The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

social relationship between classes, not an economic necessity born of the saturation of the world market. It was
‘necessary’ for as long as the proletariat was not strong enough to destroy the power of the bourgeoisie. 246
The major disagreement between Pannekoek and Luxemburg lay not in imperialism’s social and political
consequences, but in the interpretation of the phenomenon of the capitalist crisis. For Pannekoek, there was no
economic problem of the market for capitalism to solve. The system could of itself find “outlets for all its
products”. There was no problem in absorbing commodities in extra-capitalist markets (colonies, classes other
than capitalists and proletarians): “The purchasers are the capitalists and the workers themselves [...] There is
therefore no problem to solve”. 247 The origin of crises lay thus, not in disturbances in the circulation of capital
and commodities on a world market that had become too restricted, but in the mechanism of production itself”.
Pannekoek was to remain unswervingly faithful to this position all his life. For him, Marx’s schemas in Capital,
which took no account of capitalism’s evolution and the saturation of the market, were enough. Pannekoek saw
economic crises as nothing more than regular upheavals, which did not reveal any tendency towards the collapse
of the system; their interest was solely political and social: their use as a condition for the liquidation of
capitalism, provided that the proletariat kept intact its “means of power”: consciousness, organisation,
unification.
Pannekoek’s positions on imperialism in fact led him more or less clearly to a strategy of anti-imperialism. For
him, capitalism’s imperialist expansion led to political phenomena whose consequence was the heightening of
the whole system’s economic crisis. In 1912, he expressed a view which was close to Lenin’s: “The political
revolution in Asia, the revolt in India, the rebellion of the Muslim world, are opposed to a further expansion of
European capitalism, and constitute a decisive barrier to it.”
He thought that these movements would give “the signal for the European proletariat’s struggle for its own
emancipation”. 248 This posed the problem of internationalism and the national question.
Nation or class? The national question
Like all the Tribunists, Pannekoek in 1909 still thought that socialism should “take position for the right of
peoples to self-determination, against all exploitation or oppression, and against absolutism”. 249 This was a
classic position in the workers’ movement. But if the left Marxists had to take position against all colonial and
national exploitation and oppression, did this mean that they should look for ‘national solutions’ to the latter, and
therefore support the national bourgeoisie in countries demanding independence or autonomy? Pannekoek
himself was to modify profoundly this viewpoint of the Tribunists, in a rigorously anti-national and
internationalist sense, from 1912 onwards.
This anti-national and internationalist conception was laid down with complete clarity by Marx and Engels in
1848, when they emphasised in the Communist Manifesto that “The workers have no country”. The category of
class predominated over the category of nation, which latter with the disappearance of “national demarcations
and antagonisms between peoples” was historically transitory and fated to disappear. However, in a period of the
capitalist mode of production’s ascendancy, when it progressively extended its domination throughout the world
market, and produced new capitalist nations, Marxism’s founders left room for national demands, to the extent
that these created ‘historic nations’ which could further develop capitalism and so hasten its eventual
disappearance. The policy of the founders of scientific socialism was far from being coherent. They rejected the
idea of a Czech nation, and like Engels in 1882 considered that in Europe there were only two nations – Poland
and Ireland – which had “not merely the right, but the duty of being national before being international”. Yet in a
246 Pannekoek, ‚Theoretisches zur Ursache der Krisen’, Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1912-13, pp. 788-792; Bremer
Bürgerzeitung, 29 th January 1913. The critique of Luxemburg was further developed in De Nieuwe Tijd of May 1916, ‘De
ekonomische noodzakelijkheid van het imperialisme’, pp. 268-285.
247 Pannekoek, in: Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 26 th January 1913.
248 Pannekoek, ‚Weltrevolution’, in: Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 30 th December 1911.
249 Pannekoek, on an article by Otto Bauer, in: Die Neue Zeit, 1911-12, pp. 542-544.
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