The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

1905 with a preface by himself 211 . This pamphlet came to political conclusions on the revolutionary mass strike
in Russia which were to be taken up by the whole Left:
– there is “no rigid frontier between the partial and the general strike; 212
– “the political strike is the union of the political and economic struggles, the mobilisation of the proletariat’s
economic power in order to achieve its political goals”; 213
– mass action is “the form that corresponds to any revolution where the conscious industrial proletariat
constitutes the greatest mass force”; 214
– “the political mass strike becomes the form for the decisive struggle for political power, for state domination”;
– “... in the struggle for state power, violence could be a factor in the victory”. 215
Finally, Roland Holst clarified the subjective and objective conditions for such a mass strike: the proletariat’s
organisation and self-education, discipline and class consciousness – all qualities which are rooted in the
proletariat’s concentration in big enterprises. All these qualities necessary to the revolution’s success were
always emphasised by the Dutch Left, and by Pannekoek in particular (see below).
But Roland Holst distanced herself from the Marxist Left’s vision, demonstrating a centrist viewpoint close to
Kautsky’s, in still not seeing “any contradiction between parliamentarism and the political mass strike”, 216 while
paradoxically pointing out the “decline of bourgeois parliamentarism”. She saw above all – in contradiction with
her own analyses – the danger that the mass strike should turn into an insurrection:
“There is a danger that the masses fail to recognise the strike’s political goals, whether demonstration or to apply
pressure, and consider it as the final struggle, orientated towards the annihilation of capitalism”. 217 The whole
question was this: does the revolutionary mass strike in Russia open a new revolutionary historical period, whose
lessons are universally valid, including for the ‘organised’ workers’ movement in the West, whose struggles had
always been defined by the Social democracy as ‘defensive’.
Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet Mass Strike, Party, and Unions, published in 1906 but censured 218 was part of the
struggle against the reformist conceptions of the SPD leadership and the unions. Its conclusions were the same as
Roland Holst’s. But Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical framework was far broader. Fired with revolutionary passion,
more critical than Roland Holst towards the SPD and union bureaucracies, far more incisive vis-à-vis
parliamentary activity, this pamphlet can be considered as the first revolutionary manifesto of the Dutch-German
left current. The most decisive points were as follows:
– there is no such thing as a ‘Western road’ to socialism, through parliamentary strategy and the peaceful
evolution of the workers’ movement; the lessons of the Russian revolution are universal, valid in all countries,
including the most developed:
“The mass strike thus appears not as a specifically Russian product of absolutism, but as a universal form of
proletarian class struggle determined by the present stage of capitalist development and the balance of class
211 H. Roland-Holst, Generalstreik und Sozial-Demokratie (Dresden: Verlag Kaden & Co, 1905), reprint in 1906.
212 Idem, p. 6.
213 Idem, p. 120.
214 Idem, p. 84.
215 Idem, p. 180.
216 Idem, p. 127.
217 Quotes taken from the second 1909 edition of Roland Holst’s book, published in Dutch in Rotterdam: Algemeene
werkstaking en sociaaldemocratie, p. 120.
218 See J. P. Nettl’s book The Life and Work of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). R. Luxemburg’s
book was to appear first as a punted manuscript’ for internal distribution to the delegates to the SPD Congress. Under
pressure from the unions, all the surviving copies of the first edition were shredded, and another more ‘moderate’ edition
was published, where a number of formulations considered ‘provocative’ by the unions were excised.
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