“Left-wing” communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat: Lenin’s critique

Jason Adams

Platypus Review 169 | September 2024

On April 27, 2024, Platypus Affiliated Society member Jason Adams hosted an introductory workshop on Lenin’s famous 1920 pamphlet “Left-wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder and its legacy today. An edited transcript follows.^[1]

WHEN WE INITIALLY SET OUT to define “Left-wing” communism, what first comes to mind is the specific political position that rejects working within trade unions and within the parliament as a principle for revolutionary action. However, it is more accurate to define it as a certain orientation towards the revolutionary process that can include multiple, even antagonistic, political positions and methods. When Lenin, in his infamous pamphlet “Left-wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920) (LWC), defines it as an infantile disorder, he also seems to be suggesting that it is a kind of orientation rather than a specific method or set of positions; or rather, he thinks of it as a disorientation, i.e, an infantile orientation, a disordered orientation, an orientation towards the revolution that is confused by its overwhelming development, analogous to the way a child would react. By attributing this disorder to the “Left-wing” communists, it is clear that Lenin is trying to formulate a correct orientation for the socialist movement, from which he can then assess Right- and Left-wing deviations, the Right being a senile disorder while the Left is infantile.

Lenin seeks to define what a successful revolutionary orientation would be by formulating what in the Bolshevik Revolution applies to the whole of the socialist movement, constituting a new level of the revolutionary process in toto such that it defines the new tasks ahead for all revolutionaries, especially those in the advanced industrial countries. He must distinguish what in the Bolshevik Revolution is specific to Russian conditions and what is the new path set before all socialists at the international level. By identifying the true distinction here, Lenin outlines the correct orientation to the revolutionary process like a compass pointing in the general direction when confronted by multiple paths. In fact, the Third, or Communist, International, was designed with this specific purpose in mind. Seen through this interpretive lens, when we today talk of the death of the Left, this can only mean[1]  our inability to attain a true revolutionary orientation, such that all we have are Right and Left deviations, the opportunism of the DSA and the infantilism (equally opportunist in their own way) of the myriad groups that make up the sectarian Left. When a proper orientation is lacking, disorientation rules the day!

Lenin’s appellative also highlights another crucial aspect: it is a disorder specific to a period of infancy. When dealing with the German radical Leftists that make up the majority of the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD)^[2] (and after, the KAPD),^[3] both Lenin and Luxemburg refer to them as childish and immature, impatient and brash. But the point to keep in mind is that, for them, all this is to be expected given the new circumstances. The period of infancy is not just specific to the KPD, to the young age of its members, or even to newness of the Third International; it is the infancy of the new stage in the revolutionary process itself, which now sets new tasks before the revolutionaries. The very existence of the Third International and the KPD; the fact that these organizations call themselves Communist rather than Socialist; the fact that the Third International makes it a condition of admission that each prospective party label itself Communist (so as to distinguish itself from the Social Democracy of the Second International) — all this points to the fact that a new level has been reached within the revolutionary process. It is precisely this new stage, with its new tasks, that is in its infancy, and therefore produces an infantile disorder. This is why Lenin can initially say of this disorder that it “involves no danger, and after it the organism even becomes more robust.”^[4]

In “Organisation of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle” (1921), the “Left-wing” communist Herman Gorter highlighted this transition to a new stage when he distinguished, within the socialist movement, between a “period of evolution” (1848–1917) from his then current “period of revolution.”^[5] The two periods are distinguished by the difference in tactics and strategy that each calls for: the period of evolution called for the building up of trade unions and political parties (parliamentarianism); the period of revolution called for the creation of soviets and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is precisely how Lenin saw it too. The new task in this period of revolution is stated bluntly by him in LWC: defeat all the remnants of the opportunism of the Second International and begin the revolution for the dictatorship of the proletariat. “All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on the next step . . . the search after forms of the transition or the approach to the proletarian revolution.”^[6]Thus there is universal agreement among the communists that a new era has begun for the labor movement, with a new task to accomplish; it is not over this that disagreements arise between Lenin and the “Left-wing” communists. Exactly how to go about doing this, though, is where the problem lies.

This shared background of assumptions that initially defines the Left (which included the Bolsheviks) is what allows Anton Pannekoek, in his “Afterword to World Revolution and Communist Tactics,”^[7] to say that the only thing new about the critique of the radical Left in Lenin’s pamphlet is not the arguments themselves, all of which he had heard before, but the fact that they were coming from Lenin. In emphasizing these shared assumptions — in this case, the necessity of the vanguard party to fight opportunism within the socialist movement — and then locating the minimal difference in their conceptions, we can locate the point of diffraction between Lenin and the German-Dutch Radical Left — that “minor error” which will, as Lenin writes, “always assume monstrous proportions if it is persisted in, if profound justifications are sought for it, and if it is carried to its logical conclusions.”^[8] In this way, we will arrive at what I want to highlight about the German radical Left: their anti-political conception of the party and the complementary actionism born out of this conception,^[9] which is the basis for their infantilism. Thus the minimal difference, when placed under a theoretical microscope, will give us the kernel to what will develop into a maximal difference — the complete rejection of the party form that develops later within the Left-wing communist “tradition,” i.e., its regression. The seeds of the latter are there from the beginning, as an unwitting rejection of the political purpose of the party. How they get there, the logical steps taken to arrive at this point, is what I hope to tackle here.

It’s important to stress that prior to Lenin’s pamphlet, the Left in its entirety appeared to be on the same page in their condemnation of the opportunism of the Second International, as well as those “Centrists” who didn’t make a clean break. Far from being anti-Leninists, Gorter and Pannekoek believed themselves to be in complete alignment with him and the Bolsheviks, and even looked up to Lenin as a profound Marxist thinker and revolutionary. From the fight against revisionism and opportunism within the party, to the necessity to condemn the social-chauvinism of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)^[10] at the outbreak of World War I, the German-Dutch radicals looked to Lenin as a leading comrade and ally in their struggle. A good example can be seen at the Zimmerwald Congress (1915)[2]  of socialist internationalists that convened during WWI. Lenin was joined by the radical Leftists in their condemnation of Luxemburg’s failure to completely break with Karl Kautsky and the group of Centrists around him that criticized the SPD’s vote for war credits as a “loyal opposition,” viewing the SPD’s betrayal as merely a political mistake and not as a complete abdication of principle.

What does the condemnation of the tactics of the Second International amount to in practical terms? Essentially, the embrace of illegal activity as a necessary means in the struggle. This is what defines the Left at this point, in distinction from the opportunism of both the SPD, who at the time were at the head of the German government, and the Centrists, the Kautskyites: the recognition of the necessity to engage in illegal activity — i.e., revolutionary activity outside of the officially recognized institutions of bourgeois society, outside of the trade unions and parliament. Given this shared recognition, the question then arises: how should the Left now relate to these bourgeois institutions, those sites of struggle around which the “period of evolution” focused so much attention on and from which the opportunism of the Second International grew? What to do with legal action? Here is where a further distinction is made within the Left itself, from which Lenin will assert an orientationappropriate to the new period of revolution based on the experience of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution (1917). As we know, the German radical Left will preach complete abstention from these institutions, while Lenin will brand their Radical Leftism “infantile” for this reason.[3] 

As Lenin sees it, the ultra-Leftist disorientation is born from the fact that the German-Dutch Left, for the first time, must engage in illegal activity when they have only ever known legal actions. Hence in their disorientation, they swing too far to the “Left”, regressing ever closer to anarchism (that first infantile disorder diagnosed by Marx and Engels). Here is what Lenin said in LWC:

In Germany, as in other European countries, people had become too accustomed to legality, to the free and proper election of “leaders” at regular party congresses, to the convenient method of testing the class composition of parties through parliamentary elections, mass meetings, the press, the sentiments of the trade unions and other associations, etc. When, instead of this customary procedure, it became necessary, because of the stormy development of the revolution and the development of the civil war, to go over rapidly from legality to illegality, to combine the two, and to adopt the “inconvenient” and “undemocratic” methods of selecting, or forming, or preserving “groups of leaders”—people lost their bearings and began to think up some unmitigated nonsense. Certain members of the Communist Party of Holland, who were unlucky enough to be born in a small country with traditions and conditions of highly privileged and highly stable legality, and who had never seen a transition from legality to illegality, probably fell into confusion, lost their heads, and helped to create these absurd inventions.^[11]

Gorter’s argument, however, is that, in this new revolutionary period, all the old forms and tactics of the Second International, which make up the period of evolution, are now “‘historically and politically obsolete,’”^[12] counter-revolutionary, and reactionary, and to continue to work within them would therefore itself be opportunist and counter-revolutionary.^[13] Their opportunism can only mean deception for the workers, and to remain within them would contribute to this deception. A clear-cut, sharp break is therefore necessary, and the creation of new forms of organization and new tactics specific to this new period of revolution is what is needed. Concretely, this meant a complete refusal to work within the trade unions and parliament, and it is precisely here that we can begin to see how Gorter’s conception of the party — ultimately a non-dialectical conception — leads the radical Left to liquidate the party form into the class. For there is a peculiar kind of formalism operating here in the radical Left’s commitment to total abstention from bourgeois institutions; a sort of determinist formalism in that, for them, the form fully determines the content. Gorter’s abhorrence to parliamentarianism is in relation to its very form, i.e., the fact that in its structure it substitutes the authority of the leaders for the action of the masses via representation; and the same holds true for the trade unions.^[14] In doing so, these institutions must necessarily reproduce bourgeois ideology, along with its accompanying passivity, within the working class — hence why all work within parliament and the trade unions must be rejected by communists. During the period of evolution, when it was a matter of building up working-class power and organizations, it was necessary to focus all work within these institutions as a counter-hegemonic force to bourgeois hegemony and to attain proletarian autonomy. Leaders were indispensable for this purpose.^[15] Marx and Engels’s struggle within the First International against the anarchists consisted precisely in shifting the focus of revolutionary work away from conspiracy and the urban streets (with its barricades), and to these institutions where enduring organizations specific to the working class could be built; hence, they helped inaugurate the period of evolution.

But now is the period of revolution,[4]  a product of the age of imperialism, where the masses have to act for themselves and cannot rely on leadership.[5]  For Gorter, the necessity to abstain from parliament and the trade unions goes hand and hand with the necessity to find new forms of workers’ organization that are mass-based, with the role of the leadership either nonexistent or in a process of evaporation. These organizations are to be precursors to the soviet system, the ultimate form of working-class organization specific to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Gorter’s solution is what he calls industrial organizations: unions not based around trade but rather factories and industries, all of which will then combine in a more general workers’ union. I don’t want to go into the specifics about what exactly these industrial unions would look like in contrast to trade unions. This is irrelevant to my point. The issue is the continuing role the party plays, because it still has a role for Gorter. However, in completely abstaining from parliament and the trade unions, this role is drastically different from how Lenin conceives of it, and it is precisely this difference that will be the most revealing as regards Left-wing communism’s absence of politics and its eventual collapse into actionism. When Lenin scolds the radical Left for “failing to see that the new content is forcing its way through all and sundry forms,” including the old,^[16] he is reasserting the political significance of the party to intervene in these old forms; a political intervention that, for Lenin, is the defining function of the party in relation to bourgeois society. Thus the difference between Lenin’s and Gorter’s conception of this role is where the crux of the issue lies.

Leninmakes an important distinction in LWC in relation to the radical Left’s claim of the historical and political obsolescence of trade unions and the tactics of parliamentarianism. He separates the historical from the political, asserting that while the organizational forms and tactics from the period of evolution can indeed be, and actually are, “‘historically obsolete’ from the standpoint of world history, i.e., the era of bourgeois parliamentarianism is over, and the era ofproletarian dictatorship has begun,” this does not necessarily translate into political obsolescence.^[17] For “world history is counted in decades. Ten or twenty years earlier or later makes no difference when measured with the yardstick of world history; from the standpoint of world history it is a trifle that cannot be considered even approximately. But for that very reason, it is a glaring theoretical error to apply the yardstick of world history to practical politics.”^[18] For Lenin, the fact that the majority of the workers in Germany “are still in favour of parliamentarianism in general” is proof that, politically, the latter is not obsolete.^[19] While it may certainly be politically obsolete for the communists from their revolutionary perspective, they must nevertheless meet the masses where they are, and make the dominant political situation match the world-historical one through a long, patient struggle within the trade unions and parliament. The mistake the German radical Left made here was in taking “their desire, their political-ideological attitude, for objective reality. That is the most dangerous mistake for revolutionaries to make.”^[20]

The only indictment of Lenin made by Gorter and Pannekoek that potentially holds weight is their claim that he wrongly projects his own experience of the Russian Revolution onto the revolutions of Western Europe, and this mistake, they claim, leads Lenin into opportunism: his confusion of the situation in Russia with the situation in Germany amounts to a failure to see an essential difference in tactics and strategy. In this way, Gorter and Pannekoek pit the advanced development of Western European capitalism against the underdevelopment of Russia and the East in general, positing a gap in experience that supposedly blinds Lenin to his own opportunism at an international level. While the intervention within the traditional institutions of bourgeois society was necessary for the Bolsheviks as dictated by the underdeveloped conditions of Russia, this is not the case for the advanced, integrated economy of Western Europe, where the development of modern imperialism (an economic constellation of monopoly and finance capital) renders these bourgeois institutions completely counter-revolutionary, and therefore counter-productive as a site of struggle. Of course, Lenin is going to disagree: “I have neither the time nor the space here to describe the ‘Russian’ ‘Bolshevik’ methods of participation in parliamentary elections and in the parliamentary struggle; I can, however, assure foreign Communists that they were quite unlike the usual West-European parliamentary campaigns. From this the conclusion is often drawn: ‘Well, that was in Russia; in our country parliamentarianism is different.’ This is a false conclusion.”^[21] But why?

This is the heart of the dilemma, the point of diffraction I was referring to earlier. Regardless of the correctness of Lenin’s analysis of the German and West European conjuncture during this period, i.e., whether there is a mistaken projection or not, there is something more fundamental at stake. Behind this important disagreement, there lies something deeper than whether Lenin mistakenly projects his Russian experience onto Western Europe; behind it lies the problem of how to understand revolution in general, and more specifically, how to understand socialist revolution, of what the latter actually consists of, what the role of the party is therein, and what exactly is the dictatorship of the proletariat in relation to the working class. To fully grasp what is at stake here, we must follow Lenin’s argument in LWC.

The key insight of Lenin’s pamphlet that clarifies the rest of the work is Lenin’s fundamental law of revolution: “for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph.”^[22] We should feel the full gravity of this statement — that one of the greatest revolutionaries to every live is telling us the fundamental law of revolution! But exactly what to make of it in terms of concrete praxis for a revolutionary party is the rub.

Lenin is asserting that, for a revolutionary situation to ripen, a crisis must happen at two levels of society, one from below (among the oppressed) and another from above (among the oppressors); that is, “revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).”^[23] The key here is to understand the different nature of the crisis depending on the level undergoing it. For the lower class, the oppressed and exploited, the crisis can only ever be an economic crisis: it is only when their ability to reproduce their everyday existence is suspended that the lower classes “fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it”; while for the ruling class, the exploiters, the crisis can only ever be political in nature, “a governmental crisis,” in which the rulers can no longer rule and “even the most backward masses [are drawn] into politics.”^[24] The economic crisis, while necessary, is not sufficient by itself to create the conditions for revolution; it may produce a revolt of the masses, but revolts on their own do not add up to revolution and are usually quickly suppressed. A political crisis must happen simultaneously with the economic crisis for a successful revolution to become possible.

The role of the revolutionary party in this is all the more important as the situation ripens. It highlights the political function the party has when intervening in society, for it does not set out to create an economic crisis; even if it wanted to (which it doesn’t), it cannot, because it is not within its power to do so. The causal agent in all economic crises is always ultimately capitalism itself, for capitalism is nothing else but this crisis (this is the fundamental insight of Marx, i.e., the boom-bust cycles as inherent to the functioning of capitalism). What the party is instrumental for, and therefore irreplaceable, is precisely in creating the conditions for a political crisis. The main purpose of the party, prior to the outbreak of revolution, is to intervene in society in such a way that it causes the ruling class to fracture while unifying the lower classes, widening the divisions among the rulers and increasingly making it impossible for the government to function. The very existence of a revolutionary party in-itself precipitates a political crisis for the ruling class.

This, however, is precisely what is foreclosed by Gorter. He does not believe it will be possible to create a political crisis, to fracture the ruling class of Germany and, more generally, that of the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe. For both Gorter and Pannekoek, the big difference between Russia, as an underdeveloped country, and the advanced industrial countries of the West, completely hinges around the revolutionary status of the peasants. For them, the peasants have no revolutionary role to play in Western Europe, because the more advanced development of capitalism has won them over to the side of the bourgeoisie. This applies to the petty bourgeoisie in general, to all its different strata: the new imperialist stage of fully developed capitalism maintains its hold on these intermediate strata, who side with the bourgeoisie in the class struggle. In fact, Gorter states that one of the defining features of the imperialist stage is precisely the lack of rifts among the ruling class that could be exploited for political purposes. Hence why, for Gorter, Bolshevik tactics cannot be used under the conditions of the advanced industrial nations where, as he repeatedly states, “the proletariat stand alone,” bereft of allies in the class struggle (unlike the Russian proletariat who had the poor peasants as allies, in a country where capitalism was largely still underdeveloped for most of the population, and who would have not been able to attain victory without them).^[25] 

Thus the possibility of a political crisis — and therefore of politics — is foreclosed. One of Lenin’s fundamental conditions of revolution (of which there are only two) is written off as impossible! Instead, we are left with a face-to-face battle between two social blocs, two classes, bourgeoisie (which includes the petty bourgeoisie of all varieties) and proletariat. There is no real political struggle then, the hegemonic struggle of who will lead society — the bourgeoisie or the proletariat? — because there is no possibility of winning over the intermediate strata. In contrast to Lenin’s struggle for hegemony, in which the task is to provoke a political crisis and then push bourgeois civil society to overcome its contradictions, the German radical Left regresses the struggle for socialism to the level of a street battle writ large. This is why, for Pannekoek and Gorter, the main issue, in terms of strategic and tactical maneuvers, does not relate to the political instability of the ruling class but rather to the ideological grip they have over the workers.^[26]

In this scenario, where the development of a political crisis that fractures the ruling class is off the table, the role of a revolutionary vanguard party changes drastically from that of which Lenin articulated. Instead of precipitating the political crisis, all that a vanguard can do is prepare the proletariat for battle. How exactly though? Through propaganda, it must raise the class consciousness of the workers to the level of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But for this, not just any kind of propaganda work will do; if it is to be a genuine vanguard, it must lead by example. Here we have principles above politics. The party must itself be the example of the principle it wishes to teach the proletariat: it itself must be the DoP in a prefigurative sense. Hence why it cannot work within the trade unions and parliament; these institutions are defined by the maintenance of leaders over the masses, by the subordination of the latter to the former.^[27]

By giving up on the possibility of a political crisis, and thereby reducing the function of the party to providing exemplary actions to be replicated by the rest of the working class, Gorter essentially adopts the anarchist notion of the “propaganda of the deed” (albeit with a more Marxist bent). In this way, the party is supposed to have a clarifying effect on the working class, showing them the correct way forward. Its success in this will be gauged by the extent to which the immediate organizations of the working classreplace the work of the party, rendering the latter superfluous. The party dissolves into the class. By replacing the significance of the party with these more immediate organizations, the party can thus only have an auxiliary role to play, continually reducing its significance until it is no longer necessary. We see here the anti-political orientation of the Left-wing communists. By foreclosing the possibility to intervene in trade unions and parliament, they foreclose all political functions of the party. The only role the party has is an ideological one — which is notpolitics — namely, the raising of the class consciousness of the whole of the class such that it can face an undivided ruling class.

We can begin to see that, behind this foreclosure of politics, there is a deeper difference between Lenin and Gorter, a difference in the very conception of socialist revolution, and even further, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Bourgeois ideology for Pannekoek and Gorter can only be fought and defeated by a counter-ideology, the means of which is the lived example of principled action; bourgeois institutions (the material basis for bourgeois ideology) can only be countered by the counter-example of socialist institutions and forms of organizations (industrial unions and soviets). Their claim, against Lenin, is that bourgeois ideology has a stronger grip on the proletariat of Western Europe than on Russia’s, a stronger base of institutions than Russia’s newly acquired (and hence relatively weak) capitalism, such that the whole effort of the party in Western Europe can only be dedicated to combating the grip of this ideology on the working class. Whereas Right-wing opportunism only sees a bourgeois revolution where a socialist one is possible, the opportunism of Left-wing communism only sees a socialist revolution in opposition to bourgeois society. From the point of view of Lenin’s correct orientation, however, a socialist revolution is only ever an opportunity generated by the reiteration of the Bourgeois Revolution (the revolt of the Third Estate) within the changed social conditions of an industrial society. From this perspective, socialist revolution is not in opposition to bourgeois society but rather is born from its internal contradictions, its crisis created by the industrial revolution. It is a matter of showing how bourgeois ideals (of liberty, equality, fraternity, the pursuit of happiness, etc.) are blocked / negated by the society from which they come from; and then creating the conditions for their full realization by overcoming them.

Lenin’s strategy is not to provide a counter-example (this is not the party’s purpose), but rather to have the proletarian masses experience and work-though the contradictions of bourgeois society, i.e., to force a confrontation with these contradictions by pushing them to their peak heights via political intervention. When the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan “Peace, Land, and Bread,” this is not the expression of a socialist ideal or vision; peace, bread, and land are bourgeois ideals (in fact, conservative ones) that, when given expression in a political setting, reveal the poverty of the current situation of Russia under the failing Provisional Government. The point is not to pit two ideologies, two world-views — one socialist, the other bourgeois — against each other; rather its a matter of giving expression to the bourgeois desires of the masses in such a way that they reveal the Provisional Government’s inability to meet them (i.e., how the continuation of the war by the opportunists is creating famine and mass destruction), creating a breach within the historical juncture through which, via decisive action, the Bolsheviks can seize power. The socialist revolution is produced through bourgeois discontents, not through a vision of a socialist society.

In truth, the “Left-wing” communist conception of two world-views (with their corresponding institutions) in battle with each other is more fitting for the transitory period that is the dictatorship of the proletariat, after the party has taken power. Yet for Gorter and Pannekoek it is not a matter of the party taking power at all, which is why they contrast the dictatorship of the proletariat with what he calls the Bolsheviks’ “dictatorship of the party.”^[28] Such a distinction is absurd for Lenin, pure childishness. As Lenin conceives of it, the dictatorship of the proletariat is still class struggle; it is actually the highest peak of class struggle through which the working class as a whole develops class consciousness, for the latter goes hand and hand with class organization — and the dictatorship of the proletariat, for Lenin, is nothing more than the class organizing itself (increasingly as the whole of society) to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. The German radical Left, however, doesn’t recognize the dictatorship of the proletariat as the development of class consciousness; it thinks the latter has to happen beforehand, or rather, that the dictatorship of the proletariat develops within the revolution itself in such a way that it confronts an undivided bourgeoisie (once again, including all strata of the petty bourgeoisie: peasants and small shopkeepers). This is why Lenin can criticize them for wishing to jump over the intermediate stage of communism to reach the highest: “From the standpoint of communism, repudiation of the Party principle means attempting to leap from the eve of capitalism’s collapse (in Germany), not to the lower or the intermediate phase of communism, but to the higher.”^[29] In a paradoxical, nonsensical formulation, we can say that “Left-wing” communism wants the dictatorship of the proletariat before the dictatorship of the proletariat. |P

^[1] A recording of the workshop is available online at <https://youtu.be/5VZY9WLeze8>.

^[2] Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands.

^[3] Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Communist Workers’ Party of Germany).

^[4] V. I. Lenin, “Left-wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 570.

^[5] Herman Gorter, “Organisation of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle,” in Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism, ed. D. A. Smart (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 155.

^[6] Lenin, “Left-wing” Communism, 608.

^[7] In Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism, 142–48.

^[8] Lenin, “Left-wing” Communism, 569.

^[9] For the concept of actionism as practice devoid of theory, see Theodor Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” and “Resignation,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (Columbia University Press, 1998).

^[10] Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands.

^[11] Lenin, “Left-wing” Communism, 567.

^[12] Ibid., 579. Here Lenin quotes German “Left” communists.

^[13] Gorter, “Organisation,” 155.

^[14] See Herman Gorter, “Open Letter to Comrade Lenin: A reply to ‘Left-wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder,” in Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Worker’s Councils (St. Petersburg: Red and Black Publishers, 2007), 28, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter.htm>.

^[15] See Gorter, “Organisation,” 153–55.

^[16] Lenin, “Left-wing” Communism, 617.

^[17] Ibid., 579.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] Ibid., 580.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Ibid., 613.

^[22] Ibid., 602.

^[23] Ibid.

^[24] Ibid.

^[25] Gorter, “Open Letter,” 19–26, 59–65.

^[26] Ibid., 42–46.

^[27] Ibid., 47, 53.

^[28] Gorter, “Organisation,” 152.

^[29] Lenin, “Left-wing” Communism, 569.