The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

democracy, notwithstanding the Russian Revolution. The goal was to take power, as it existed in the state, by
means of a parliamentary majority, not to destroy the power of the state and its apparatus: “...the aim of our
political combat remains the same as it was before: to seize state power by conquering a majority in Parliament,
and to ensure the Parliament’s pre-eminence over the government. But the destruction of the state, never... Never
can this process lead to the destruction of the state power, only to a shift in the relations of power within the
state.” For Kautsky, the ‘conquest’ of the state was thus a gradual, peaceful process, by parliamentary means and
within the state apparatus.
Seven years before Lenin came back to the question in his 1917 State and Revolution – which made extensive
use of Pannekoek’s arguments 240 – Pannekoek had posed the problem with startling clarity in his pamphlet The
means of proletarian power: 241 “The proletarian struggle is not only a struggle against the capitalist class for state
power, but a struggle against state power”. 242 Although, as Lenin said, Pannekoek’s presentation lacked “clarity
and precision”, it contained the germ of the idea already developed by Marx and Engels, and constantly taken up
again by the Marxist Left after 1917, that the proletariat could not be satisfied with conquering the old state
power as such; it had to demolish the whole machinery (police, army, legal system, administration), to replace it
with a new state apparatus.
What would be the type of this new state power? What would be the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
built on the ruins of the power of the bourgeois state? Lacking any large-scale historical experience,
Pannekoek’s and the Dutch Left’s answers to these questions remained vague. And yet their response was not –
as Kautsky claimed 243 – an anarchist one: destruction of all state power without the conquest of political power.
In a pamphlet published in 1906 (Upheavals in the future state), Pannekoek declared that the necessary conquest
of political power by the proletariat was “a long term process, which can last for decades, with advances and
setbacks”. As far as the period of transition between capitalism and communism was concerned, he insisted that
the proletarian dictatorship should not be confused with nationalisation, nor with any kind of ‘state
capitalism’. 244
For Pannekoek, the period of transition was in fact determined by three conditions:
– the “political domination of the working class” over society and the economy;
– unconditional “workers’ democracy”;
– “the improvement of the day-to-day situation of the popular working masses”, through a “powerful
increase in labour productivity” and “the elevation of the cultural level”. Socialism was not so much the
“violent suppression of private property” and an overthrow of juridical property relationships, as first and
foremost “the suppression of poverty and misery”.
The state of the transitional period, as envisaged before 1914 by the Dutch ‘radicals’, could perfectly well
coexist with a Parliament and local councils. It would be at one and the same time a government, and
administration and a Parliament, but above all “all sorts of committees for different purposes”. Although
Pannekoek did not use the term, this state would be reduced to a ‘semi-state’, whose tasks would be essentially
240 See Chapter 6.3 of State and Revolution. At the time, the Russian Marxists had stayed aloof from the polemic between
Kautsky on the one hand, and Pannekoek–Luxemburg on the other. Trotsky wrote ironically about Luxemburg’s “noble
impatience”. By contrast, Lenin in 1912 had already taken Pannekoek’s side against Kautsky (see: Corrado Malandrino,
Scienza e socialismo: Anton Pannekoek 1873-1960 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1987), pp. 140-141.
241 A. Pannekoek, Die Machtmittel des Proletariats, conference held before socialist workers in Stuttgart,
‘Sozialdemokratischer Verein’, Oct. 1910 (published in Schwäbische Tagwacht, 4 th Nov. 1910).
242 A. Pannekoek, ibid., p. 3.
243 K. Kautsky, ‘New Tactics’, op. cit., p. 371: “To date, the difference between social-democrats and anarchists, was that the
former wanted to seize state power while the latter wanted to abolish it. Pannekoek wants to do both.”
244 Pannekoek, Ethik und Sozialismus. Umwälzungen im Zukunftsstaat, Leipzig, 1906. Reprinted in: Pannekoek,
Neubestimmung des Marxismus, with an introduction by Cajo Brendel (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1974). The quotes
which follow are taken from this pamphlet.
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