The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

ourgeois revolutions, thinks of nothing but staging revolutions, while revisionism adopts the theory of slow
evolution, which belongs to the decadent bourgeoisie.”
This analysis may seem contradictory. On the one hand, the Left asserted that these were “bourgeois
tendencies”, on the other that they were “petty-bourgeois, rather than bourgeois tendencies”. In fact, with the rest
of the Marxist Left, the Dutch Left did not consider anarchism and revisionism as being integrated into the
bourgeoisie. Ideologically, they were situated on a bourgeois terrain, but socially they expressed the penetration
of petty-bourgeois ideology within the workers’ movement. Anarchism and revisionism were the political
expression of a class without any future, oscillating between extremes: “... unlike the self-satisfied big
bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie has always been a class of malcontents, inclined to resist the existing order.
Social development offers no perspective to this class; unable to keep up, it inevitably falls into one excess or
another; either it gets drunk on revolutionary phrases and would like to seize power through a putsch; or it
crawls shamefully at the feet of the big bourgeoisie, trying to beg or trick reforms out of it. Anarchism is the
ideology of the petty-bourgeois gone mad, revisionism that of the petty bourgeois when he has been tamed.”
These oscillations explain how – as we saw in the example of the German “Jungen” (Chap. 1) – each can be
transformed so easily into its opposite.
But the very fact that revisionism had a substantial base in the trade unions, and that anarchism was losing its
purely individualist aspect, to be transformed into anarcho-syndicalism which in some countries was anchored in
a milieu of organised workers, made this analysis incomplete. The petty-bourgeoisie’s psychology, its
oscillations between rage against and submission to the existing order, illuminated but did not sufficiently
explain the historical phenomenon of the development of revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism.
In fact, the Dutch Marxist Left did not have a homogeneous vision; its analysis was hesitant. In a pamphlet on
Social democracy and Revisionism, published in 1909 in the midst of the split with the SDAP, Gorter asserted
that revisionism and anarchism shared the same historic and economic roots: absence of heavy industry,
economy of small businesses and peasantry. Like anarchism, it was a sort of ‘transitional stage’ before the
formation of a combative industrial proletariat. 196 This kind of explanation was too closely tied to the Dutch
situation to be convincing. By summarily identifying revisionism and anarchism, Tribunists like Gorter hoped to
avoid the accusation of anarchism by their political adversaries. Pannekoek, in his book Die taktischen
Differenzen in der Arbeiterbewegung (also published during the split, in 1909), came closer to the truth. He
showed that revisionism was a universal phenomenon in the international workers’ movement, but one which
reached its fullest extent in developed countries like Germany. The basis for revisionism lay in the appearance of
a social stratum identified entirely with trades union and parliamentary activity. Above all, the mass unions’
“ideal is not a socialist order, but liberty and equality within the bourgeois state”, and they are the tool of a
bureaucracy which is completely detached from the working class. 197 Pannekoek called this bureaucracy the
“workers’ aristocracy”. It was not so much a social stratum as a caste of ‘leaders’ extending their domination
over the working masses.
This form of the theory of a ‘workers’ aristocracy’ was not new. It had already been sketched out by Engels, but
in a polemical way, and only to be relegated to the depot of theoretical accessories. 198 It was taken up again in
the 2 nd International, and especially systematised by Lenin during World War I. There were obvious similarities
between the conceptions of the Dutch and Left and those of Lenin. On the one hand, anarchism was analysed in
its anarcho-syndicalist form as the price the workers’ movement had to pay for the opportunism in the 2 nd
196 H. Gorter, Sociaal-Demokratie en Revisionisme (Amsterdam: Sociaal-Demokratische Partij, 1909), p. 3.
197 A. Pannekoek, Die taktischen Differenzen [...], op. cit., p. 84.
198 Engels first spoke of a “workers’ aristocracy” with reference to highly qualified workers, organised in corporatist unions
and hostile to the organisation of unqualified workers, especially in Britain. But in 1885, in an article in Die Neue Zeit,
Engels predicted the disappearance of this British ‘layer’ of ‘privileged’ workers as a result of the economic crisis: “With
the ruin of Britain’s industrial supremacy, its working class will lose its privileged status. On the whole – including its
privileged and leading minority – it will be brought to the same level as workers abroad” [Marx-Engels, Le Syndicalisme,
ed. Maspéro, 1972, 193 (with an introduction by Roger Dangeville)].
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