The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The alternative: war or world revolution
In a prophetic article, published on 30 th December 1911, 268 Pannekoek set forward literally the historic
perspective which was to be developed during the war, and serve as the slogan for the foundation of the
Communist International in 1919. In this article, titled ‘World Revolution’ – a term never used in the Second
international – the Dutch theoretician declared, before Luxemburg, that capitalism had entered its decline and
that henceforth the only way out was either world war or world revolution. The system was in crisis and could
no longer find new outlets. The new perspective was world war and world revolution: “War and revolution
accompany [capitalism’s] growth, world war and world revolution mean its decline [...] The non-capitalist world
becomes ever smaller, and therefore the number of competitors becomes ever greater [...] With the end of
expansion, the source of all new prosperity, crisis and unemployment, poverty and desperation push the masses
to rebellion [...] To the demand for world war, [the proletariat] answers with world revolution”.
Nonetheless, this article seemed to make the outbreak of world war a precondition for world revolution. From
the conjuncture of crisis, colonial wars and ‘national’ liberation, and European wars leading to world war, would
come “the day of the social revolution”. 269 Apart from the ambiguities specific to the Dutch Left on the ‘antiimperialist
struggle’ and the national question (see below), this article in fact hesitated between a ‘world war or
world revolution’ as an alternative, or a causal perspective of ‘war and revolution’, which latter seemed –
deceptively 270 – to be the case in World War I.
Later on, the Dutch Left’s position on this question became much more nuanced and less fatalist. In his 1912
polemic against Kautsky, Pannekoek devoted a long passage to the question of the struggle against war. World
War was not a foregone conclusion. While Pannekoek – optimistically – still declared that in a conscious
socialist proletariat the outbreak of war would inflame, not nationalist feeling, but “revolutionary determination”,
he nonetheless emphasised that the revolutionary position was anything but fatalist. The problem for the working
class was not ‘what will happen after the war?’, but on the contrary ‘how can we prevent the war from
happening?’. Any ‘maximalist’ bet on the revolutionary outcome of the world war could only express doubt or
despair of the proletariat’s revolutionary capacities: “Only if we despair of the proletariat’s capacity for
autonomous action can we see in a war the indispensable precondition for revolution”.
In reality, the struggle against the war was inseparable from the struggle for revolution, and vice versa: “The
struggle where war is at stake [...] all this becomes an episode in the process of the revolution, an essential part
of the proletariat’s struggle for the conquest of power”. 271
On the ideological level, the condition for the outbreak of war was less the European proletariat’s adherence to
the bourgeoisie and its imperialist slogans, than an absence of active resistance: “The present state power needs,
not the devotion, but the passive lack of resistance of the majority of the population; the only thing that could
counter its plans would be the active resistance of the masses.” 272 Once again, in this active resistance the ‘spirit
of the masses’ counted for more than ‘party decrees’. And contrary to Kautsky’s ideas, it would be possible to
prevent the outbreak of war by the mobilisation of the workers in mass strikes.
It is true that Pannekoek, like most revolutionaries of the day, had a tendency to underestimate the penetration of
nationalist ideology into the workers’ movement. Confident in 40 years of ‘socialist education’, they could
scarcely imagine the collapse of the International and its parties, including the oldest and most powerful of them,
the German party. Confident in the revolutionary perspective in the era of imperialism and capitalist decline,
they under-estimated the slow penetration of nationalist ideology into the sections of the International. They
were confident in the resolutions of the International’s Stuttgart and Basle Congresses, and barely made any
268 Pannekoek, ‘Weltrevolution’, Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 30 th December 1911.
269 Pannekoek, idem.
270 It was in fact the revolution of 1917 which put an end to the war due to its international impact within the proletariat,
especially in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.
271 Pannekoek, ‘Mass action and revolution’, op. cit., p. 335.
272 Pannekoek, ‚Für den Frieden’, in: Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 23 rd December 1912.
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