The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The Dutch on the other hand remained hesitant and divided. They were by no means as radical on the
parliamentary question. The majority around Wijnkoop were electoralist and the minority were undecided. Even
Gorter defended the idea of a sort of revolutionary parliamentarism right up to the summer of 1920. 410
Pannekoek on the other hand defended an anti-parliamentary position. 411 Like all the left communists he drew
attention to the change in historic period and the need to break with the democratic principle’s rooted in the mass
of workers of Western Europe. In order for the consciousness of the class to develop there had to be a break with
“parliamentary democracy”. 412
In 1919 the Komintern did not think that refusal to participate in bourgeois parliaments was a reason to exclude
the left. In a reply to Sylvia Pankhurst 413 , Lenin voiced the opinion that: “the parliamentary question is at present
a specific, secondary point... What is primordial for a communist party is to be indissolubly tied to the working
masses, to know how to carry out permanent propaganda, to participate in each strike, give echo to every
demand of the masses... Those revolutionary workers who attack parliamentarism are quite correct in as far as
they express the rejection of bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy.” 414
In Hungary anti-parliamentary positions were known because of a group of Hungarian communists exiled to Vienna
following the end of the ‘Hungarian Commune’. Within this group there was Lukács, who was an anti-parliamentarian, as
well as Bela Kun who supported a strange tactic: participation in elections in order to denounce them, no deputies to be sent
to parliament.
In Sweden the federation of young Social Democrats (Social-demokratiska ungdomsforbündet) – led by the Anarchist Carl
Johan Björklund (1884-1971) –, which had joined the Komintern in May 1919, was resolutely antiparliamentarian. They
were in contact with the KAPD in 1920 and denounced the opportunism of Zeth Höglund (1884-1956) in Parliament: Lenin
portrayed the latter as the Swedish Karl Liebknecht.
Anti-parliamentarism reached as far as Latin America: within the Partido Socialista Internacional of Argentina – the future
Communist Party of Argentina that was created in December 1920 – there arose a strong minority in 1919, which followed
Bordiga and defended the boycotting of elections.
410 Some weeks before he drafted his Reply to Lenin, on 1 st May 1920, Gorter wrote to Lenin: “I am not an enemy of
parliamentarism. I write this simply to show you – you and the central committee – how dangerous it is to speak too much
in favour of the opportunist communists” (quoted by Wiessing, op. cit., p. 91).
411 K. Horner (i.e. Pannekoek), ‚Taktische und organisatorische Streitfragen’, in: Der Kommunist (Bremen), 13 Dec. 1919.
412 A. Pannekoek, ‘De strijd over de kommunistische taktiek in Duitsland’, in: De Nieuwe Tijd, 1919, p. 695.
413 Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) worked in the suffragette movement founded by her mother Emeline. In 1914 she founded
the East London Federation of Suffragettes, publishing The Women’s Dreadnought. Her movement broke with feminism,
which supported the war, and became the Workers’ Socialist Federation in 1917, which published the Workers’
Dreadnought. She supported the Bolsheviks. In 1919 she was present at the Bologna Congress of the PSI. She became the
paid correspondent of The Communist International, the publication of the Komintern. When she came back from Italy she
took an active part in the Frankfurt conference and later in the Amsterdam conference. She rejected any form of
parliamentary tactic and any form of entryism into the Labour Party. In June 1920 she helped found the Communist Party
(British Section of the Third International). In the same year she, together with the shop steward William Gallacher (1881-
1965), defended anti-parliamentary and anti-syndicalist positions at the Second Congress of the Komintern. In January
1921, in Leeds, her party was forced to join the CP of Great Britain (CPGB) which defended CI orthodoxy. The Workers’
Dreadnought remained her tendency’s independent publication within the “united” CP. She was imprisoned by the British
government and then freed because she had been excluded from the CPGB, with her followers, in September 1921. In
February 1922 she, and the others who had been excluded, founded the Communist Workers’ Party, a section of Gorter’s
KAI which was to survive until June 1924. From then on Sylvia Pankhurst ceased to be a left communist and a proletarian
militant. She returned to her first love, feminism, and developed a passion for Esperanto. In 1928 she became the apostle of
an ‘anti-fascist crusade’. In 1932 she formed a Women’s International Matteoti Committee, a feminist antifascist
movement. In 1933, she defended vigourously Van der Lubbe within the British Van der Lubbe Committee. During the
1935 war between Italy and Ethiopia she supported the Negus. She left for Ethiopia in 1956, settled in Addis Ababa with
her son Richard. She did much social work and was very well known in Africa, in the Pan-Africa movement and the League
of Coloured Peoples. Together with her son Richard she edited the Ethiopia Observer. She became a friend of the Negus
and died in Addis-Ababa, where she is buried. Haile Selassie attended the Emperor the ceremony. [See: M. Davis, Sylvia
Pankhurst. A life in Radical Politics (London: Pluto Press, 1999).]
414 Sylvia Pankhurst’s letter and Lenin’s reply (August 1919) can be found in: Die Kommunistische Internationale No. 4-5,
pp. 91-98 (‘Der Sozialismus in England’).
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