(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