The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

‘Great Night’: “[passive radicalism] foresees revolutionary explosions as cataclysms appearing out of nowhere,
as if from another planet, independently of our will and action, to give capitalism the coup de grace”. 235
The main points of the revolutionary critique of kautskyism, which the Dutch Left consigned definitively to the
revisionist camp, were as follows:
– in the era of imperialism and great capitalist coalitions, capitalism can no longer accord the proletariat lasting
reforms, condemning the latter to defensive actions against the deterioration of its living conditions. The mass
strike is the typical form of struggle in the imperialist era, and ceases to be a struggle for reforms: “...the class
struggle becomes more bitter, and tends to generalise; the combat’s motive force is no longer the hope of
improving the class’ situation, but increasingly the sad necessity to confront the deterioration in its living
conditions [...] Mass action is a natural consequence of modern capitalism’s development into imperialism; it is
the form of combat against capital which is more and more forced on the working class.”
– mass action is seen sometimes as “correcting parliamentary action”, sometimes as an “extra-parliamentary
political activity of the organised working class”. 236 Above all, it means spontaneous action, regrouping the
active and conscious majority of workers, which implied both their own organisation and discipline. Without
giving this organisation a name – the workers’ councils? – Pannekoek emphasised one major fact: the
proletariat’s ability to organise itself, in massive struggle outside parliament: “[The mass] was passive, it
becomes an active mass, an organism with its own life, cemented and structured by itself, with its own
consciousness and its own organs”.
– in mass action, the role of the party is decisive; it is an active factor, catalysing the revolutionary action that it
both leads and organises, “because it bears an important part of the masses’ capacity for action”. But this leading
role is spiritual rather than material; the party’s role is not to command the proletariat like an army general staff:
“[the party] is not the bearer of the entire will of the proletariat as a whole, and it cannot therefore give it an
order to march as if commanding soldiers”. 237
– violent confrontation with the state, disposing of every means of repression, cannot stop the proletariat; the
ruling class can destroy the form of proletarian organisation, but not its ‘spirit’, which persists in the working
masses educated with a spirit of organisation, cohesion and discipline. Thus the state “can only destroy the
proletarian organisation’s outside envelope, not its being”. This is fully verified in revolutionary action, where
the organisation is tempered, and in the fire of experience becomes “as solid as steel”.
– finally, returning to the question of the party, Pannekoek declared that the political party cannot be a mass
organisation, but must be a trained nucleus which cannot substitute itself for the will of the masses: “But ‘we’
are not the masses; we are only a little group, a nucleus. The course of events is determined by what the masses
do, not by what we want”. 238 This conception was to be developed at length by the German-Dutch Left during
the 20s.
But Pannekoek’s essential contribution in the debate on the mass strike lay less in his analysis of the role of the
party, which he largely shared with Rosa Luxemburg, as in that of the finality of the revolution. If, as Pannekoek
noted in 1912, each strike “now appears as an explosion, a small-scale revolution” 239 , this is because it is part of
a long term process of confrontation with and finally destruction of the capitalist state: “The [proletariat’s]
combat only ends with the complete destruction of state organisation”.
This new conception of the relationship between the proletariat and the state was world’s apart from that of both
the official Social democracy and Kautsky. For the latter, there was no change in the tactics of the Social
235 A. Pannekoek, ‘Mass Action and Revolution’, in: op. cit., pp. 322-323 & 298.
236 A.Pannekoek, ‘Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics’, in: op. cit., 407; ‘Mass Action and Revolution’, in: op. cit.,
p. 313.
237 A.Pannekoek, ‘Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics’, in: op. cit., p. 414.
238 A.Pannekoek, ‚Partei und Masse’, in: Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 4 th July 1914.
239 A.Pannekoek, ‘Mass Action and Revolution’, in: op. cit.; see also: Pannekoek, Der Kampf der Arbeiter (Leipzig:
Leipziger Volkszeitung, 1909), p. 30: “Behind each temporary demand, the capitalists see lurking the hydra of revolution”.
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