The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Gorter’s analyses were remarkable. The pamphlet was written in October 1914, just as Lenin was writing his
major texts against the war, and went in entirely the same direction. Not only did they define the war as
imperialist, they also proclaimed, with the collapse of the 2 nd International, the need for a new International,
through an uncompromising struggle against the kautskyist centre. The content diverged from the bolshevik
analysis only by its slogans. Lenin’s leitmotiv – the need to ‘transform the imperialist war into a civil war’ – is
nowhere mentioned. Gorter insisted above all on the necessary recovery of the class struggle in the form of
“mass action”. Alongside slogans – defended by both Lenin and Luxemburg – such as the refusal “to make any
compromises or alliances with any bourgeois party whatever”, or the rejection “even in the case of war, of any
credits for militarism and imperialism”, we can find the germ of future positions of the Dutch-German
Communist Left. Like Rosa Luxemburg, Gorter rejected national liberation struggles (except for Indonesia!),
and he also advocated fighting the bourgeoisie “other than with the usual means of union and parliamentary
struggle”.
Gorter’s pamphlet demonstrated his complete political and theoretical agreement with Pannekoek’s analyses. In
October 1914, the latter had proclaimed the death of the 2 nd International, riddled with opportunism and
reformism: “The 2 nd International is dead; it has been ingloriously consumed in the world-wide fire. But this
death is no accident. It only means that the International was dead inside”. 298
The burning question for the Dutch Marxists was thus, as it was for Lenin and Luxemburg, how to evaluate the
period, and to call into question the tactics used by the 2 nd International, in order to start again on a more solid
basis.
The nature of the war
Like all Marxists of the time, Gorter analysed the world conflict in the framework of the evolution of capitalism.
This evolution meant capital’s establishment world-wide, in its constant search for new markets. Nonetheless,
the economic element in Gorter’s pamphlet was very sketchy; it was more a description of the stages of capitalist
expansion into the colonies and semi-colonies than a real theoretical explanation of the imperialist phenomenon.
In some ways, Gorter was closer to Lenin than to Luxemburg. 299 Gorter’s analyses were close to those of
Luxemburg above all on the political level, declaring vigorously that every state is imperialist and that there can
be no such thing as national liberation, contrary to Lenin during World War I 300 : “All states have an imperialist
policy and want to extend their territory”. 301 The world proletarian struggle cannot thus be directed against each
bourgeoisie taken nationally.
Unlike Liebknecht, who declared that ‘the main enemy is at home’, Gorter insisted that there is no ‘main’
enemy, an enemy number one and number two; on the contrary, what mattered was the struggle against all
imperialisms, since the workers’ struggle was no longer situated on a national, but on a world terrain: “The
national imperialism threatens the proletariat as much as the imperialism of other nations. Consequently, for the
298 Pannekoek, ‘De ineenstorting van de Internationale’, in: De Nieuwe Tijd, Oct. 1914, pp. 677-688.
299 Like Lenin, Gorter defined imperialism phenomenologically. It was not, as Rosa Luxemburg insisted, a result of the
saturation of the world market, but of the control of the world economy by the trusts, the banks and the financial and
industrial monopolies. On the level of economic theory, the Dutch Left always set itself apart from Luxemburg’s analyses.
In 1913, Pannekoek was one of the harshest critics of Luxemburg’s book The Accumulation of Capital, which was
published that same year.
300 In his critique of the Junius pamphlet, Lenin’s response (written in July 1916) to the question of whether or not all
‘national liberation struggles’ were necessarily absorbed into the conflicts between the great imperialist powers, was
evasive: “Every war is a continuation of politics by other means. The national liberation politics of the colonies will
inevitably be continued by national wars of the colonies against imperialism. Such wars may lead to an imperialist war
between the present ‘Great’ imperialist Powers or they may not; that depends on many circumstances.” [Lenin, Collected
Works, op. cit., pp. 305-319.]
301 Translated from the Italian edition: L’imperialismo, la guerra mondiale e la socialdemocrazia (Milano: Società editrice
Avanti!, 1920), p. 10.
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