The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

economic, and whose political domination would tend to disappear: “The state will be a body with economic
functions, which no longer has any need to exercise its own domination”.
The Dutch Left went no further in its analysis of these complex problems. Of one thing it was certain: that
socialism would mean the definitive departure from “the animal epoch of humanity”.
War or world revolution?
From 1910 onwards, the debates on the mass strike were no longer situated solely on the terrain of the
revolutionary perspective opened by the first Russian Revolution. The development of imperialism and
militarism posed the alternative of war or revolution. For the Dutch-German Left, the mass strikes in the West
were already placed directly on the immediate terrain of the struggle against the war and against imperialism.
The stakes of the debate were changing: no longer reform or revolution, but imperialism or socialism,
nationalism or internationalism, war or world revolution.
Crisis and imperialism
Pannekoek’s theory of the mass strike was closely tied to his conception of imperialism. But imperialism for
Pannekoek did not appear at all as the result of capitalism’s decline at the end of its expansion. His conception
was closer to that of Radek, which was taken up later by Lenin and Bukharin; imperialism was nothing other
than the export of capital and the capitalist states’ grip on the sources of raw materials. From this point of view,
Pannekoek’s conception was light-years away from Luxemburg’s, as it was set out in The Accumulation of
Capital (1913), which showed not only that imperialism was not only a tendency within capitalism imposed on
all the developed countries, but led directly to its decline.
For Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism expressed not only capitalism’s growing difficulty in finding new fields for
the accumulation of capital, and new solvent extra-capitalist markets, but above all the historic decline of a
system whose collapse was inevitable. From the mortal crisis of a capitalist system in decline arose the objective
possibility of a proletarian revolution.
Pannekoek was far from denying the role of the economic crisis as a factor in posing objectively the necessity of
proletarian revolution. In 1913, when Luxemburg’s book had just been published, Pannekoek clearly announced
that the crisis was a determining factor in the revolutionary crisis: “The crisis shakes things up, it leaves no room
for feelings of calm and security; the changing conjuncture pushes the mind to reflect and revolutionises
people’s heads. Crises thus contribute to a large extent to revolutionising the workers’ movement, and to keeping
it revolutionary.” 245
Although he agreed with Luxemburg that the capitalist system had entered into a new period of crises,
Pannekoek refused to follow her theoretical explanations on the nature of imperialism. Indeed, he was one of the
most determined adversaries of Luxemburg’s theory of the accumulation of capital. His condemnation of this
theory was in fact partly due to a misunderstanding but also to a difference in interpretation of the laws of
capitalist accumulation. The misunderstanding was contained in the concept of the ‘historic necessity of
imperialism’. According to Pannekoek, Luxemburg considered that capitalism’s collapse, once it had reached its
imperialist stage, was a ‘mechanical necessity’. For him, imperialism could not be anything other than “the
particular form of expansion in this epoch”, resulting in militarism and the exacerbation of social antagonisms.
Imperialism was not necessary economically, but socially. It was fundamentally a question of power’, of the
245 Pannekoek, ‚Die Krisen und der Sozialismus’, Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 26 th July 1913.
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