The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

In August 1919, at the national conference in Frankfurt, Levi declared that he was in favour of working in the
unions as well as in Parliament. During the October Congress, known as the Heidelberg Congress, Levi
presented a resolution – which had not been presented for discussion in the party sections before the congress –
excluding those who refused to work in the unions and in parliament. Contrary to the party’s principle of
workers’ democracy (each district had one mandate regardless of its size), and in violation of the decision of the
Frankfurt conference, the Central Committee was allowed to exclude the left. Although the latter was the
majority within the KPD, it was expelled. It is worth noting that the opposition outside the party refused to
follow Laufenberg, Wolffheim and Rühle who wanted to form a new party immediately. 417 This ideal that you
fight to the end to reconquer the party was a permanent concern of the Communist Left of the period and is very
similar to the view of Bordiga’s Fraction in this respect.
The Dutch Left supported the German Left. Pannekoek attacked Radek in particular, who had supported Levi
theoretically in his fight against the Dutch Left. 418 He denounced the approaches that the KPD was making
towards the Independents as sliding towards opportunism. 419 This policy expressed a petty bourgeois ‘Blanquist’
conception of the party. By defending the non-Marxist theory that a “small revolutionary minority could take
political power and hold it”, Radek merely justified the dictatorship of Levi’s Central Committee within the
party. In reality, his position was hostile to Bolshevism:
“The real Russian example is to be found in the days before November 1917. At that point the communist party
never stated or believed that it should take power and that its dictatorship would be the dictatorship of the
working masses. It always stated that the soviets, representatives of the masses, must seize power; the party itself
had to draw up the programme, fight for it and, when at last the majority of the soviets recognised the
correctness of the programme, they would take power on their own account.” 420
The Pannekoek of 1919 was not yet the ‘councilist’ Pannekoek of the 30s and 40s. He acknowledged, as did the
Communist Left in the 20s, the indispensable role of the party. In spite of the criticisms levelled at them later by
the ‘bordigist’ current, Pannekoek and the Dutch Left were not in any way connected with the anti-party,
‘spontaneist’ positions of Rühle which expressed a ‘blind’ cult of ‘following’ the masses for the sake of
‘democratic’ formalism: “We are not fanatics of democracy, we do not have a superstitious respect for majority
decisions and we do not hold the belief that everything that the majority does is good and must be followed”. 421
In fact what the Dutch Left emphasised was that a revolution was more difficult in Western Europe and that its
path is “slower and more difficult”. Radek’s recipes to accelerate events at the price of a dictatorship of the
minority in the party were the road to defeat.
In countries dominated by the “old bourgeois culture” with the spirit of individualism and respect for the
“bourgeois ethic”, Blanquist tactics are impossible. Not only do they negate the role of the masses as
revolutionary subject but they also under-estimate the strength of the enemy and the propaganda work necessary
to prepare the revolution.
What enables the revolution to be victorious is the development of consciousness in the class, which is a difficult
process. For this reason Pannekoek rejected the union tactic explicitly for the first time. He fully supported the
German Left which urged the formation of factory organisations. 422 The position of the Dutch on the question of
revolutionary parliamentarism remained much less clear. Pannekoek published a series of articles in Der
417 Cf. P. Kuckuk, Bremer Linksradikale bzw. Kommunisten von der Militärrevolte im November 1918 bis zum Kapp-Putsch
im März 1920 (Thesis, Hamburg 1970), pp. 296-297.
418 K. Radek nevertheless attempted to oppose Levi’s split from his prison cell. After the split had taken place Lenin was
made aware of it and declared in favour of the unity of the party, seeing the Opposition as a mark of youth and inexperience.
419 A. Pannekoek, under the pseudonym of K. Horner: ‚Die Gewerkschaften’, in: Der Kommunist, Bremen, 24 Jan. 1920.
420 This quotation and the following one are extracts from the article by Karl Horner: ‘Der neue Blanquismus’, in: Der
Kommunist, No. 27, Bremen 1920. Republished in H.M. Bock’s collection: A. Pannekoek, H. Gorter, Organisation und
Taktik der proletarischen Revolution, op. cit.
421 A. Pannekoek, op. cit.
422 K. Horner, in: Der Kommunist, No. 22, 1920. Quoted by H.M. Bock.
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