The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

INTRODUCTION
Despite the theoretical and political fame of Gorter and Pannekoek in the international workers’ movement, the
Communist Left of the Netherlands is the least known of the left currents which arose firstly within the Second
International, then in the Communist International, and finally outside it.
This lack of recognition is due in part to the geographical framework in which it developed – “little Holland” –
and to the fact that the Dutch language never has been a language of international communication.
However, the Dutch current had its “hour of glory” in the years before the First World War. The “Tribunist”
SPD – from the name of its periodical De Tribune – was one of those rare currents which, like the Russian
Bolsheviks and the Bulgarian “Tesnyaki”, went so far as to split to form a party rid of reformist and revisionist
elements. A minuscule party isolated from the mass of the Dutch workers, the SPD constituted a particularly
influential tendency of the revolutionary left in the Second International, above all on the theoretical level.
Gorter, who was less a theoretician than a great populariser, was one of the most translated Marxist authors.
More theoretically profound, Pannekoek could easily stand up to Kautsky in the discussion on the “mass strike”,
which sprang from the Russian experience of 1905. He compares with Rosa Luxemburg, in his theoretical
rigour, and influenced Lenin in the writing of his major work, State and Revolution. Pannekoek had close ties
with the Bremen Left (Bremer Linke) and exercised as profound an influence on the “radicalism” of the German
left as did Rosa Luxemburg.
But it was above all from 1917 onwards, in the Third International, that the Dutch current appeared as an
international left communist current. At the head of the Amsterdam Bureau of the Third International, oriented to
the left on questions of tactics, it linked itself completely to the left of the KPD, from which was to emerge the
KAPD, the most radical party of the German working masses, to such a degree that, for nearly 15 years, the
history of the German Left (KAPD and Unionen) blended with that of the Dutch Communist Left of Gorter and
Pannekoek, despite successive splits. There is not on the one hand a German Left and on the other a Dutch
Communist Left, but truly a German-Dutch Communist Left, with Gorter as its leading political figure.
In the history of the Communist International (Komintern in Russian and German), the German-Dutch
Communist Left, under the theoretical leadership of Gorter and Pannekoek, was the first current of the left to
lead the international opposition to the union and parliamentary theses adopted by the leadership of the
International. More than the Italian “bordigist” current, whose opposition to the Komintern in 1919-20 was
restricted to antiparliamentarism, the German-Dutch current was the only one which criticised in depth, in a
resolute way, the orientation of the Russian Bolsheviks. It was this which finally led to the expulsion of the
Gorter and Pannekoek tendency from the Komintern in 1921, along with the KAPD and other groups defending
the same orientation – in Britain and Bulgaria.
The German-Dutch Communist Left, born in the wake of the declining German revolution, suffered a rapid
decay. The attempt of Gorter and a part of the KAPD artificially to found another International, the Communist
Workers’ International (KAI), failed miserably. The German-Dutch communist current, and first and foremost
its largest organisation, the KAPD, decomposed, generally in confusion. Pannekoek retired temporarily from
political activity and Herman Gorter, who had been the most politically dynamic element of this current, found
himself isolated until his death in 1927.
Due to its hasty exit from the Komintern and the abortion of the KAI, which left a heavy weight of
demoralisation, the German-Dutch current found itself isolated at the international level, and condemned to a
descent into endless factional struggles and a nation-wide retreat. When, between 1925 and 1927, other
oppositions emerged within the Komintern – the “ultra-left” fractions of the KPD and the “bordigist” fraction of
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