The death of Pan

Herman Gorter's "Open letter to Comrade Lenin" had a quasi-legendary status in some left-wing circles I causally frequented in my youth. Gorter had dared to challenge the great Lenin himself! Of course, nobody had read the stuff, just as nobody had read "The Satanic Bible" or "The Anarchist Cookbook", two other notorious screeds from my younger days (but perhaps in different social circles).

So now I have read the open letter, in a splendid edition by the British left-wing group Wildcat (probable membership: one person). I must say that I got involuntary sympathies for poor Vladimir Illyich when reading it. This was surely worse than the speeches of the Left SRs and Anarcho-Communists in the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets!

Gorter, originally from the Netherlands, belonged to the "Left Communist" KAPD in Germany during the revolutionary upheaval in that nation after World War I. KAPD boycotted the parliamentary elections on principle and refused to work inside the official trade unions. Nor were they interested in united actions with other left-wing parties. Lenin considered the KAPD to be muddle-headed sectarians and ultra-lefts, and sharply rebuked them and similar groups in his book "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder". I'm no friend of Comrade Lenin, but he *was* smarter than Gorter, pointing out that Communists (of course) must stand in elections, work in the official trade unions, and attempt to woo other left-wing forces and even Social Democrats in order to strengthen their own positions.

Gorter's attempts to refute Lenin's positions are politically worthless, and need not be recounted here. What struck me when reading Gorter's text, is that it sounds more like an exhortation than a political analysis. Its message sounds anarchistic and even moralistic: the small revolutionary minority must "make an example" to the rest of the working class, every worker must become a "hero", und so weiter. Gorter sounds so stereotypically preachy, that I wondered what his background might have been. According to Wikipedia, Gorter was originally...a poet. Bingo. That would explain a lot of things. "Open letter to Comrade Lenin" is at bottom a poetic exhortation to revolution. Lenin himself preferred the real thing, of course. I wonder how many aspirins he needed after digesting Comrade Gorter's lyrical bravado?

"Open letter to Comrade Lenin" is indispensable reading for those who specialize in the detailed history of the early Communist movement. Everyone else might as well give it a pass.

If you can read Dutch, you might be interested to know that Gorter wrote an extensive lyrical epic called "Pan" about the socialist revolution. Thank God it was never translated to Russian.