The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

‘linksradikal’ current, the source of the Spartakist group and the Bremen IKD (‘International Communists of
Germany’).
The Marxist left of Bremen (a Hanseatic ‘free town’, and a great proletarian centre) had always been critical of
the SPD leadership and the trade unions. Pannekoek came to join them in April 1910. He was a militant in
Bremen until July 1914. The Bremen party secretary Wilhelm Pieck (future leader of the KPD in 1919, and
president of the GDR in 1949) asked him to continue to work as a socialist teacher. He was paid by the Bremen
“Bildungsausschuß”, formed by the party and unions. As in Berlin, Pannekoek was not content to simply to give
lessons on the theory and practice of the class struggle in the town where he was living. He made propaganda
tours and held conferences throughout Germany, particularly in Stuttgart, Göttingen, and Hamburg. As a
member of the opposition, this gave him the opportunity to make contact with the most radical workers,
increasingly suspicious of the party and union apparatus. At the same time, he took an active part in the
fundamental activity of the party in Bremen: meetings, distribution of leaflets; all this on top of his regular work
as a revolutionary journalist, whose articles were published in one of the most influential opposition newspapers:
the Bremer Bürgerzeitung.
The SPD’s Bremen section was certainly the most theoretically advanced of all the ‘radical’ sections in
Germany. It was dominated by the characters of Alfred Henke 137 , (128) and above all Johann Knief, a future
founding member of the IKD and People’s Commissar in the Bremen Soviet Republic of 1919. 138 The group of
teachers around Knief was particularly numerous, and very active in the class struggle. This group and the mass
of factory workers were very receptive to ‘extremist’ ideas. They were the most ardent in spreading the idea of
the mass strike, but also in the struggle against imperialism and the danger of war. Above all, they were
resolutely opposed to the reformism of the trades unions which, as in the rest of Germany, adopted a passive
attitude to the struggle, when they did not simply ban strikes altogether. Hence the debate, in Bremen, on the
question of ‘masses and leaders’, which contained in germ one of the main positions of the German communist
left in 1919: the struggle of the mass against the leaders. Like Lenin, the Bremen left and Pannekoek believed
that a layer had formed, made up of union bureaucrats and employees (the ‘workers’ aristocracy’), which was
increasingly removed from the class struggle; they advocated a determined resistance to the ‘leaders’, through
the self-development of the spontaneity of the struggle. In 1911, a significant debate on the subject took place in
Hamburg. Remarkably, Pannekoek won the overwhelming support of the workers present, in his defence of the
real movement against the ‘leaders’, despite the presence of Carl Legien, reformist leader of the ‘free unions’.
The result was a violent campaign against Pannekoek by the Bremen unions, and the termination of his contract
with the local union group. Although the local party section continued to pay him and support him politically, his
relations with the party leadership were worsening. Now it was not just the right wing that tried to stifle his
written propaganda, but the centre. In November 1911, for the first time ever, Kautsky refused one of
Pannekoek’s articles for Die Neue Zeit.
The Bremen left’s struggle against the kautskyist ‘centre’ reached its culmination between 1910 and 1913. It
provided the opportunity for a united front with Rosa Luxemburg in the debate on the question of elections and
the mass strike (see Chapter 2). In September 1910, a common resolution was presented to the Magdeburg
congress, insisting on the use of extra-parliamentary means of struggle. This resolution in favour of the
‘propaganda for the mass strike’ in the party press and meetings was rejected by the congress. In parallel,
Luxemburg and Pannekoek conducted a vigorous counter-offensive against Kautsky’s ‘strategy of attrition’ (see
Chapter 2), and his passive radicalism. At the 1913 Jena Congress, Pannekoek, in the name of the Bremen
137 Alfred Henke (1868-1946), tobacco worker, became editor-in-chief of the Bremer Bürgerzeitung in 1906. Although he
was on the left, he joined the USPD in 1917, and became president of the Bremen workers’ and soldiers’ council in 1919.
He moved towards the right. As a member of the National Assembly, he returned to the SPD in 1922 and retained his seat
until 1932.
138 Johann Knief (1880-1919), teacher, member of the SPD from 1906, editor on the Bremer Bürgerzeitung from 1911 until
1916. He was a founding member of the ‘Linksradikale’, and later of the IKD, and edited Arbeiterpolitik, where he worked
with Radek. Knief, alias Peter Unruh, was imprisoned by the government for revolutionary activity in January 1918. For his
biography, see: G. Mergner, ‘Johannes Knief und seine Region’, Parts 1 & 2, in: Archiv für die Geschichte des
Widerstandes und der Arbeit, No. 1, Berlin, 1980, pp. 85-117; No. 2/3, Berlin, 1980, pp. 45-89.
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