Anton Pannekoek, The Workers’ Way to Freedom & Other Council Communist Writings (1935-1954), edited and introduced by Robyn K. Winters (PM Press/Working Class History), 2024 (303 pp. $24.95)

The future belongs to the workers, but most of them still do not know it.

Anton Pannekoek, 1907

We concluded our book on the Russian Revolution⁽¹⁾ by contrasting two erroneous, but opposing views, drawn from that working class experience. The first was Bordiga’s view that the working class only exists through the Party, and this will not only be a weapon of the working class, guiding the revolutionary assault on capitalism, but will also be a government-in-waiting and go on to rule after that assault. By way of contrast, we also quoted the councilist, Otto Rühle⁽²⁾ who argued that the party form itself is inherently bourgeois and thus is the very antithesis of proletarian revolution. A reader later asked us why we had chosen to highlight Rühle’s contribution rather than those of the more famous councilist, Anton Pannekoek. Our reply was simple enough. We were highlighting the extremes of the discussion on the party and class question that had emerged from the last revolutionary wave. Pannekoek’s views were much more nuanced than Rühle’s although both had shared similar experiences in the German Revolution.

Antonie (or Anton) Pannekoek (1873-1960) lived through an epoch of tremendous highs and lows in the workers’ movement but especially the revolutionary wave that brought an end to the First World War. The consequences of its subsequent defeat still live with us today. One was to alert the capitalists of the danger to their existence should the international working class ever get so organised again. The second has been the monstrous rise of totalitarian states along Stalinist lines claiming to be “socialist”. Their very existence has been enough to discredit the original liberating aim of Marxism and thus make the prospects for the appearance of a new class movement all the more difficult. As the capitalist system is once again leading the world down the road towards a new imperialist war, an attempt to draw what we can from that revolutionary past is as urgent as ever.

Pannekoek’s direct involvement in those events lasted a comparatively short time, but having lived through this turbulent period in working class history Pannekoek remained a Marxist all his life, convinced that the key to revolutionary transformation lay in the development of the class consciousness of the mass of the working class itself. A review of this recent publication of some of his writings gives us the opportunity to look more closely (albeit briefly) at his contribution to the fight for a classless society.

Pannekoek was not driven to socialism through exploitation, poverty or oppression. He began political life as a supporter of the Dutch Liberal Party, like his upwardly mobile liberal businessman father. He only came to Marxism in his late twenties when he had already begun to make his mark as an astronomer, when he came across Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Equality. It was a decisive turning point for him or, as he put it, “For the first time it dawned on me that all theories have a social basis and significance and develop in response to real material interests rather than abstract reasoning”.⁽³⁾ However, Pannekoek found Marxist economic theory “too determinist”⁽⁴⁾ which made him look for a more “spiritual”⁽⁵⁾ Marxism. He thought he had found it in the work of Joseph Dietzgen, a rare worker theorist in the nineteenth century, and one praised by both Marx and Engels. Dietzgen, a tanner by trade, was credited by Engels with being the first to describe the method of Marx as “historical materialism”, even before Plekhanov made the phrase more famous.

Dietzgen’s influence on Pannekoek’s thinking was profound and endured through all the phases of his political evolution. Such was his admiration for Dietzgen that he even went so far as to say that “it is doubtful whether (Marx and Engels) ever understood the essence of his arguments”.⁽⁶⁾ Pannekoek considered that Dietzgen completed the Marxist idea of historical materialism.

Marx stated that realities determine thought; Dietzgen established the relation between reality and thought. Or in the words of Herman Gorter, Marx pointed out what the world does to the mind, Dietzgen pointed out what the mind does to itself.⁽⁷⁾

This seems a step away from Marx’s famous statement that, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”⁽⁸⁾

Pannekoek however counters with another famous quotation from Marx.

... but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical.⁽⁹⁾

Pannekoek refers to this quotation several times in his writings but even in his days as a left communist, as in his 1920 essay on World Revolution and Communist Tactics,⁽¹⁰⁾ he uses a cut version of the quote above omitting this preceding “material” part of the passage:

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force ...

For Pannekoek, “the marxist view as a whole” has to take into account both premises that “the actions of men are entirely determined by their material relations” and “Men must make their own history themselves through their own actions”.⁽¹¹⁾ Only in this way can the twin dangers of voluntarism and fatalism be avoided. Pannekoek however was well aware that, as a result,

Two marxists … will therefore express themselves differently, the one primarily emphasising the determinate nature of the mind, the other its active role, they will both lead their respective truths into battle against each other, although they both pay homage to the same marxian theory.⁽¹²⁾

Where the balance lay between ideas and the material circumstances that produced them was to be central to Pannekoek’s activity all his life but he would always tend towards the idealist side of the question.

Having broken with his liberal bourgeois past, Pannekoek soon became a major force in the Leiden branch of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sociaal-Demokratische Arbeiterspartij, SDAP). From there, he would become one of the major intellectual figures of the international Marxist radical left in the social democratic movement. This was at a time when mass strikes in the Low Countries, and the 1905 revolution in the Russian Empire, were throwing up new challenges to the increasingly reformist Social Democracy of the Second International. In the Netherlands itself, Pannekoek had seen the pathetic performance of his own SDAP in the mass strike wave of 1903, “which still represents the greatest labour dispute in the history of the Netherlands”.⁽¹³⁾ The SDAP had at first supported the strikes but the leadership had later sabotaged them for fear that they were becoming too “political” (“politics” was something the Party leader, Troelstra, reserved for their Parliamentary group). Pannekoek led the denunciation of Troelstra for this betrayal: “Your flabby and hesitant conduct cannot but serve the possessing class and the government”.⁽¹⁴⁾ It was his first concrete experience of the failure of a supposedly socialist party to support class action. It was an experience which would inform his position in his later debate with Karl Kautsky.

Nevertheless, in 1904 it was Kautsky himself who invited him to Germany to work in the party school of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) in Berlin. He was soon forced to quit (like Karl Radek and Rudolf Hilferding) on the grounds that the police were threatening to deport them as “foreigners”. The Party, however, still paid for his writing and speaking activities, and he became very active in the Bremen Left, alongside Johann Knief and Paul Fröhlich in writing weekly for the Bremer Burger-Zeitung. His promising career as an astronomer was put on hold whilst he became a professional revolutionary. In this period Pannekoek wrote regularly for De Nieuwe Tijd and Die Neue Zeit, the latter edited by Kautsky, with whom he and his friend, the poet Herman Gorter, remained on good personal and political terms until 1910. By this time the Dutch Left around Gorter and Pannekoek had already been expelled from the SDAP in the Netherlands, and were making common cause with the Radical Left in German Social Democracy.

The argument with Kautsky had begun in 1909 when the latter published his The Road to Power. Kautsky had earlier won the admiration of the Radical Left in the SPD for his defence of Marxist orthodoxy against the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. But the “Marxist orthodoxy” of the SPD was now becoming a fossilised dogma which postponed the idea of socialism to some distant future, and demanded no more of the working class than votes for its parliamentary candidates. The SPD may have been the biggest socialist party in the world, with enormous resources from millions of workers, but it increasingly stood in the way of a genuine and active working class response to the new turn that capitalism was taking. Pannekoek shared with Rosa Luxemburg the realisation that the capitalism in the age of imperialism was more dangerous than ever.⁽¹⁵⁾ Both saw that the working class was entering into more direct conflict with capitalism. They both saw in the mass strikes, which had developed in the early years of the twentieth century, the elemental and organised expression of working class consciousness. Curiously at this point, neither, as yet, saw the workers’ councils (soviets) established across the Russian Empire as anything significant, but they both put an emphasis on workers’ self-activity as an expression of the real and revolutionary movement of the class. And, at this point, both thought the role of the party was to give revolutionary expression to the mass movement. On the other hand, Kautsky, in The Road to Power, sought to combat the danger as he saw it of “disorganised action”. Like Troelstra, he put the emphasis on the Party and its ability to lead, discipline and control the class movement. There was a fatalist sense that socialism would come about simply through capitalism collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. In the meantime all that was required of the working class was to vote the SPD into parliament and join its trade unions. Pannekoek rejected all of these assumptions in his 1912 polemic against Kautsky in Die Neue Zeit, Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics.

He did not reject the role of the Party in this debate. On the contrary, like Lenin of that epoch, he argued that it should live up to the revolutionary essence of Marxism. Starting from his understanding of historical materialism as developed by Dietzgen, Pannekoek defended his idea on the significant role of class consciousness in the coming social revolution. As it was central to his thinking throughout his life, it is worth quoting in some detail.

Marxism explains all the historical and political actions of men in terms of their material relations, and in particular their economic relations. A recurrent bourgeois misconception accuses us of ignoring the role of the human mind in this, and making man a dead instrument, a puppet of economic forces. We insist in turn that Marxism does not eliminate the mind. Everything which motivates the actions of men does so through the mind. Their actions are determined by their will, and by all the ideals, principles and motives that exist in the mind. But Marxism maintains that the content of the human mind is nothing other than a product of the material world in which man lives, and that economic relations therefore only determine his actions by their effects upon his mind and influence upon his will. Social revolution only succeeds the development of capitalism because the economic upheaval first transforms the mind of the proletariat, endowing it with a new content and directing the will in this sense. Just as Social-Democratic activity is the expression of a new perspective and new determination instilling themselves in the mind of the proletariat, so organisation is an expression and consequence of a profound mental transformation in the proletariat. This mental transformation is the term of mediation by which economic development leads to the act of social revolution. There can surely be no disagreement between Kautsky and ourselves that this is the role which Marxism attributes to the mind.⁽¹⁶⁾

He continues with the argument we quoted above that the material basis of ideas and the ideas themselves are of equal significance before concluding with his other key argument that with a proletariat now taking mass action the situation was changing and so were the demands on socialists. The determinist idea that the proletariat would come to power “when conditions mature” was now making the Social Democratic Party a brake on the movement at a time when “Marxism now becomes the theory of proletarian action”. Kautsky quite openly talked of the need for the Party to “hold back the masses” until the day it would come to power through the ballot box.

The relationship between masses and party cannot therefore be as Kautsky has presented it. If the party saw its function as restraining the masses from action for as long as it could do so, then party discipline would mean a loss to the masses of their initiative and potential for spontaneous action, a real loss, and not a transformation of energy. The existence of the party would then reduce the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat rather than increase it. It cannot simply sit down and wait until the masses rise up spontaneously in spite of having entrusted it with part of their autonomy; the discipline and confidence in the party leadership which keep the masses calm place it under an obligation to intervene actively and itself give the masses the call for action at the right moment. Thus, as we have already argued, the party actually has a duty to instigate revolutionary action, because it is the bearer of an important part of the masses’ capacity for action; but it cannot do so as and when it pleases, for it has not assimilated the entire will of the entire proletariat, and cannot therefore order it about like a troop of soldiers. It must wait for the right moment: not until the masses will wait no longer and are rising up of their own accord, but until the conditions arouse such feeling in the masses that large-scale action by the masses has a chance of success. This is the way in which the Marxist doctrine is realised that although men are determined and impelled by economic development, they make their own history. (our emphasis).⁽¹⁷⁾

Kautsky’s reputation as “the Pope” of “orthodox Marxism” remained intact for a little while longer. However, the First World War was to further bring into question what that “orthodoxy” amounted to. Against all the anti-war resolutions adopted by the various Congresses of the Socialist International, the parliamentary faction of German Social Democracy voted unanimously (respecting party discipline since about a sixth of the deputies were against it) for the Kaiser’s war budget in August 1914. Their excuse was that it was for a war against “Russian despotism”. Kautsky was not an MP but, asked to advise the Parliamentary group, he told them to abstain, on the very un-marxist premise that it would not just be a war against Tsarist despotism but also a war against “the democracies” of Britain and France. In fact Kautsky did not see war as intrinsic to advanced capitalism, so when the First World War broke out he regarded it as an annoying interruption of the peaceful conditions needed for the Social Democratic Party to lead the proletariat to take over state power via the ballot box. This was the only class war he counted on. His position on the war was thus ultimately pacifist, and not a class position, as Lenin was not slow to point out in a series of documents on the “renegade Kautsky”. For Lenin the war would lead to a reappraisal of what Marxism meant in terms of recognising that imperialism was a new era in capitalism and that the state was not something to be captured but destroyed.

Pannekoek was in the Netherlands when the First World War broke out. However, alongside other members of the Dutch Tribune group, he denounced both defencism and pacifism. He collaborated with the Bremen Left and other internationalists like Borchardt’s Lichtstrahlen (Rays of Light) who all left the SPD and agreed with Lenin and the Zimmerwald Left⁽¹⁸⁾ that the fight against war only had meaning as “part of a general struggle against capitalism”.⁽¹⁹⁾ In the wake of the class betrayal of the Second International he too looked forward to the establishment of a new International. In January 1916 Pannekoek, thanks to Henrietta Roland-Holst who financed the first issue, was appointed an editor of the Zimmerwald Left’s new but short-lived journal, Vorbote (The Herald), alongside Lenin, Zinoviev and Radek. Pannekoek, like Lenin, saw the publication as not only opposing class war to imperialist war, but also the necessary first step towards the birth of a new and revolutionary International in place of the discredited Second International of social democracy. But when Radek published the theses against national self-determination of the Warsaw Committee of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy, SDKPiL),⁽²⁰⁾ it provoked such a bitter argument with Lenin that Pannekoek and Roland-Holst demoted the others to “contributors”. The journal folded for lack of money after only two issues.⁽²¹⁾

This did not stop Lenin later praising Pannekoek in his debate with Kautsky in The State and Revolution. Lenin had been prompted in argument with Bukharin in 1916 to re-examine Marx and Engels’ earlier writings on the state and now concluded:

In this controversy, it is not Kautsky but Pannekoek who represents Marxism, for it was Marx who taught that the proletariat cannot simply win state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into new hands, but must smash this apparatus, must break it and replace it by a new one.⁽²²⁾

Pannekoek, for his part, enthusiastically welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution⁽²³⁾ as the first step in the world working class’s struggle to shake off the shackles of capitalism and, on return to Bremen, in 1919 took part in the establishment of workers’ councils in imitation of the Russian soviets. He also joined the newly-formed German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) but the loss of their leaders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, in the disaster of January 1919 opened up a debate about the value of working in parliament and trades unions. For Pannekoek such activity was the “opportunism” at the core of the demise of German Social Democracy in 1914. Capitalism was now in a new period and these were no longer permissible tactics. The debate was to split the KPD and lead to the expulsion of its left wing who went on to form the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, KAPD). The KPD then went on to join with the centrists of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD) to form the United Communist Party of Germany (Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, VKPD) as the German organisation of the Third International. The KAPD had originally been an associate member of the Third International but was now given an ultimatum to join the VKPD which it refused thus resulting in its leaving the Comintern.

It was in the course of this that Lenin’s famous denunciation of the entire international communist left in his Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder was published. It was intended as an attack on all the “left communists” in every country in the run up to the Second Comintern Congress but it contained a particular form of abuse for “K. Horner” (Pannekoek), who within three years had gone from the real defender of Marxism to revealing his “failure to understand the ABC of Marxism”.⁽²⁴⁾ It was absolutely characteristic of Pannekoek that his response did not descend to the same level of personal abuse that Lenin had indulged in. Instead he related Lenin’s polemic to the increasingly difficult material situation of the revolution in Russia (referring to the material losses in the war against the Whites). He does not think it unreasonable for the Russian Communists to seek compromises for the immediate survival of the revolution but questions whether that should also become the policy of the Third International. He presciently argued that:

The Third International, as the association of communist parties preparing proletarian revolution in every country, is not formally bound by the policies of the Russian government … We can see now why the tactics of the Third International, laid down by Congress to apply homogeneously to all capitalist countries and to be directed by the centre, are determined not only by the needs of communist agitation in those countries, but also the political needs of Soviet Russia.⁽²⁵⁾

From 1921 on, the Third International, increasingly acting as an agent of the new Russian State, forced all its affiliated parties to accept the united front with the parties of the Second International (whose Social Democratic adherents had murdered so many communists). Eventually all the left elements would be driven out in a campaign of “bolshevisation”. For its part, the KAPD split into many fractions which resulted in its collapse by 1927. Throughout this period of the demise of the prospect of world revolution, Pannekoek was largely absent from the political scene as he resumed his distinguished career as an astronomer of international standing. Thus, 1921 marked the end of his full-time engagement in collective action in revolutionary politics, although he would cooperate with the Dutch Group of International Communists (Groep van Internationale Communisten, GIC) headed by Henk Canne-Meijer (which published versions of his books, Lenin as Philosopher and Workers Councils) in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as write for Paul Mattick’s International Council Correspondence and Living Marxism, among other journals. In the growing counter-revolution which reached its fullest expression in Stalinism, the German Left gave birth to council communism.

Which brings us to the book under review. It is only at this point that it starts to deal with Pannekoek’s contribution to revolutionary thinking. There is no reference to the formative period of Pannekoek’s revolutionary experience. There is not even a single mention of Dietzgen and his critical role in the formation of Pannekoek’s thinking. The editor’s target audience is clearly anarchists as, for example, in the statement that the inspiration for the work comes from Daniel Guérin, an ex-marxist who tried to synthesise its revolutionary aspects with anarchism.⁽²⁶⁾ Talking of the future revolution, Guérin concluded his short essay Towards a Libertarian Communism with the words “it will not be authoritarian but libertarian and self-managing, or, if you like, councillist”.⁽²⁷⁾ Against the vagueness of Kropotkin’s mutualism, Guérin can see that the Russian workers’ councils were the historically discovered form of how workers could take over society and abolish class division and at the same time create a form of organisation which, as Pannekoek himself noted,⁽²⁸⁾ would lead to the abolition of the state.

But there is already an anarchist website⁽²⁹⁾ devoted to Pannekoek’s writings. It is much broader in scope, publishing his work against Kautsky in 1912 as well as his anti-war articles. Unfortunately the publishers’ claim for this “deft collection” is a little over the top. They claim that the first half of the book “is transcribed from a manuscript ... never before published in full.” Yet, of the 24 chapters and 2 appendices, only 6 (amounting to 60 of the 303 pages) can really be described as unpublished previously. And no-one seems to have asked why Pannekoek did not publish these handwritten notes in English despite living for nearly three decades more. Pannekoek’s usual style of writing is to start a paragraph with a single statement as if it were a hypothesis and then elaborate on it at some length. The handwritten documents which the editor has found in the Pannekoek Archive⁽³⁰⁾ are written in a totally different way with very short and staccato sentences and few qualifications. It is as if Pannekoek was practising expressing himself in English. And some of these sentences he perhaps did not want to be made public, such as his mistaken prediction that America and Europe would both emerge economically ruined from the coming (Second) World War.⁽³¹⁾ Indeed in his 1947 book, Workers Councils, he wrote the opposite. The Second World War had created “the big opportunity that now faces American capitalism”.⁽³²⁾

Pannekoek has not generally been well treated in the publications of his works after his death. His book Workers Councils was reproduced as a pamphlet in 1970 by Paul Mattick jr’s Root and Branch group but only contained Part I and II (leaving out Pannekoek’s considerations of the war and post war situation in Parts III, IV and V). Merlin Press reproduced his Lenin as Philosopher but the supposed accompanying essay by Korsch is missing and the latest offering from PM Press is even more disappointing. Even his well-respected⁽³³⁾ A History of Astronomy was translated into English with the final paragraph omitted. It clearly states Pannekoek’s continuing commitment to historical materialism and the human future of “a free self-governing world community of productive labour”.⁽³⁴⁾

We have followed the growth of the astronomical world view from the first emergence of civilisation from the prehistoric stage of barbarism. In this growth of science we have before us the fascinating spectacle of a process of spiritual development, which accompanied the development of mankind throughout the period of civilisation. And however many wonders of knowledge and insight this science has brought, its task is far from complete. At our nearest neighbouring world, the moon, we still face questions, until to passive observation can be added active experimentation. Of our immediate environment in the universe, the solar system, our knowledge has only recently emerged from the stage of general uncertainty and is still imperfect in all respects. Our knowledge of the galaxy and of the stars themselves is still in its beginnings and limited to the outside; of the endless space beyond and of the interior of the stars, of their development in past and future, there is hardly a first beginning of understanding; everything there is still a problem. In every part, every area, we face a series of exciting questions. It is time, that humanity, by establishing a free self-governing world community of productive labour to secure its material life in abundance, should free all spiritual forces for the perfection of its knowledge of nature, of the science of the universe.

The Workers’ Way to Freedom seems to be yet another instance of shoddy treatment of his legacy. The editor almost admits this by telling us this is an “early walk-through of council communist ideas” which “... often mirror points made in Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils and his 1938 book Lenin as a Philosopher”.⁽³⁵⁾ In short, it adds nothing to Pannekoek’s legacy and in some ways detracts from it. The editor tells us more about how they came to transcribe Pannekoek’s notes than we ever learn about Pannekoek himself. Indeed, were it not for the addition of Appendix A which was Paul Mattick’s appreciation of Pannekoek two years after his death in 1960, “transcribed from the Marxists Internet Archive”,⁽³⁶⁾ we would have no background to Pannekoek’s Marxist view of the world at all. And, as we noted earlier, you won’t find a single reference to the critical influence of Dietzgen on Pannekoek anywhere in the book. In short, this is an opportunity wasted to discuss the relevance of Pannekoek’s writings in the modern context. For this it is better to critically read the originals by Pannekoek, which are now all online on at least three sites.⁽³⁷⁾

We say “critically” because, aside from it being in the spirit of the man himself, we have to carefully examine a contribution which ended more than 60 years ago. Since that time much has changed in capitalism and in the composition of the working class. When Pannekoek died in 1960 that composition had not changed much from the day he entered political activity. It was still a largely Fordist industrial world with large factories employing thousands of workers, the likes of which are rarer today. Older workers will understand what Pannekoek is talking about when he argues that the representation of the councils will start in the “shops” or departments of each factory (and from where we get “shop steward”) but Pannekoek died in the midst of the longest secular boom in capitalist history. He did not live to see the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s and the beginning of the crisis.

The attempt to make workers pay for it was initially met with strong resistance by the working class all over the world. Capitalist states in every continent sought to boost profits by cutting wages through inflation. There were wildcat strikes, takeovers of factories and attempts at workers’ self-management (doomed to fail as long as capitalism existed) but the strangle-hold of the unions now integrated into the state kept the struggle from exploding into real revolution. And when that still was not enough the capitalists started to write off capital, bringing a return to unemployment levels not seen since the 1930s. Fighting wage cuts is one thing, but fighting for jobs, when the capitalists don’t care about them, is another. Class resistance heroically continued into the 1980s but it could not halt the brutal process of capitalist restructuring. By the 1990s most of the huge production units were either abandoned or cut, as heavy industry was shipped off with their capital to the new special economic (more accurately “special exploitation”) zones in China and elsewhere. Add to this the technological shift to the microprocessor and the decline of the old industries and we find the working class in the richest capitalist countries today are more fragmented, working in smaller productive units. This throws up a different challenge for revolutionaries today which goes beyond what Pannekoek envisaged in Workers Councils. We’ll conclude this review article by briefly looking at what these entail.

All real working class revolutionaries today are, in a certain sense, “councilists”. As Pannekoek correctly noted, the great historical discovery of the Russian proletariat was the soviet. This is not only the organisational basis for the struggle to replace capitalist production for profit with a society in which production is solely to meet human need. As he was well aware, it is also the future form of a classless society without a state. The struggle for socialism is not only about changing the character of economic production but also the instrument through which the social transformation of humanity can take place, where the political participation of “citizens” is not restricted to voting once in five years but where delegates can be recalled or mandated in every aspect of social life in order to represent the real interests of those who work. However, Pannekoek, considered that the workers’ councils in Russia arose “spontaneously” and he assumes the same thing will happen again. In the first place, the idea of “spontaneity” does not explain anything. Even in the world of physical science such things as “spontaneous combustion” have material causes, although not always apparent to the outside observer. We know that the elemental class struggle forces workers from time to time to go beyond the limits of capitalist order. These often take even the most prepared of revolutionaries by surprise, but there are always material reasons for them and these only become apparent as the struggle unfolds. And the assertion of spontaneity is not even historically accurate (although Pannekoek might not have known it). The first soviet in Ivanovo-Vosnesensk arose from the material needs of the workers in that Russian “Manchester” to unite all the strikes in their area to make them more effective. Months later the proposal for the first St Petersburg Soviet in 1905 almost certainly came from a Menshevik member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and the form of election was borrowed from a Tsarist commission of enquiry.⁽³⁸⁾ In the second place, we do not have the same concentration of workers today and this means that consciousness is more fragmented across the class than it was in Pannekoek’s time. This only increases the need for those who are already clear about capitalist exploitation to form some sort of political association which attempts to draw more and more workers into its way of thinking. In short, something like a party.

For most council communists descended from the Dutch and German Left this is an anathema.

The likes of Paul Mattick, Otto Rühle and Anton Pannekoek all shared the same experience of seeing the workers’ revolution betrayed by not just one, but two, Internationals. The Social Democratic parties of the Second International not only betrayed the workers in 1914 by supporting imperialist war but went on to massacre revolutionary workers in defence of German capitalism in 1919 and the years that followed. 1919 saw the foundation of the Third Communist International but in less than two years it adopted the same Social Democratic ideas of using Parliament and the unions seen by Pannekoek and his comrades in the KAPD as false “opportunist” steps to gain a mass following quickly. No surprise then that the Dutch and German Communist Left came to see parties as simply machines for putting a minority in power however much they claimed to represent the class. But there were differences within the ranks of the council communists who appeared in the 1930s.

As the counter revolution developed into Stalinism, Paul Mattick senior eventually labelled everything to do with the Russian Revolution “Bolshevik”, and to put forward the conspiracy theory that the Bolsheviks had only supported the idea of workers’ councils to get hold of power for their party.⁽³⁹⁾ Otto Rühle, on the other hand, simply concluded that “all parties are bourgeois”.⁽⁴⁰⁾ As we have already seen, Pannekoek, ever the scientist, tended to avoid sterile and personal polemics. He made a greater attempt to understand what had materially brought about the counter-revolution in Russia. He recognised that the workers’ councils did broadly function under the Bolsheviks for “around six months” as did many other organs of workers’ self organisation (factory committees, cooperatives, etc.). Pannekoek does not discuss the revolution in precise detail so omits to say it was the Bolsheviks who actually made the soviets more like his own ideal model of the council system when they introduced the recall of delegates.⁽⁴¹⁾ Even when he uses the word “Leninism” it is a term of neither praise nor abuse, as it is for most commentators, but is linked specifically to the creation of the Marx-Engels Institute, initially headed by Riazanov and Deborin, and reorganised by Stalin as a means of promoting the Lenin cult.⁽⁴²⁾

Pannekoek is different from the other councilists in that his whole outlook is based on the notion of the working class acquiring a consciousness of a new society. And consciousness means nothing if it does not take organisational form. Pannekoek sees the councils as the ideal form but is also aware that revolutionary class consciousness cannot be arrived at without debate and discussion amongst workers hence the idea of “parties” based on that process is not excluded. He tells us that potentially revolutionary

great times will be full of the noise of party strife. Those who have the same ideas form groups to discuss them for their own and to propagate them for their comrades’ enlightenment. Such groups of common opinion may be called parties, though their character will be entirely different from the political parties of the previous world. Under parliamentarism these parties were the organs of different and opposite class interests. In the working class movement they were organizations taking the lead of the class, acting as its spokesmen and representatives and aspiring at guidance and dominance. Now their function will be spiritual fight only. The working class for its practical action has no use for them; it has created its new organs for action ... the council organization, it is the entirety of the workers itself that acts, that has to decide what must be done.⁽⁴³⁾

The problem for Pannekeok is not so much “parties” but the issue of who holds power after the revolution. The descendants of the Dutch and German Communist Left are not the only victims of the last counter-revolution who have reflected on its lessons. In the tradition of the Italian Left the Internationalist Communist Party (Partito Comunista Internazionalista, PCInt), founded in 1943 in Italy, also came to recognise that whilst a party was an essential weapon of the working class in the fight for communism it would also be “different from the political parties of the previous world”. Above all:

It would be a gross and dangerous error for the future to believe that the moment the working class creates their party, then they somehow relinquish – totally or even partially – those attributes which make them the gravedigger of capitalism, as if others could act as an alternative and have the same consciousness of the need to struggle against the class enemy and to overthrow it in revolution. At no time and for no reason does the proletariat abandon its combative role. It does not delegate to others its historical mission, and it does not give power away to anyone, not even to its political party.⁽⁴⁴⁾

The difference here is that Pannekoek does not confront the issue that the road to revolutionary class consciousness before the revolution is an uneven one. The PCInt Platform recognises that the coming into existence of a party (a “part” of the class) is as necessary as it is inevitable in the process of the class coming to consciousness before a revolutionary period, given that workers experience capitalism differently in different places, and at different times. Holding on to the insights gained in the historic struggle is just one task of the party.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Its role will not just be confined to Pannekoek’s education and propaganda but also the organisation of the assault on power by the class as a whole. But as Pannekoek implies, this “new party” cannot be a government-in-waiting. It will not form a “workers’ government” separate from the soviets (as did the Bolsheviks in 1917 in the Sovnarkom, or Council of People’s Commissars, which was only loosely supervised by the Soviet Executive before largely supplanting it), but its members will participate in the councils and whatever executive committee is established. And as Pannekoek is also well aware, the establishment of councils is not a complete victory in itself. To begin with they are simply an arena where the struggle for socialism can take place. The party has to ideologically fight for it in that arena whilst at the same time focussing on the other task that it is equipped for – the promotion of world revolution to link with communist workers across the globe. As the councils gradually move towards the abolition of classes and capitalist production they also change function from organs of struggle to organs of administration of the needs of society – in short, they are the key to the withering away of the state, historically discovered in the class struggle itself.

Notes:

(1) J. Dominie, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924 - A View from the Communist Left, 276 pp. from leftcom.org

(2) Although it was a view which originally had some attractions for the early Revolutionary Perspectives group (one of the predecessors of the Communist Workers’ Organisation) and the English translation of Rühle’s From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution was undertaken by DG Place, the founder of Revolutionary Perspectives. It was then posted on the old libcom site by the late Dave Graham (Graeme Imray, an ex-member of the CWO and Workers’ Voice before that), and has now reappeared on marxists.org

(3) Quoted in J. Gerber’s introduction to Serge Bricianer’s Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils, files.libcom.org

(4) This is Gerber’s description in the work cited in note 3.

(5) Pannekoek often used “spiritual” (which he took from Dietzgen) when referring to thought or consciousness.

(6) Lenin as Philosopher (Merlin, 1975) p.35. Although publicly praising Dietzgen as “our philosopher”, Marx and Engels were also sceptical about his stress on the idea that thought in itself was a factor almost on a par with the material world. On 4 October 1868 Marx had written to Engels, "Read through the manuscript. My view is that J. Dietzgen would do best if he condensed all his ideas into 2 printed sheets and had them printed in his name as a tanner. If he publishes them at the intended length, he will make a fool of himself because of the lack of dialectical development and the running in circles. Read it through and write your opinion." web.archive.org

(7) ibid.

(8) marxists.org

(9) Marx in The Introduction to Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right, marxists.org

(10) See Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism (edited by D.A Smart) Pluto Press, 1978 p.93

(11) See Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics in Smart p.71

(12) loc. cit.

(13) John Gerber, Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers’ Self-Emancipation (1873-1960) p.36 (Kluwer Academic Publishers and International Institute of Social History, 1989). A good account of this is to be found in N. Harding Lenin’s Political Thought Volume 2 (Macmillan 1977) pp.92-110.

(14) In Het Volk, 26 March 1903. Quoted in The Dutch and German Communist Left (International Communist Current, 2001) p.33. It can also be found on line by the original author, Philippe Bourrinet (with additional footnotes) at files.libcom.org

(15) Although Pannekoek did not accept Luxemburg’s economic theory in which she explained the basis of imperialism and even criticised her The Accumulation of Capital in 1913. Luxemburg replied to him in her Anti-Critique. See K.J. Tarbuck (ed) Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital (Penguin 1972) p.67 onwards.

(16) See Smart p.70.

(17) Smart p.73

(18) For the Resolution of the Zimmerwald Left and its context, see: leftcom.org

(19) See: The Dutch and German Communist Left p.108

(20) leftcom.org

(21) See Warren Lerner. Karl Radek – The Last Internationalist (Stanford 1970) pp.44-7 and R Craig Nation in his War on War (Haymarket 1989) pp.112-4.

(22) Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow 1974) Volume 25 p.489

(23) In World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920) he was still writing that “the new order in Russia is showing increasing strength” (see Smart p.94) as well as twice more in the same article.

(24) “Left-wing” Communism – and Infantile Disorder in Lenin, Selected Works Volume 3 (Moscow 1977) p.309.

(25) Afterword to World Revolution and Communist Tactics in Smart op. cit. p.144.

(26) We have quoted him on this previously. See leftcom.org

(27) theanarchistlibrary.org

(28) See: World Revolution and Communist Tactics in Smart op. cit. p.117.

(29) theanarchistlibrary.org

(30) aaap.be

(31) The Workers’ Way to Freedom p.11.

(32) marxists.org

(33) In a rare Cold War cooperation, NASA translated a 1962 Russian review of A History of Astronomy which noted Pannekoek’s continued commitment to human emancipation. The Russian review noted that Pannekoek spent less time on Egyptian astronomy because its work was entirely at the service of theocracy and not society in general. articles.adsabs.harvard.edu

(34) The last paragraph of Pannekoek’s Een geschiedenis van de sterrekund (A History of Astronomy). We are grateful to Vico of the Antonie Pannekoek Archives for both the original Dutch and translation.

(35) The Workers’ Way to Freedom p.3.

(36) The Workers’ Way to Freedom p.225. The link is marxists.org

(37) There is a wide selection of his writings plus other articles on Pannekoek himself (including works by Bricianer and Gerber quoted here) on libcom.org

(38) See Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets (Merlin 1974) p.53.

(39) Mattick’s Anti-Bolshevik Communism is reviewed in Revolutionary Perspectives 14 (First Series). See files.libcom.org

(40) See his From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution, marxists.org and The Revolution is not a Party Affair, marxists.org

(41) See “Decree on the Right of Recall” in First Decrees of Soviet Power edited by Y. Akhapkin (Lawrence and Wishart 1970) p.42.

(42) See Lenin as Philosopher p.8. Space prevents us from an analysis of Lenin as Philosopher here but it is safe to note that in looking for the emergence of state capitalism in the USSR in 1938 by referring to a polemic Lenin indulged in before the First World War, Pannekoek again reveals a tendency to the idealist.

(43) See Workers Councils in the section on “The Workers’ Revolution”

(44) leftcom.org

(45) For a fuller treatment of the relationship between class consciousness and revolutionary organisation see our pamphlet Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation which is available as a PDF here leftcom.org