The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

same direction. As long as the different atoms are moving in any direction, then they neutralise each other, and
the sum of their activity is equal to zero.” 185
– This consciousness is not a pure reflection of the proletariat’s economic struggles. It takes on a political form,
whose highest and most developed expression is socialist theory, which allows the proletariat to go beyond the
‘instinctive’ and still unconscious stage, to reach the stage of conscious action, directed by the communist goal:
“Theory is socialism’s scientific foundation. Putting it into action will make the greatest contribution both to
giving the movement a certain and calm direction, and to transforming unconscious instinct into a conscious
human act.” 186
Pannekoek would add to this organisation and theory, which he sometimes referred to as ‘knowledge’, freely
accepted discipline, as the living cement of consciousness.
As we can see, this conception of the Dutch Marxist Left is as far removed from that of Lenin expressed in What
is to be Done?, which considered that consciousness had to be injected from the outside by bourgeois
intellectuals, as it is from the spontaneist, anti-organisation and economist current. The Dutch Left was
convinced that class-consciousness existed in two dimensions: the theoretical depth of ‘knowledge’ accumulated
by historical experience, and its extent within the masses. Increasingly, the Dutch and German Lefts emphasised
the importance of the mass strike, at one and the same time ‘spontaneous’ and ‘organised’, for the massive
development of class consciousness.
This position was in fact directly derived from Marx’s theory of consciousness. 187 Despite appearances, after
1905 and the first Russian revolution it differed little from that of Lenin, for whom ‘class instinct’, ‘spontaneity’
and socialist education were inseparably linked: “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously socialdemocratic,
and more than 10 years of work by the social democracy has done much to transform this instinct
into consciousness.” 188 There was thus a clear convergence within the pre-1914 Marxist Left of the
understanding of the question of class-consciousness.
The ideological obstacles to the proletarian revolution
In order to arrive at a socialist awareness of its goal, the proletariat had to free itself of a certain number of
ideological barriers that appeared within itself. For the Marxist Left, the struggle on the ideological terrain,
against the bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideas that insidiously penetrate the proletariat, was just as vital as the
practical class struggle against the bourgeoisie.
Religion
185 A. Pannekoek, ‚Massenaktion und Revolution’, in: Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 30, 1911-1912, No. 2, pp. 541-550, 585-593, 609-
616; reprinted by Antonia Grünenberg, Die Massenstreikdebatte, Frankfurt/Main, 1970. French translation: Kautsky,
Luxemburg, Pannekoek. Socialisme : la voie occidentale, Paris, 1983, 297-335. [With an introduction by Henri Weber, exleader
of the French trotskyist organisation Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), who became senator and secretary
of the French Socialist Party in the late 1990s.]
186 A. Pannekoek, op. cit., in: Bricianer, op. cit., p. 98.
187 K. Marx, The German Ideology, Part I, Feuerbach, ‘Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook’: “To produce this
communist consciousness massively, and to bring about the triumph of the cause itself, a transformation is necessary which
affects the mass of humanity, and this can only take place in a practical movement, in a revolution.” Marx continues that the
working class is the class from which emanates a consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, a communist
consciousness.
188 Lenin, ‘On the reorganisation of the Party’, Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub., 1961), pp. 29-
39. Original Russian text in: Novaya Zhizn’, Nos. 9, 13 and 14, November 10, 15, and 16, 1905.
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