The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

not that of a general staff, in which the party commands the class like an army. The party did not command but
led the revolution. The revolution could not be decreed but was the “work of the masses” and “broke out
spontaneously”. While certain actions by the party could be the starting point of the revolution “this only
happens rarely” – the decisive factor was the maturation of class consciousness, which prepared the spontaneous
actions of the proletariat. The revolution was thus not engendered out of nowhere, but was the culmination of a
development of consciousness. It was “psychic factors profoundly rooted in the unconsciousness of the masses”
which created the apparent spontaneity of revolutionary activity. The function of the party was precisely “always
to act and speak in a way that would awaken and fortify the class consciousness of the masses”. [Gorter’s
emphasis.] 494
This function of the party determined the structure and functioning of the communist organisation. Instead of
regrouping enormous masses, at the price of watering down principles and contracting the opportunist gangrene,
the party had to remain a “nucleus, hard as steel and pure as crystal”. 495 This idea of a nucleus-party implied a
rigorous selection of militants. But the Dutch left did not make an eternal virtue out of small numbers: the
organic growth of the party could only take place on the basis of a solid nucleus, not of whatever tactics. “In
Western Europe we wish first to build very firm, very clear, and very strong (though at the outset perhaps quite
small) parties, kernels, just as you did in Russia. And once we have those, we will make them bigger. But we
always want them to be very firm, very strong, very “pure”. Only thus can we triumph in Western Europe.
Therefore we absolutely reject your tactics, Comrade”. 496
Gorter – at the price of a paradox in his argumentation – got carried away by the polemic against the Komintern
Executive, which saw the communist left as a ‘sect’: “A sect then, says the Executive Committee [...] Quite so, a
sect, if you mean by that the initial nucleus of a movement which aims to conquer the world”. 497
Equally blundering was the argumentation about the centralised functioning of the communist party. Following
the KAPD, Gorter opposed a “party of leaders” to a “party of the masses”, a ‘dialectic’ which Pannekoek had
rejected. It was evident that the whole left had been traumatised by the 1919 split in Heidelberg, where the
minority, basing itself on the non-representative leadership of the KPD, which was exerting a dictatorship over
the party, manoeuvred to exclude the majority. This leadership of Paul Levi, Heinrich Brandler and Clara Zetkin
was opposing the will and orientation of the working class masses in the party. The ‘party of leaders’ was a party
that did not develop internal democracy in the party, but the dictatorship of a clique, from the top downwards,
justifying itself with reference to Lenin’s conception of ‘iron discipline’. Such parties could only crush any
opposition. The ‘party of the masses’ and not the mass party, which Gorter rejected, was built “from the bottom
up” on the basis of the revolutionary workers.
Gorter, and with him the whole communist left with the exception of the anarchistic tendencies – did not deny
the necessity for the party to function in a unified, centralised and disciplined manner. Gorter, who is so often
wrongly portrayed as the Don Quixote of the ‘struggle against leaders’, in fact wanted ‘right guides’, who try
only to determine the ‘right path’:
“In Western Europe we still have, in many countries, leaders of the type of the Second International; here we are
still seeking the right leaders, those that do not try to dominate the masses, that do not betray them; and as long
as we do not find these leaders, we want to do all things from below, and through the dictatorship of the masses
themselves. If I have a mountain-guide, and he should lead me into the abyss, I prefer to do without him. As
soon as we have found the right guides, we will stop this searching. Then mass and leader will be really one.” 498
The implication of these ambiguous formulations was that the KAPD was momentarily a party without real
leaders without discipline and without centralisation. Which was not at all the case. Gorter seems to postpone to
494 Offener Brief an den Genossen Lenin (1920), in F. Kool, Die Linke gegen die Partei-Herrschaft, op. cit., p. 485.
495 Ibid.
496 Idem, p. 446.
497 Idem, p. 486.
498 Idem, p. 419. The KAPD added a note to that paragraph, to strongly underline the shape of the new workers’ parties :
„Von unten auf’, which could be translated in English by „rank and file“ or „grassroots“.
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