The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

democrats and bourgeois in the war and in the revolution have been very slight and have disappeared in most
cases!!”. 503
Any ‘workers’ government’ – Pannekoek insisted – is essentially counter-revolutionary. “Seeking by all means
to avoid the widening of the breach in capitalism’s flanks and the development of workers’ power, it behaves in
an actively counter-revolutionary manner”. The role of the proletariat was not only to fight against it but to
overthrow it in favour of a communist government.
We can see here that the left’s analysis of the nature of the social democratic parties was still marked by
hesitations. Sometimes social democracy seems to be classified as the left wing of the bourgeoisie, sometimes as
a ‘workers’ party’. The tactic of the Dutch Left does not seem very clear in Gorter’s writings: no support for
social democracy, whether right or left wing, in elections, but a call for joint action, “for strikes, boycotts,
insurrections, street combats and above all for workers’ councils and factory organisations”. This amounted in
effect to saying that there could be a united front ‘from below’ or ‘in action’ with these organisations.
The change in the historic period had profoundly modified the tactics of the proletariat in Western Europe. It had
been simplified by tending directly towards the revolutionary seizure of power. This did not mean that the
revolution would be easier in the west than in an underdeveloped country like Russia. On the contrary it would
be more difficult: against the strength of a “still powerful” capitalism, “the effort demanded of the masses by the
situation is much greater than in Russia”. These objective factors (the economic strength of capital, the unity of
other classes against the proletariat) were however of lesser weight than the delay in the subjective factors of the
revolution. The Dutch Communist Left, like the Italian Communist Left, underlined the enormous weight of
‘democratic’ prejudices in the proletariat. The ‘democratic’ heritage was the main factor of inertia within the
proletariat. It was the principal difference with the Russian revolution. Pannekoek expressed it in these terms:
“In these countries, the bourgeois mode of production, and the high level of culture that has been linked to it for
centuries, have deeply impregnated the way in which the popular masses feel and think.” 504
The proletarian way of thinking had been infected by this ‘culture’, which was typically expressed by
individualism, by the feeling of belonging to a ‘national community’, by the veneration of abstract formulae like
‘democracy’. The power of the old, outmoded conceptions of social democracy, the proletariat’s blind belief –
expressing its lack of confidence in itself – in the “leaders who for decades had personified the revolutionary
struggle and goals”, and finally the material and moral weight of the old forms of organisation, “gigantic
machines created by the masses themselves”, all these were negative factors that served to keep “bourgeois
tradition” alive.
It followed that the fundamental question in the advanced countries of Western Europe was the break with
bourgeois ideology. This “spiritual” tradition was a “factor of infection and paralysis” for the masses. The
contradiction between the immaturity of the proletariat, which was too used to reasoning in ideological terms,
and the maturity of the objective conditions (the collapse of capitalism) “can only be resolved by the
development of the revolutionary process”, by “the direct experience of the struggle”.
The tactic to be followed by the proletariat in the revolutionary period necessarily had to adapt itself “to the
stage of evolution reached by capitalism”. The methods and forms of the struggle changed according to “each
phase” of capitalist evolution. The proletariat thus had to “overcome the tradition of preceding phases”, in the
first place the trade unionist and parliamentary traditions.
The Union question
Unlike the anarchists, Gorter and Pannekoek did not argue for a timeless rejection of parliamentary and trade
union tactics. What they did say was that after 1914, they were no longer “weapons of the revolution” (Gorter).
503 Gorter, op. cit., p. 470.
504 Pannekoek, Weltrevolution und kommunistische Taktik, op. cit. (S. Bricianer, op. cit., p. 171).
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