The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

form the Tribunist movement: Mendels, J.A.N. Knuttel, and W. van Ravesteyn. 27 Like Gorter and Roland Holst,
Pannekoek received his training in Marxism from Van der Goes – who introduced them to Joseph Dietzgen – but
also from Kautsky, who long remained their ‘teacher’. Gifted with a rigorous mind thanks to his scientific and
philosophical training, and with great clarity as a teacher, Pannekoek quickly became one of the main
theoreticians of the international Marxist left, in both Holland and Germany. Writing for De Nieuwe Tijd, and
from 1903 for Die Neue Zeit, Pannekoek was at the heart of all the major debates in the 2 nd International: on the
question of the mass strike, of the state, on the national question, on war (see Chapter 2). He was often the equal
of Rosa Luxemburg in the depth of his political thought, and influenced Lenin’s State and Revolution. He was
one of the first Marxists to take up the fight against emerging revisionism. His ‘Kant’s philosophy and
Marxism’, published in De Nieuwe Tijd in 1901, attacked the core of the revisionists’ “neo-Kantian philosophy”,
which transformed socialism from a weapon of revolutionary struggle into a mere bourgeois ethic. Pannekoek
was certainly more a theoretician than an organiser, and his influence was felt above all in the realm of ideas; he
was unable to weigh decisively in the organisational struggle against the revisionist majority in the SDAP.
Nonetheless, Pannekoek remained an active militant. He participated fully in the life of the SDAP, intervening in
Congresses, writing and distributing leaflets for his local section. Pannekoek’s reputation as a ‘pure theoretician’
is hardly accurate, at least before 1921. He was no ‘bookworm’, but a brilliant party propagandist, standing for
Marxism against the Catholics on religion, against the liberals on the socialist project. He worked tirelessly in
the great social movements like the 1903 transport strike, intervening in the workers’ mass meetings. The
proletarian cause mattered more to him than his job as an astronomer, and the threats to his livelihood from the
reactionary Kuyper government. But it was in Germany that Pannekoek really came into his own as an
international and internationalist militant and theoretician.
Less well known outside Holland, the poet Henriëtte van der Schalk (1869-1952), the wife of the artist Richard
Roland Holst (1868-1938), belonged to the same generation as Gorter, joining the SDAP with him in 1897. She
contributed powerfully to the history of the Dutch workers’ movement, and to the development of the theory of
the mass strike. The daughter of a notary public, she succeeded in separating from her middle-class milieu and
from the literary movement of the 1880s, to join the socialist movement. She was a remarkable socialist orator.
She gained an international hearing early on in the congresses of the International, first in Paris (1900), then in
Amsterdam (1904), where she was given the task of presenting the congress resolution on the general strike. A
friend of Rosa Luxemburg, she was far from having the latter’s rigour. She symbolises both the ‘centrist’
hesitations at the great moments of political decisions and splits, as well as a pure idealism, or even an
incomplete break with her religious beginnings. When she left the workers’ movement after 1927, her original
Marxism quickly dissolved into the ‘religious socialist’ movement, and she returned to her literary and poetical
activities. Her political life began with Marx and ended with Tolstoï and Gandhi. 28
The third generation of Marxists – also trained by Van der Goes – was less well known, but had an enormous
weight in the formation of the Tribunist movement. Its haste to form a new organisation, without having the
patience to combat revisionism within the SDAP (see below), and its frequent political and theoretical
27 For Pannekoek’s political activity in Leiden, see C. Malandrino: ‘La prima attività politica e sociale di Anton Pannekoek a
Leida (1899-1906)’, II pensiero politico (Florence), Vol. XV (1982), No. 2.
Maurits Mendels (1868-1944), was like Pannekoek a member of the Leiden liberal electoral union. A journalist and lawyer,
he joined the SDAP, and for a short time was a member of the SDP in 1909. He resigned, to return to the ‘old party’, and
became a deputy, then a senator. Johannis Knuttel (1878-1965) was a famous philologist, and remained all his life in the
Tribunist, then the communist movement. In the CP, he was to follow all the twists and turns of stalinist policy.
28 See Roland Holst’s autobiography, Het vuur brandde voort. Levensherinneringen, Amsterdam/Antwerpen, 1949 (reprint
Amsterdam, 1979). She developed progressively pacifist and religious ideas, in order to “serve God inside mankind”. After
breaking with Russian ‘communism’ in 1925, she gave numerous contributions to religious-socialist periodicals (e.g.
Bevrijding, organ of the Bond van Religieuse Anarcho-Communisten (BRAC), and Tijd en Taak). In 1948, she wrote a
book in praise of Gandhi: Een requiem voor Gandhi, while she was contributing to the jubilee of the Queen Wilhelmina:
Vijftig jaren. Officieel gedenkboek ter gelegenheid van het gouden regeringsjubileum van Hare Majesteit Koningin
Wilhelmina... 1898-31 (Amsterdam: Scheltens & Giltay, August 1948). More interesting politically are her contributions on
the mass strike, written in 1905 and 1918, which still await translation into other languages than Dutch. See her major
political work: De revolutionaire massa-aktie. Een studie (Rotterdam: W.L. & J. Brussels Uitgevers-maatschappij, 1918).
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