The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

section, supported a counter-resolution presented by Luxemburg, which described a “renewed interest in the
mass political strike” and – paradoxically – called for “an all-out campaign for electoral reform”. 139 Pannekoek,
however, placed more emphasis than Rosa Luxemburg on the struggle against war.
In fact, the oppositions in the German social democracy fought in parallel, without really developing any
common opposition. In 1913, there was a de facto split between Luxemburg and the Bremen left. This cannot be
explained by the disagreements between Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek on the analyses contained in her
Accumulation of Capital (see Chapter 2). In fact, it originated in the ‘Radek affair’. Karl Radek had been a
member of the Polish SDKPiL, but had settled in Germany since 1908. He was accused of ‘theft’ by the SDKPiL
leadership, and excluded. Luxemburg, this time with the support of the SPD leadership, consequently obtained
his exclusion from the party at the Jena congress. Radek, however, was one of Bremen’s most active militants,
and had the complete support of both Pannekoek and the local section. The result was to create a divide between
Luxemburg’s tendency and that of Bremen, which was to prove a barrier to the regroupment of the
‘Linksradikalen’ during the war.
In fact, the Bremen left was more single-minded than Luxemburg in the formation of what could look like a
fraction. Radek, who had been trained in the school of Bolshevism, was more determined than Pannekoek in
calling implicitly for the formation of a real fraction. During the SPD’s debates of 1913 on the reorganisation of
the party leadership, Pannekoek was in favour of a ‘narrow’ leadership, made up of “a small number of the
party’s best political thinkers”. Radek not only spoke of eliminating the parliamentary fraction from the party
leadership altogether, but even suggested the idea of forming a fraction within the SPD. 140
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On the eve of the Great War, the Bremen left was on the point of splitting. Politically, it was already on the
terrain of ‘left communism’. Its positions against unions and ‘leaders’, its energetic support for any spontaneous
struggle of the workers, its constant struggle against the danger of war, gave it its own distinctive character.
There is no doubt that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were influenced, during the war, by Pannekoek’s theoretical
activity, insisting on the ‘destruction of the state’ by the proletariat, and by Radek’s analyses of ‘imperialism, the
final stage of capitalism’. 141 The Bremen opposition’s social base was the mass of workers who were in a de
facto state of secession from the union apparatus and the SPD. In July 1913, following the strikes in Hamburg,
5,000 workers in the Bremen shipyards came out on unofficial strike, against the orders of the trade union.
Pannekoek, Radek, and Knief gave their determined support to this antiunion action. The developing split in the
party came on top of the split of the working masses from their own organisations.
As a ‘foreigner’, Pannekoek was forced to leave Germany in August 1914, and return to Holland. In 1915,
Radek left Germany for Switzerland, where he was to work with the Bolsheviks in the Zimmerwald left. But the
fight was not over: both Pannekoek and Radek continued to follow the development of the Bremen fraction,
which was expelled from the social democracy in 1916 and began to publish the paper Arbeiterpolitik. Situated
at the confluence of the German, Dutch, and Russian ‘left radical’ currents, the Bremen left prepared the birth of
the international left communist current, which appeared in the open in 1918-19. Pannekoek played a
determining part in the process.
139 J. P. Nettl, Life and Work of Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
140 See: D. Möller, Karl Radek in Deutschland (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1976); J.-F. Fayet, Karl Radek (1885-
1939). Biographie politique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004). The Bremen section published Radek’s book: Der deutsche
Imperialismus und die Arbeiterklasse (1912), which came to the same conclusions as Pannekoek on imperialism.
141 Radek analysed imperialism as “the final phase in the development of capital”, in his book In den Reihen der deutschen
Revolution 1909-1919 (Munich, 1920), p. 72.
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