The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

the party which makes the revolution, but the class as a whole”. 713 He recalled that the revolutionary party,
necessary as a vanguard, cannot substitute itself for, nor dissolve itself into, the working class. He insisted on the
indispensable role of this party, before and during the revolution, essentially on the political terrain: “All action
demands a permanent spiritual struggle by the masses in order to arrive at lucidity, a struggle waged in the form
of a combat between opposing parties and tendencies, and the party must pursue this struggle for the workers
and under their gaze. At each stage of the class struggle the party has a primordial role, a kind of spirit of the
revolution...”. 714
This implicitly rejected the position of Canne-Meijer who opposed an antipolitical ‘class politics’ to ‘party
politics’ and confronting other parties’ activity within the proletariat.
The period of ‘prosperity’ characterised by reaction – like 1848 in Germany – bringing with it “decline,
confusion and disappointment” in the workers’ movement, inevitably brought changes in the tactics of the
revolutionary movement, where mass action was no longer on the agenda. The KAPD must therefore remain a
small party, the better to defend itself against the prevailing reaction. It was a question for him of preserving “the
quality and correctness of its principles” and not blindly extending its field of activity. Pannekoek warned the
KAPD against the intoxication of success: the ‘flexible’ tactic, which could only try to palliate the party’s
numerical weakness, had to be rejected. The price of emerging from its isolation was likely to be opportunism.
Consequently Pannekoek advised: more propaganda, less inflammatory agitation, less verbal activism in the
press of the KAPD.
Pannekoek’s warnings were still more severe for the AAU, which most expressed the tactic of ‘flexibility’. The
latter must guard against transforming itself into a trades union organisation – “one would find oneself faced
with another Zentrale, nothing else”. 715 Its role was not to lead the struggles, but to support them by its clarity.
This was another way of saying – implicitly – that the Union’s existence was superfluous in a period of reaction:
“Like the KAP, the AAU is essentially an organ for the revolution. At other times, in a phase of the ebb of the
revolution, nobody would have thought of founding such an organisation. But it is all that remains of the
revolutionary years.” 716
Pannekoek’s criticisms were in part founded on the critique of opportunism. Implicitly, they demonstrated the
danger of the dual organisation. Either the KAPD dissolved the Union, which was no more than a glorious
remnant of the revolution, or the Union dissolved the party, by posing as a hybrid politico-economic
organisation. At all events, there was no room for two parties based on the same positions.
The weakness of Pannekoek’s text ‘Principles and Tactics’ lay in a certain fatalism, which was pointed out by
the KAPD. 717
In a sense, in speculating on a new period of capitalist prosperity, K. Horner – Pannekoek’s pseudonym – had a
tendency to bury the revolution too quickly. He did not understand, as the KAPD showed it, that crises were no
longer cyclical as they had been in the 19 th century. His comparison with the situation after 1848 was not a valid
one. In the epoch of the “mortal crisis of capitalism”, the brief periods of “relative stabilisation” in no way
prevented the outbreak of class movements in the form of wildcat strikes, where the party must intervene
actively. The preparation of the KAPD for new struggles which would be born from the immediate crisis was
thus perfectly justified: “capitalism in its monopolistic phase is like a powder keg”.
Two years later, the Great Crash and the crisis that followed brutally disproved Pannekoek’s optimistic
predictions of a new period of capitalist ‘prosperity’, and confirmed those of the KAPD. The economic crisis
saw the triumph of ‘flexible tactics’ and the Union carried the party with it, at the cost of dismembering the
713 Proletarier, No. 8, August 1927.
714 Idem.
715 Idem.
716 Idem.
717 Proletarier, No. 10-11, Nov. 1927, ‘Realpolitik und Revolution. Eine Antwort an Genossen K. Horner’, by Carl Schlicht
(Carl Happ, Hamburg).
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