The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

forces... The most backward country... has shown the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist
countries the path and the methods of the struggle to come.” 219
– the mass strike is neither an accidental phenomenon – the term used by Luxemburg in 1902 – nor a single
action, like the general strikes, “but describes a whole period of class struggle extending over several years,
sometimes decades”;
– the historical period of mass strikes marks the upsurge of a revolutionary epoch: “The mass strike is simply the
form taken by the revolutionary struggle... It is the living pulse of the revolution, and at the same time its most
powerful motor”. And Luxemburg declared unambiguously that the revolutionary process is present right from
the outset of any mass strike: “in reality, it is not the mass strike that produces the revolution, but the revolution
that produces the mass strike”;
– the mass strike, as a living phenomenon, cannot be dissected, any more than it can be broken down into rigid
categories, to draw up a table of schematic classifications. It embraces every form of class struggle, both
economic and political, that make up a global and unitary struggle of the proletariat, whose categories and
divisions disappear to make way for the whole, the class: economic strikes and political strikes, mass strikes and
partial strikes, demonstrations or combat strikes, general strikes covering particular branches of industry of
whole towns, peaceful economic struggles or street fighting and barricades, all these forms of struggle live
alongside or within each other, flowing the one into the other: it’s “an ocean of eternally new and fluctuating
phenomena”. “There are not two distinct forms of working class struggle, one political and the other economic,
there is only one class struggle which aims both to limit the effects of exploitation and to put an end to this
exploitation and to bourgeois society at the same time”;
– class consciousness is formed, forged and developed, not just in the crucible of already existing organisations
(parties and unions), through a long ‘education’, but also and above all in the revolution, where it becomes
“concrete and active”: the revolution accelerates the proletariat’s coming to consciousness, and quickly gives it
the best ‘education’, that of the struggle, which requires “a great idealism”;
– it is a mistake to think that (party and union) organisation can bureaucratically and mechanically engender the
class struggle. On the contrary, the struggle gives birth to the general organisation of the proletariat: “The
dialectical, living evolution... gives birth to organisation as a product of the struggle”. While the organisation of
the proletariat as a whole was born with the struggle, there was no question of a ‘spontaneist’ rejection of
political organisation. This remained the “most enlightened and conscious vanguard of the proletariat”. But its
role and function changed; they were no longer to ‘educate’ the proletariat, or to organise or direct the struggle
technically, but to orientate it politically: “the task of the Social democracy consists, not in the preparation or
technical leadership of the strike, but in the political leadership of the movement as a whole”.
There is no doubt that this pamphlet served as a political and theoretical foundation for the Left Marxist current
in Germany and Holland, and for Left Communism from 1919 onwards. The most obvious missing point, which
was not mentioned explicitly by either Roland Holst, Luxemburg or Pannekoek, was the Petrograd workers’
soviet, which played an enormous part in the first Russian Revolution; the role and function of the workers’
councils were never analysed and recognised. In the framework of the struggle against revisionism and
reformism, Luxemburg only cited the example of the creation of Russian unions in 1905, to contrast these with
the reformist German unions. Trotsky was alone –and without this having any echo in the German-Dutch Left
prior to 1914 – in showing the fundamental role of the workers’ councils as the “organisation of the proletariat
itself” whose aim was the struggle “for the conquest of revolutionary power”. 220 Moreover, the question of the
capitalist state and its destruction by the revolution was scarcely mentioned by Roland Holst, and not dealt with
at all by Luxemburg. When the discussion started up again from 1909 onwards, this time between Kautsky and
the Marxist Left, it was Pannekoek who posed the question clearly for the first time.
219 Quotations taken from Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet: Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften (Mass strike, party and
trade unions), in: Politische Schriften, (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), pp. 135-228.
220 See: Trotsky, 1905 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), Chapter ‘Conclusions’, pp. 222-241.
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