The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

While the class and party are in a complementary, organic relationship within a same unity of consciousness,
they are nonetheless not identical. The party was the highest expression of the proletariat’s class-consciousness,
seen as a political and historic consciousness, and not as a reflection of the immediate struggle (immediate
consciousness in the class). The party was thus ‘a part of the class’:
“The party is a part of the class, the most conscious part in the struggle and the most highly trained. It has the
ability to understand first the dangers threatening [the workers’ struggle], and to be the first to see the potential
of the new organisations of power: it must struggle there for its opinion to be used to the utmost by the workers;
it must spread its opinion by speaking, and if necessary by active intervention, so that its example makes the
working class advance in the struggle.”
It is notable that this conception of a propagandist party ‘by word and deed’ was identical to that of the KAPD in
the 1920s. Here, the Bond had an almost voluntarist conception of the party, where the example of the party’s
action is a combat, or even an incitement to combat. This definition of party was also similar to that of Bordiga,
for whom the party was a programme, plus a will to act. 1207 But for the Dutch Left, the programme was less an
ensemble of theoretical and political principles, than the formulation of the class consciousness, or even of a sum
of workers’ consciousness: “The party must synthesise, in clear formulae, what each worker feels: that the
situation is untenable, and that it is absolutely necessary to destroy capitalism”.
• The’ party’s tasks’: theory and praxis
The Theses declared: “Questions must be examined in their coherence; the results must be set out clearly, and in
their scientific determinism”.
The party’s tasks within the proletariat followed from this method:
– a task of ‘clarification’, not of organisation, the latter being the task of the workers in their struggle. The
function of organising the class disappears, to be replaced by a task of clarification within the struggle. This
clarification was defined negatively, as an ideological and practical struggle against “all the underhand attempts
by the bourgeoisie and its accomplices to contaminate the workers’ organisations with their own influence”;
– a task of ‘practical intervention in the class struggle’. This follows from the party’s understanding that it
cannot take from the workers their own functions’: “[The party] can only intervene as a part of the class, and not
in contradiction with it. Its position in intervening is solely to contribute to the deepening and extension of the
domination of the power of the council democracy...”.
This function of the party did not imply passivity. The Spartacusbond affirmed its role as a ‘motor’ of the class
struggle, able to take initiatives which would compensate the ‘workers’ hesitations’:
“...when the workers hesitate to take certain measures, party members can, as revolutionary industrial workers,
take the initiative, and they are even required to do so when it is both necessary and possible to carry out these
methods. When the workers want to leave a decision to engage in action to a union body, then conscious
communists must take the initiative for an action of the workers themselves. In a more developed phase of the
struggle, when the enterprise organisations or the workers’ councils hesitate before a problem of economical
organisation, then conscious communists must not only show the necessity of this organisation, they must also
study these questions themselves, and call mass meetings to discuss them. Thus their activity unfolds within the
struggle, and as a motor of the struggle, when it stagnates or is in danger of running into dead ends.”
In this quote, we cannot help noticing a ‘workerist’ interpretation of intervention in the workers’ councils. The
fact that party members intervened as “industrial workers” seemed to exclude the possibility of “conscious
communists” – from the intelligentsia – defending their viewpoint before the workers, as party members. On this
basis, Lenin, Marx, or Engels would have been excluded. We know that in 1918, Rosa Luxemburg was denied
1207 See: ‘Het marxisme als methode van onderzoek’; an article written by Bruun van Albada, who was an astroromer, in:
Spartacus No. 1.
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