The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

International; on the other, the ‘workers’ leaders’ and the ‘workers’ aristocracy’ were considered the vectors of
the revisionist current.
But there the likeness stopped. Following the debate on the mass strike, against Kautsky and ‘centrism’, which
revealed the reformist current’s general penetration of every layer of the working class, both ‘poor’ and
‘aristocratic’, Pannekoek no longer used the concept of ‘workers’ aristocracy’. As for anarchism, the Dutch
Left’s position remained the same: hostility by principle, and permanent theoretical combat. The Dutch Left’s
rejection of the anarchist current was only tempered by the development of the class struggle, and the part played
by anarcho-syndicalist militants like the NAS in Holland. In fact, the Dutch Left, and especially Pannekoek,
made a clear distinction between the French ‘revolutionary syndicalism’ embodied in Sorel, and the American
IWW. Pannekoek considered Sorel’s writings to be “bourgeois-confused”, typical of a slow economic
development. 199 By contrast, in 1912 he considered the principles of the IWW as “perfectly correct”. 200 This
strange distinction between syndicalism in France and that in America and Holland is explained by the fact that
the Dutch Left considered the NAS and the IWW as the social expression of a modern proletariat, freed from
artisan strata, less qualified but more concentrated. But the Dutch Left in no way altered its political rejection of
the federalist and anti-centralist tendencies that developed in the new revolutionary syndicalism, in reaction
against the revisionist unions. 201
The debate on the mass strike, conducted from 1910 onwards against Kautsky and the bureaucratic apparatus of
party and unions, relegated the attempts at sociological explanations of revisionism and anarchism to the
background. The most dangerous enemy of the revolution was no longer anarchism, but kautskyist ‘centrism’,
whose conclusion was the consolidation and even the triumph of revisionism. At stake was no longer the
theoretical struggle against revisionism, but the struggle for the revolution. The proletariat’s strategy had to be
re-evaluated. With or against the unions, parliamentary or extra-parliamentary struggle. The aim of the class
struggle and its tactical methods – mass struggle or union and parliamentary struggle – had to be re-evaluated in
the light of the wave of mass strikes culminating in the first Russian revolution of 1905.
From the mass strike to the proletarian revolution
a) The debate on the mass strike in the 2 nd International before 1905
Until the beginning of the century, before the outbreak of the 1905 revolution in Russia, the debates within the
2 nd International over the proletariat’s means of revolutionary action were limited and held within the straitjacket
of the Congress resolutions on the general strike. The general strike advocated by the anarchist currents
was rejected as foreign to the tactics and strategy of the workers’ movement. Defended as an anti-political
‘method’ for ‘making the revolution’ without the formation of workers’ political organisations, it became the
prerogative of revolutionary syndicalism. 202 Revolutionary syndicalism rejected any parliamentary tactics, or any
strategy of long-term organisation of the workers’ movement; it theorised ‘active minorities’ and ‘revolutionary
gymnastics’ as necessary and sufficient means to maintain, by ‘direct action’, the working masses’ spirit of
revolt. For Sorel and his followers, the general strike was both a brutal catastrophe (‘The Great Night’),
overthrowing capitalism in one decisive action, and an idealist myth which could give the masses a quasi-
199 Pannekoek on Georges Sorel’s book La Décomposition du Marxisme, in: Die Neue Zeit, 1908-1909, Vol. 1, p. 555. In
English: George Sorel, Reflections on violence, CUP, Cambridge, 1999; a book which influenced Mussolini.
200 Pannekoek, in Die Neue Zeit, 1912, 903.
201 For example, the German revolutionary syndicalists seceded from the Social-Democrat ‘Free Unions’ (‘Freie
Gewerkschaften’) in 1907, to form localist organisations. In an article written in 1913 (‘Der deutsche Syndikalismus’, in:
Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 29 th Nov. 1913), Pannekoek insisted that “revolutionary activity must be associated with the massive
strength of a centralised organisation”, not dispersed in localist organisations.
202 See: H. Dubief, Le Syndicalisme révolutionnaire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1969).
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