The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

ended in defeat – but whatever helps to strengthen it in the long term. However, in a somewhat contradictory
reasoning, Pannekoek shows that class interests and morality often diverge, since “it is not that which is useful to
the class that is moral; on the contrary, that which in general is normally directed towards the advantage and
interest of the class is moral”. 180
Significantly, Pannekoek and the Dutch Left were to abandon bit by bit this problematic, which was clearly
marked by the debate against the revisionists and the neo-Kantians. Especially after 1905, the fundamental
problem for the Dutch left was no longer the question of ‘proletarian morality’, but of class-consciousness. In the
end, the real proletarian ‘morality’ lies in the formation and strengthening of its class consciousness, as a
precondition of the socialist goal.
d) The Dutch Left’s conception of class consciousness
For the Marxist Left, the proletariat’s strength did not lie in its numbers, concentration and economic importance
alone. It became a class both in and for itself from the moment that it becomes aware not just of its strength, but
of its own interests and goals. It is consciousness that brings the working class into existence. The class is selfaware:
“It is only thanks to consciousness that weight of numbers is transformed into a force for the class itself,
and that the latter is able to grasp that it is vital to the productive process; only thanks to consciousness can the
proletariat fulfil its interests and achieve its aims. Only class consciousness makes it possible for this inert,
immense and muscular body to exist and become capable of action.” 181
Pannekoek and the Dutch Left followed the classical Marxist movement in highlighting the different degrees of
class-consciousness, which can only be understood historically. At first, class-consciousness is neither complete,
nor “adjudged” – to use the Lukács’ formulation 182 – as it would be conditionally and ideally had it reached
maturity. The primitive and still immediate form of class-consciousness, though still indispensable for the
struggle, is the ‘mass instinct’, or ‘class instinct’. While demonstrating that this instinct is spontaneous action,
“action determined by immediate feeling as opposed to action based on intelligent thought”, Pannekoek declared
that “the instinct of the masses is the lever for humanity’s political-revolutionary development”. 183 This assertion
may seem somewhat paradoxical, since it looks like a glorification of the immediate ‘class instinct’. In fact, this
was not the case. For Pannekoek, this instinct was ‘immediate class consciousness’, which had not yet reached
the political and socialist form. In polemics against the revisionists and kautskyists (see below), the Marxist Left
often emphasised the ‘healthy and sure’ class instinct, meaning by this the workers’ class interests curbed by the
bureaucratised party and trade union apparatus.
Although it has often (in particular by the ‘Leninist’ current represented above all by Bordiga’s followers) been
accused, along with Rosa Luxemburg, of a form of spontaneism 184 , for the Dutch Left there was nothing
‘spontaneous’ about class consciousness; they had no ‘mystique’ of irrational action along the lines of Sorel.
Insisting that class-consciousness is neither a group social psychology nor an individual consciousness, the
Dutch Marxists put forward a definition which is far removed from ‘spontaneism’:
– Consciousness within the proletariat is a collective will, organised as one body; its form is necessarily the
organisation which gives unity and cohesion to the exploited class: “the organisation groups together in one
framework individuals who were previously atomised. Before the organisation, each individual’s will was
expressed independently of all the others; the organisation means the unity of all individual wills acting in the
180 Pannekoek, idem, p. 21.
181 Pannekoek, Divergences tactiques au sein du mouvement ouvrier, quoted in Bricianer, op. cit., p. 56.
182 György (Georg) Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1991). [Histoire et conscience de
classe (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1960), p. 73.]
183 Pannekoek, ‘Der Instinkt der Massen’, in: Bremer Bürgerzeitung, reprinted by Hans Manfred Bock in: Jahrbuch 3: ‚Die
Linke in der Sozialdemokratie’ (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1975), pp. 137-140.
184 It is the point of view of the Leninist ‘fundamentalist’ current, organised in the bordigist circles.
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