The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The cause of opportunism in the Third International was the stagnation of the revolution and the weakness of the
communist parties. As Pannekoek stressed, it was the defeats in Germany in 1919 and 1920 which had led to a
division of the communist movement into two tendencies: a radical tendency which defended “new principles”
and sought to provoke a “clear and sharp separation”; and an opportunist tendency which “puts forward what
unites rather than what separates”. This opportunism was all the more dangerous in that it very often resorted to
“frenetic declamations” and could lead to putschism by “counting solely on a single big action”. Pannekoek
clearly had in mind the attitude of Wijnkoop, who was a “radical of the phrase” par excellence, and of the
USPD, which in January 1919 had pushed for the insurrection in Berlin. Such a tendency, which “is only
interested in immediate results without any concern for the future” and which “remains at the surface of things
instead of going to the root”, suffered from the disease of immediatism.
Thus the Dutch left turned around Lenin’s accusation that the left was impatient: the real disease of communism,
typified by the right, was immediatism, whose corollary was impatience and the search for ‘instant success’.
It is interesting to note that while Gorter and Pannekoek both analysed the roots of immediatism, they saw
different causes for it. For Gorter, there was no doubt that the Russian Bolsheviks in 1920 were still deeply
revolutionary. They were simply mistaken in the way they wanted to “accelerate the western European
revolution” by trying to get “millions of men to take part in it immediately”. Pannekoek on the other hand
stressed the fact that the Bolsheviks were playing a conservative role in the International by identifying with the
Russian state and its “workers’ bureaucracy”. This state, from which the International had to be rigorously
independent, was trying to find a modus vivendi with the West, at the risk of sacrificing the interests of the world
revolution.
The role of the communist party – ‘masses and leaders’
In his pamphlet Lenin accused the Dutch and German left of having a circle mentality and of “denying the
necessity of the party and of party discipline”. This was true for the Rühle current and the Dutch ‘councilists’ of
the 1930s, but it was not at all true for Gorter and Pannekoek in the 1920s. 491 On the contrary, the Dutch left
accorded a great importance to the role of the party, both before and during the revolution. But the party was not
an end in itself: taking up Rosa Luxemburg’s conception, the Dutch theoreticians declared that communists
“worked to prepare their own demise” in a communist society. 492
The communist party could only be “a weapon” of the revolution, and a “pure” product of it: “The task can only
be fulfilled if the Communist Party consists of politically truly conscious and convinced revolutionaries, who are
ready for any deed, any sacrifice, and if all the half-baked and wavering elements are kept off by means of its
programme, by action, and especially by the very tactics.
“For only thus, only by preserving this purity, the Party will be able to make the class truly revolutionary and
Communist, through its propaganda, its slogans, and by taking the lead in all actions. The Party can take the lead
only by being always absolutely pure itself.” 493
The function of the party was not therefore simply a programmatic one: it had an active function of propaganda
and agitation. Even if the working masses were acting spontaneously, the party did not fall into spontaneism,
which means lagging behind the action of the masses. The party did not regroup the masses but was their
‘vanguard’, through its slogans and directives. The party oriented and ‘led’ the struggle. This leading role was
491 Lenin, in his polemic against the left, takes along a quotation from the pamphlet by the ‘Unionist’ group in Frankfurt,
which was close to Rühle. This group, led by Robert Sauer, soon left the KAPD to join the AAUD-E.
492 A formulation taken from Henriëtte Roland Holst, ‘De taak der communistische partij in de proletarische revolutie’,
De Nieuwe Tijd, 1920, pp. 520-529, 583-596, 610-624, 665-674, 751-763. Text in German in the pamphlet: Partei und
Revolution (Vienna: Arbeiter-Buchhandlung, 1921) [Reprint, with an introduction by Cajo Brendel (Berlin: Kollektiv
Verlag, 1972)].
493 Gorter, in Frits Kool, op. cit., p. 485.
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