The following message was read out by a member of the CWO at the Berlin meeting of the GIS on Friday 11 December 2009. A longer commemoration will be organised next year and we will honour his last letter to us in which he asked us to translate three extracts from the Platform of the GPR in order to demonstrate how politically close we were.

On the night of Monday December 7th 2009 Robert Sutterlutti of the GPR (formerly GIK) ended his life. This was a tragic blow for the entire internationalist communist left as Robert had dedicated his life to disseminating left communist ideas and for the last quarter century had been actively engaged with many communist groups especially in the former Eastern bloc. He was a member of the Kompol group which in 1983 agreed to come to the Fourth International Conference of the Communist Left organised by Battaglia Comunista in London. Unfortunately that group split and disappeared before the conference took place but Robert reconstituted some of the group as the GIK. He made a tour of the UK in the 1980s visiting various groups but concluding by this time that he was personally closest to the IBRP, The GIK then hosted a fifth conference in Vienna in 1989 which was a response to the crisis in Eastern Europe. Following this conference he and a CWO comrade made a leafletting tour of factories in the old DDR. This took in Zwickau, Halle, Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin. They also gave leaflets out in Dresden city centre and to an anti-Stasi demo in Leipzig. In general, they were well received at the factories, with a handful of individual exceptions, and in Dresden city centre. They also held a meeting, arranged by Robert before they left Bregenz, with a loose group of socialist oppositionists of the GDR, in Leipzig.

Rob also found people to translate Bureau statements into Slovenian, Serbian and Croatian which he proposed to single-handedly take into the ex-Yugoslavia until persuaded by our comrades that physically this was rather dangerous. The GIK then seemed to disappear for a while but Rob continued to visit Eastern Europe and according to the comrades of the ARS was very important in bringing left communist ideas into the ex-Soviet Union. It was at this time that our late comrade Mauro baptised him as the “plenipotentiary of the IBRP”. He also kept in touch with German comrades here in Berlin and organised the meetings which eventually resulted in the emergence of the GIS as the German affiliate of what was the IBRP and is today the ICT. After this he recognised that the most important contribution he could now make would be to revitalise the GIK and start to work on the ground in Austria itself. He then wanted the GIK to enter the IBRP. However, as we pointed out to him at the time of their first application to join in 2004 they lacked the basic instruments to be considered a real group. They had no platform, no publication and no real practice in the area where they found themselves. At the same time the GIK was also eclectic in that some supported the ICT and some were Bordigist which was not a recipe for coherence. Rob began to address these issues and the GIK changed to the GPR with a new basic document and began to take part in struggles in Austria. They also produced a magazine which reflected their eclecticism and Rob voiced himself unhappy about this in his last email to the ICT Bureau.

In this mail he makes it clear that he was not demoralised by the political situation. He blamed the psychiatric system for drugging his brain and making him incapable of work as well as thinking of suicide. He urged us never to see medical help for depression as he was convinced that he would have recovered if it had not been for the chemicals they had pumped into him. He wrote

“I want to continue to work as a revolutionary but I cannot. When I think about my plans for life in the next few years (which was to move to Vienna and to build up a revolutionary organisation with the comrades there) and I see my inability, my restlessness (also produced by the rebound effect) and my lack of concentration grows more and more. And the more this is the case, the less I am able to concentrate. (a vicious circle) because I think about this inability and about what I could do for the growth of the group.
Especially in this time today the work of revolutionaries would be very important because capitalism is running into its final crisis and proletarian struggles will grow. I see that there are more young people interested in revolutionary marxism and left communism (for example in my region) than before. I discussed with some of them regularly but now I am not able to continue.”

The conditions of existence under capitalism may have brought about his depression but he makes it quite clear that this was not because any sense of political failure. On the contrary his message is that our time, the time of the revolutionary working class, is coming. There could be no better salute to the memory of this dedicated and courageous comrade than for us all to continue our work for the communist society he so ardently desired.