The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

workers before the seizure of power, and so the military organisation of the proletariat. It led to denying the
complex military problems that would follow the seizure of power: the orientation of production towards
armaments, in order to defend the new proletarian power against the attacks of the counter-revolution. Finally,
accepting the Groningen section’s position would have meant that the SDP was sliding into pacifism, a danger
that was all the more real in that it was amalgamated in a cartel of organisations of a pacifist or anti-militarist
orientation. The adoption of Gorter’s resolution, by 432 votes to 26, was thus a clear rejection of pacifist
ideology, even when peddled by an anti-militarist phraseology. The resolution showed that the SDP’s prime task
was the struggle for the revolution, and so for the arming of the workers: “If the workers take power one day,
they will have to keep it guns in hand”. 293
The SDP left thus clearly posed the question of whether the struggle for peace and against militarism should
come before the struggle against capitalism. The Utrecht Congress had answered no. The fact that there were
still hesitations within the SDP could be seen from Pannekoek’s articles of the time, which supported Gorter. In
an article published on 19 th June 1915, in De Tribune (‘De strijd tegen het militarisme’), Pannekoek declared:
“the struggle against militarism can only bring results as part of the general struggle against capitalism”. 294
Similarly, the proletariat could not adopt the slogan of peace, unless it was accompanied by an energetic struggle
against capitalism. In another article, published in De Nieuwe Tijd during 1915 on social democracy and War 295 ,
Pannekoek emphasised again that pacifism was also supported by “wide strata of the bourgeoisie”, and that “it is
not by words, but by acts, and actions, [that] the proletariat can exercise an influence on peace”. Gorter and
Pannekoek were attacking all the political wavering that had appeared in the SDP, and not just the pacifist
conceptions being spread at the time by Roland Holst (see below). Nonetheless, the SDP’s theoretical positions
on the war remained clear. They belonged to the same orientation as the Marxist Left in Germany, and above all
in Russia. But in the end, Gorter’s and Pannekoek’s positions had a greater real echo in the international
revolutionary movement than in the SDP.
Along with Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek and Radek, at the beginning of the war Gorter was the Marxist
theoretician who explained most coherently the death of the International and the nature of war in the imperialist
epoch, and drew out all its practical implications for the revolutionary struggle.
Gorter’s political and theoretical combat against the war
In December 1914, the SDP publishing house brought out Gorter’s main theoretical and political contribution to
the struggle against the war: Imperialism, the World War, and the Social democracy. This pamphlet, quickly
republished several times in Dutch, was immediately translated into German to lead the struggle against the
Social democracy at the international level. 296 It met with a considerable echo, not just in the Russian emigrant
milieu in Switzerland, but also in Germany. In Holland, even anti-marxist anarchists like Domela Nieuwenhuis
welcomed Gorter’s pamphlet and helped to distribute it. 297
Gorter’s pamphlet seems to have been completely unaware of the Bolsheviks’ positions, since they, and in
particular Lenin, are never quoted or mentioned for their radical positions. It is true that the bolshevik positions
only began to come to the attention of the Dutch Marxists in the summer of 1915, during the preparations for the
Zimmerwald Conference. It was only then that the Dutch began to publish Lenin’s articles. On 31 st July 1915,
De Tribune published Lenin’s article ‘War and Revolution’.
293 Cf. De Tribune, 17 th July 1915, p. 3, col. 1.
294 Pannekoek, ‘De strijd tegen het militarisme’, in: De Tribune, 19 th June 1915.
295 Pannekoek, ‘De Sociaal-Democratie en de oorlog’, in: De Nieuwe Tijd, Feb. 1915, pp. 137-151.
296 The pamphlet went through four editions in Dutch during the war. Lenin set himself eagerly to read it with the help of a
Dutch-German dictionary. He enthusiastically sent Gorter his “cordial congratulations” in a letter to Wijnkoop, 12 th March
1915 (quoted by H. de Liagre Böhl, op. cit., p. 133).
297 See: Sam de Wolff, op. cit., p. 143.
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