The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

social-democratic parties, whose statutes allowed the membership of religious persons, since personal beliefs
were a ‘private affair’. 191
But it is true that for the Marxist Left, the religious question seemed secondary in the ideological struggles of the
time. For the whole workers’ movement, much more was at stake in the theoretical struggle against revisionism
and anarchism. And there was little sign then of the first symptoms of capitalism’s decline, expressed in the
‘religion of the state’ and a resurgence of mysticism.
b) Revisionism and anarchism
From the outset, the Dutch Marxists’ theoretical and practical struggle was directed against a powerful
revisionist, reformist, and opportunist current in the SDAP and the German SPD. But it was always joined with a
parallel struggle against anarchism.
The Marxist Left was in no doubt that anarchism and revisionism were both “bourgeois tendencies within the
workers’ movement”. 192 The revisionism defended by Bernstein, Troelstra, and Vliegen in practice was drawing
closer to the “bourgeois reformers and radicals”. Anarchism, by contrast, precisely because of its “utopian
phraseology” was “more dangerous” than revisionism. Although these two tendencies appeared to be diametrical
opposites, in fact revisionism and anarchism were symmetrical to each other. For the anarchists, the state was the
“devil”, while for the revisionists it was the “fairy godmother”. For the former, the goal was everything and the
movement nothing, while for the latter “the final goal is nothing, the movement is everything”. 193 In fact, they
strengthened each other: “anarchist phraseology” strengthened the revisionist “reaction”, while revisionist
practice, such as the policy of alliances with the bourgeoisie illustrated in France by ‘Millerandism’
“considerably strengthened the anarchist current in the trade union movement”. 194
But the Dutch Left went further than identifying symmetry between these “bourgeois tendencies”: they
emphasised their common roots in a bourgeois conception of the world. Both joined bourgeois liberalism in a
“common cult of the individual and personal liberty”. 195 Both stood on the terrain of the bourgeoisie, but while
anarchism adopted the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie, revisionism adopted that of the bourgeoisie in decline.
They thus expressed two different periods of bourgeois development: “Anarchism, continuing the tradition of the
191 Like other social-democratic leaders, Lenin, too, considered that religion was a ‘private matter’ within the party, and that
religious workers should not be prevented from joining it: “We should not only admit to the social-democratic Party
workers who still retain faith in God, but work to attract them to the Party”; he added that “we attract them in order to
educate them in the spirit of our program, not so that they should actively combat it”. But he emphasised that social
democracy’s ‘indifference’ to religion – one of a kind with bourgeois anti-clericalism, “as a means to turn the masses’
attention away from socialism’ – had “engendered a new deformation of Marxism in the opposite direction, towards
opportunism”. Religion could be a ‘private concern’ within the Party, but not in socialist propaganda; the idea of religion as
a ‘private concern’ only had any meaning alongside the demand for the suppression of all state religions: “The party of the
proletariat demands that the state should proclaim religion a private affair, without in the least considering that the struggle
against the ‘opium of the people’ and against religious superstition is a private affair. The reformists have deformed things
so far as to pretend that the social-democratic party considers religion a private matter!” Like Pannekoek, Lenin nonetheless
insisted on the danger of focusing propaganda on atheism and giving it an exaggerated importance “... this would threaten to
lead the proletariat’s political party to exaggerate the struggle against religion; it would lead to removing the dividing line
between the bourgeois and the socialist struggle against religion” [Lenin, ‘The attitude of the workers’ party towards
religion’, May 1909, in: Collected Works, Vol. 15, pp. 402-413].
192 Pannekoek, Die taktischen Differenzen in der Arbeiterbewegung, quoted in: S. Bricianer, op. cit., p. 71.
193 Pannekoek, ‘Theorie en beginsel in de arbeidersbeweging’, in: De Nieuwe Tijd, 1906, pp. 609-613. This article is the first
draft for Die taktischen Differenzen [...], quoted above.
194 Pannekoek, ‘Theorie en beginselen [...]’, quoted above, p. 611. ‘Millerandists’ are socialists who take office in bourgeois
governments, named after the French Socialist leader Alexandre Millerand (1859-1943) who joined the French Cabinet of
Waldeck-Rousseau in 1899, alongside the marquis de Galliffet who had directed the repression of the 1871 Paris Commune.
195 The quotes that follow are drawn from Die taktischen Differenzen [...], quoted above.
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