basis of his attack on parliamentarism, for example. But there is nothing inherently communist about self-activity (however necessary it is for revolution to take place). In fact capitalism increasingly demands of workers that they display self-activity, by taking initiatives and by “challenging the status quo” (as modern management-speak can even say). The content of a communist movement is communisation, and this is not even touched on by Gorter. As the Wildcat introduction says, Gorter “still wrote as if he saw Communist revolution in terms of creating a new government”.
We also want to comment on the language used by Gorter himself. In many parts of the Open Letter, particularly in the third part relating to parliamentarism, Gorter makes numerous comments about the “big banks” and often combines this with rhetoric about “monopolies”. It may appear from this that Gorter has an obsession with Finance Capital, putting him in the same camp as many twentieth century reactionaries, whether of the right or the left.
In fact references to the “big banks” and such like are fairly few and far between in the other writings of Gorter, and even in the Open Letter it is clear that what he really means is concentrated capital – capital which is “is strong and widely organised and deeply rooted” in society – rather than ascribing any particular evil to Finance Capital. In The Organisation of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle, written by Gorter and published by the KAPD in 1921, he also makes a reference to “big capital, bank capital” but also states that “capital is no longer organised by trades but by the factory unit” and that “the strength of capitalism now lies in the factories”. In other words, Gorter clearly understood that the power of capital is that of commodity production and not some clever trickery by the financiers.
The problem is perhaps that Gorter is using a rather “German” terminology derived from writers such as Hilferding and, more importantly, Lenin, whose Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism took much of its analysis from Hilferding and many of its empirical details from the world of German business. Its ideas assumed that the era of “free competition” was over and that the concentration of capital inevitably created monopoly in all areas of the economy with finance capital (itself a monopoly) at its head. There was thus a growing fusion of finance capital, industrial capital and the state. As many critics of Hilferding have pointed out, this was largely true for Germany but was certainly not true for the British Empire or the US, which was to become the dominant world power scarcely two decades after the Open Letter was written. In the US economy, “vertical integration” (the creation of companies uniting raw materials extraction, processing, manufacturing and marketing in a single entity) was the order of the day, rather than the “horizontal integration” (monopolies) seen in Germany. Gorter knew this very well – in The Organisation… he even describes vertical integration.
In short, we should not judge Gorter too harshly just because of his choice of words, and those who fulminate against the financiers should not think that Gorter is a supporter of their cause.