The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

organisational discipline, both expressions of Prussian military discipline. In the second place, it is seen as
‘Germanic’ insofar as it was part of the ‘national bolshevik’ reaction to the defect of 1918. We know that Gorter
and Pannekoek were accused by Wijnkoop of being ‘pro-German’; and the KAPD was seen by the leadership of
the Komintern as being a typical expression of German ‘national-bolshevism’. Finally, it is seen as ‘Germanic’
because it considered the German revolution to be superior to the revolution in backward Russia.
While it is true that Germany was the centre of a strong reaction against bureaucracy, culminating in the theory
of struggle against the ‘leaders’ and in Rühle’s cult of anti-authoritarianism, it was not the only country where
this happened. The anti-authoritarian current developed in many countries, both ‘Latin’ as well as ‘Germanic’. It
was accompanied by a strong resurgence of anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary syndicalist tendencies which,
as in France, Spain and Italy, developed sympathies towards the bolsheviks because of their rejection of the
official Socialist movement, and through the discovery of Lenin’s theses calling for the destruction of the state.
But the majority of the left communists, Gorter, Pannekoek, the German KAPD, laid particular insistence on the
need for organisational discipline and the formation of new proletarian leaders. Before 1914, the entire left, and
Pannekoek in particular, faced with the federalist conceptions of the revisionists, were in favour of strict
organisational discipline. For them, the mass strike evolved from spontaneity to a greater discipline in the
organisation of the workers and of the political vanguard. The rejection of the libertarian and revolutionary
syndicalist tendencies in Holland and the exclusion of the Rühle tendency showed a real effort by the left to
demarcate itself from such elements.
As for the so-called ‘national-bolshevism’ of the German/Dutch left, while it did express itself in the
Laufenberg-Wolffheim current in the KAPD, it was immediately combated and excluded. Far from being ‘pro-
German’ the left was above all the product of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Profoundly internationalist, it
spread to countries as different as Britain and Bulgaria, and in the 20s and 30s to the USA, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, France and Denmark.
And concerning the ‘anti-Russian’ character of the left communist movement, it did appear with Rühle, and then
later on in the councilist movement of the GIC and Paul Mattick, but this wasn’t the case at the beginning. The
left communists started off, as in the case of Gorter and Pannekoek against Wijnkoop, as the best disciples of
bolshevism and the Russian revolution.
The stress on the importance of the revolution in Germany was not the expression of a rejection of the Russian
revolution or of any particularist tendencies. The German-Dutch left, just like the Komintern, always insisted on
the vital stakes of the revolutionary struggle in Germany. This country was the key to the world revolution, being
the most industrialised country in Europe and the one most likely to draw the whole of Europe into the
revolution, above all because it had a very concentrated and conscious proletariat that had been educated by
decades of socialist propaganda and action. The criticisms made of bolshevik policies were those of fellow
Marxists trying to show that the proletarian revolution could only reach its fullest dimensions in the most
developed countries. The extension of the revolution to these countries would prove that Russia had been the
first outpost of the world revolution, and not a model to be followed, because of its economic and social
backwardness. The Russian schemas being put forward by the bolsheviks in the Komintern could not be valid in
countries where the weight of the peasantry was limited and were trade union tactics were definitively out of
date.
Certain tendencies, like the ‘bordigist’ current, later on accused the German-Dutch left of being the pure product
of a ‘western road to communism’, as a kind of ‘western Marxism’. Nothing could be further from the truth. The
Marxism of Pannekoek and Gorter found a very wide echo in a country as backward as Bulgaria. It gave rise to
tendencies within the bolshevik party, like that of Miasnikov, who associated himself with the KAPD. At the
same time, as Marxists Gorter and Pannekoek always stressed the unity of the world proletariat, which
demanded the same basic tactics in all countries, underdeveloped or developed. Despite certain of the ideas
expressed by Gorter in 1920, with his conception of the ‘geographical meridian’, cutting Europe in two, very
quickly the predominant view was that the conditions of a proletarian revolution were ‘mature’ in all countries
and on all continents.
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