The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

organisations they had so patiently built, but they had to conduct the struggle outside, and even against the latter,
without requiring any previously existing organisation to lead it. For the whole workers’ movement, the year
1905 posed the problem not just of form (generalisation, self-organisation, spontaneity), but of the content of the
mass strike: reforms or revolution.
b) The Dutch-German Left and the mass strike. Henriette Roland Holst and Rosa Luxemburg
The Marxist Left had begun to analyse the mass strike well before 1905. Begun by Rosa Luxemburg, it was
continued by Roland Holst in the Dutch Left during 1905, then taken up again in greater depth by Luxemburg
and finally Pannekoek. While the positions of the Marxist Left in Germany and Holland appear the most
coherent, they cannot be considered independently of those of the Russian Left, and of Trotsky in particular.
There is an evident theoretical solidarity and convergence between them, in the combat against reformism and
for the revolution.
The first to use the term ‘political mass strike’ was in fact a Russian. In 1895, Parvus 208 advocated political mass
action as a method of proletarian defence against the state, and one which could begin the social revolution. Put
forward in reaction to the revisionism in practice of the German party, the ‘political mass strike’ was rejected by
both the SPD leadership, and by the left, represented at the time by Kautsky and Mehring. But in 1902, during
the general strike called by the Belgian party and conducted in a strictly legal framework, only to be called off,
Rosa Luxemburg considered all the consequences of its use by the proletariat. Defending the ‘political general
strike’ as an ‘extra-parliamentary action’ which should not be sacrificed to parliamentary action, she showed that
such action would be without effect if it were not backed up by “the menacing spectre of the free flowering of
the popular movement, the spectre of revolution”. 209 While condemning the anarchist slogan of the ‘general
strike’ as a ‘universal panacea’, she pointed out that this was “one of the oldest slogans in the modern workers’
movement”. The general strike corresponded in fact to an “accidental political strike”, which could be neither
called nor controlled to order. Like the revolutions of the past, it should be understood as one of the “elementary
social phenomena produced by a natural force whose well-spring lies in the class nature of modern society”. As
such, she posed the question of the necessary use of class violence as an “irreplaceable offensive method”, “both
in the various episodes of the class struggle, and for the final conquest of state power”. Prophetically, she
concluded that if the social democracy “really decided to renounce violence once and for all, if it decided to
commit the working masses to abide by bourgeois legality, then all its political struggle, parliamentary or not,
would sooner or later collapse pitifully, to give way to the unlimited domination of reactionary violence.”
The 1905 Russian Revolution, which began with a general strike and ended in the defeat of the December
insurrection, allowed the Marxist Left in Germany and Holland to clarify the revolutionary conception against
either the rejection, or at best the tepid acknowledgement of the mass strike within the social democracy.
Rejected by the revisionists, the SPD’s Jena congress in September 1905 paid lip-service to the notion of the
mass strike. Bebel’s resolution, which was nonetheless hailed as a ‘victory’ for the Left, commended the mass
strike solely as a “defensive weapon”, and considered that the events in Russia could not serve as example for
the workers’ movement in the West. 210 A few months later, in February 1906, a secret conference of the SPD
and the unions was held, to prevent the spread of the mass strike among the German proletariat.
Faced with this attitude, appearing already in 1905. Kautsky, who at the time was still on the left of the SPD,
asked Roland Holst to draw up a pamphlet on The General Strike and the Social democracy, published in June
208 A. Grünenberg, op. cit., contains a text by Parvus on the subject.
209 This and the quotes that follow on the experience of the Belgian strike are taken from a collection of texts in French by
F. Mehring and R. Luxemburg: Grèves sauvages, spontanéité des masses. L’Expérience belge de grève générale (Paris:
Cahiers Spartacus, Dec. 69), pp. 17-41.
210 Schorske, op. cit., p. 69.
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