The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

strike”. Moreover, Kautsky declared, the content of social democracy’s principles is not that of an ‘abstract’
socialism: “Social democracy continues to mean republican by its nature”. 231
Pannekoek chose a quite different terrain. Supported by the Bremen Left and the Dutch Tribunists, between 1910
and 1912 he launched into a fundamental debate against Kautsky. Since 1909, the Tribunists’ relations with
Kautsky had deteriorated considerably, partly because of the Tribunist split from the SDAP, but above all
following the publication of Pannekoek’s book Tactical Disagreements in the Workers’ Movement. Quite apart
from its general theoretical orientation against revisionism, this book was one of the first milestones in the
Marxist Left’s break with parliamentarism and official unionism.
d) The new tactic of mass action: Pannekoek vs. Kautsky – the question of the state
While emphasising that parliamentarism had played a positive role in the proletariat’s history (“parliamentarism
has [...] metamorphosed the proletariat, created by capitalism’s enormous development, into a conscious and
organised class, ready for struggle”) 232 , Pannekoek emphasised that it could never serve as an instrument of
proletarian rule; it is more the “normal form of bourgeois political domination”. And he warned against the
electoralism (‘Nur-Parlementarismus’ or ‘Nothing-but- parliamentarism’) developing in the social democracy.
In doing so, the position of Pannekoek and the Tribunists looked back to Marx and Engels’ denunciation of
‘parliamentary cretinism’. On this point, Rosa Luxemburg and the German Left had an identical position.
On the union question, the position defended by the Dutch was much more radical than Rosa Luxemburg’s.
While agreeing with her that the unions should be subordinated to the party and its revolutionary programme,
and that the political and union struggles should be merged “into a unified struggle against the ruling class”,
Pannekoek declared that it was impossible to conduct a revolutionary struggle within the unions. Structurally,
the unions stood, not on the terrain of the class struggle, but on that of the bourgeois state, and so could not be
organs of an German Communist Left of revolutionary struggle: “the unions do not situate themselves at all as
capitalism’s adversaries, but are on the contrary on the same terrain as it [...] The unions are not the direct organ
of the revolutionary class struggle; their aim is not the overthrow of capitalism. Quite the reverse, they are a
necessary element for the stability of a normal capitalist society.” This – very contradictory – analysis heralded
the rejection of the union structure as an instrument of the struggle, and even of any ‘revolutionary’ union
structure. Kautsky presented this position as syndicalist 233 , but Pannekoek’s left contained the seeds of the antitrade
union principle adopted by the German Communist Left in the 1920s.
Pannekoek’s critique of Kautsky, in its fully mature form in the 1912 texts ‘Mass Action and Revolution’ and
‘Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics’ as a political and theoretical vision was much deeper than that of
Luxemburg, who in this debate remained essentially on the terrain chosen by Kautsky. 234
First of all, Pannekoek demonstrated the convergence between Kautsky’s old radicalism and revisionism; the
‘passive radicalism’ of the kautskyist centre had a definite end point – the derailment of the revolutionary
struggle onto the parliamentary and trades union terrain: “This passive radicalism converges with revisionism in
the sense that it leads to the exhaustion of our conscious activity in the parliamentary and trade union struggle”.
From the theoretical viewpoint, kautskyism was a non-will to action, and a fatalism that converged with the
apocalyptic and catastrophist view of the revolution common to the anarchists in the form of the ‘miracle’ of a
231 K. Kautsky, ‚Zwischen Baden und Luxemburg’, Die Neue Zeit, 1910 [pp. 652-667], in: op. cit., p. 236.
232 Pannekoek, Divergences tactiques au sein du mouvement ouvrier, quoted in Bricianer, op. cit., pp. 75 and 80.
233 K. Kautsky, ‚Der jüngste Radikalismus’, in: Die Neue Zeit, 1912, pp. 436-446. To which Pannekoek answered defiantly,
“Well! Let’s go for revolutionary syndicalism!” to close the debate with Kautsky (in: ‘Zum Schluss’, Die Neue Zeit, 1912,
pp. 611-612).
234 In French in: Pannekoek–Kautsky–Luxemburg, op. cit., pp. 297-335 & 387-415. In German, in: A. Grünenberg, op. cit.
79