The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

innovation. The experience of the Russian and German revolutions widened and confirmed the work of these
eight years as an active militant.
Pannekoek’s first political activity in Germany was thus as a teacher in the Party School, opened on 15 th
November 1906. This was jointly funded by the SDP and the ‘free unions’ (“Freie Gewerkschaften”). Courses
lasted six months. Their aim was to give training in theory and propaganda to the cadres of the socialist and
trades union movement. For a workers’ movement as powerful as the German, the number of ‘students’ was
extremely small: thirty at most. It is true that they and their families were financed entirely by the Party for the
duration of the course. There seems to have been no requirement of “orthodoxy” for admission to the courses.
There was nothing scholastic about Pannekoek’s teaching – and the same could be said for Mehring and Rosa
Luxemburg, who also worked in the Party School. The aim was to “provide a clear understanding of capitalism,
not only to encourage workers to fight it, but to discover the best methods of struggle”. 128 In both his teaching
and his writing, Pannekoek highlighted the factor of class consciousness, which he called the ‘spiritual factor’.
His work at the Party School did not last long. As foreigners, the police banned both Pannekoek and Hilferding
from teaching in Prussia. In October 1907, he was replaced by Rosa Luxemburg. Far from being discouraged,
Pannekoek worked in the Social-Democrat Party with still greater determination. Moreover, his reputation in the
Party’s ‘leading circles’ was such that Bebel himself asked him to stay in Germany and devote himself to
working for the SPD. Like Otto Rühle during the same period, he became a typical Social-Democrat
‘functionary’, a ‘Wanderlehrer’ (visiting teacher) and propagandist in the service of the national organisation. He
travelled throughout Germany, including Leipzig, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt, to give courses and conferences. His
travels gave him the opportunity both to evaluate the spread of revisionism and the state of mind of the rank and
file workers confronted with the bureaucratisation of both Party and trades unions.
During this period, Pannekoek formed close ties with both Kautsky (he described himself as a ‘kautskyist’ until
1909) and with the left current in German and international social democracy. He became friends with Rosa
Luxemburg, and with the Bolshevik Samuel Levitin. 129 He appreciated the “burning revolutionary passion” of
the Bolsheviks, 130 which he compared favourably with the pedantic and in the end bourgeois mannerisms of the
Social-Democrats. It is noteworthy that, unlike Luxemburg, neither Pannekoek nor the Tribunists had any
criticisms to make of Bolshevism until 1919. On the Bolshevik side, after the break between Kautsky and the
radicals Lenin asked Kamenev to make contact with Pannekoek at the 1912 Chemnitz Congress 131 to conduct the
struggle against Kautsky’s ‘passive radicalism’.
These contacts with the radical left were not limited to Germany and the Russian exile milieu. Pannekoek
travelled several times to Switzerland. He remained in contact with the Swiss socialist movement through Robert
Grimm of Bern (the future technical organiser of the Zimmerwald Conference), and Brandler, who had settled in
Zürich and was later to become one of the main leaders of the KPD. Hence the contacts, which were to be
resuscitated in October 1914, with Grimm and the Berner Tagwacht against the war and later for Zimmerwald.
This activity was impressive enough, but Pannekoek did not restrict himself to the role of a ‘Wanderlehrer’.
Although he declared himself to be “not much of a man for congresses”, 132 he took an active part in the
congresses of the German social democracy, first as an observer (since he was a permanent party official), and
then from 1910 as a delegate from the Bremen section. At the same time, Pannekoek remained a member of the
SDAP, and then of the ‘Tribunist’ SDP following the split of February 1909. With Gorter and Van Ravesteyn, he
128 A. Pannekoek, ‘The S.D. Party School in Berlin’, in: International Socialist Review (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr &
Company, Dec. 1907), pp. 321-324.
129 Samuel Levitin, bolshevik, in exile in Berlin, studied psychology and pedagogy. He returned to Russia in 1917 to become
a teacher of pedagogy. Although Pannekoek never knew Lenin in person, at the 1913 Iena Congress he had discussions with
Trotsky on the Russian and international situation.
130 Pannekoek, Herinneringen, op. cit., p. 117.
131 See: C. Malandrino, op. cit., p. 540.
132 Letter from Pannekoek to Kautsky (Sept. 1910) after the Copenhagen international congress, which he had been
unwilling – or unable? – to attend. [Quoted in B.A. Sijes’, Introduction to the ‘Herinneringen’, p. 16].
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