Wim Bot on Marx-Lenin-Luxembourg Front and Committee of Revolutionary Marxists

Interviews by Wim Bot with ten members of the revolutionary-socialist and Trotskyist resistance in World War II for the purpose of his study on the Marx-Lenin-Luxembourg Front and the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists. The collection includes the digitised files of 15 cassettes containing interviews conducted by Wim Bot in the 1980s with former members of the MLL Front and the CRM on the left-wing resistance during the war in The Hague.

This volume examines the political ideas and activities of the Marx-Lenin-Luxembourg Front, the illegal continuation of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party. The MLL-Front was formed immediately after the beginning of the German occupation of the Netherlands and existed until April 1942, when the organisation’s main leaders were shot. After that, the MLL-Front broke up into two smaller organisations, the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists and the Communist Union Spartacus. It was originally my intention to extend the research to these groups and two other organisations on the left wing of the Dutch labour movement during the occupation period. These were the Trotskyist Group of Bolshevik-Leninists, active under the name Bond van Communisten from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941, and the group around the resistance magazine ‘De Vonk’. The latter group, which existed throughout the occupation, originally worked closely with the MLL Front. However, it broke up in the summer of 1941. I chose this original set-up because all these groups (with the exception of ‘De Vonk’ after the summer of 1941) occupied a special minority position within the illegality. Indeed, they refused to side with the democratic Allies in the struggle against fascism and the German occupation and hoped for a revolutionary breakthrough in a socialist direction at the end of the war. They saw the war as a consequence of capitalism, and war, fascism and capitalism, in their view, had to be ended by the international solidarity of the working class.