Contradicting the Bolsheviks: Anton Pannekoek and European Marxism:

Anton Pannekoek (introduction by Noam Chomsky), Workers’ Councils (AK Press, Oakland, CA, and Edinburgh, 2003), xxxiv + 219pp, $15 paperback.

Before reading the volume under review, I revisited Vladimir Lenin’s ‘Left-wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920) and The State and Revolution (1917), books I first read when 15-years-old (on the urging of a Maoist-Republican father) and have returned to several times since. These are key texts in the Leninist canon. The former, despite the historical specificity of many of the arguments, is still occasionally deployed by Leninists when countering theoretical – and sometimes even tactical – approaches that they find bothersome. The latter, written between August and September 1917, is occasionally held up as evidence of Lenin’s anti-statist instincts and of his support for participatory democracy. In fact, his endorsement of democracy was qualified and it is clear that he saw its fate linked inextricably to the ‘state’, an entity, according to Lenin’s prognosis, destined to wither into nothingness as genuine equality emerged. Bourgeois representative democracy was denounced as a construct and protector of capitalism; ‘it is natural,’ remarked Lenin in an acerbic critique of Karl Kautsky in 1918, ‘for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general, but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “for what class?”.

Different conceptions of socialism:

Both books by Lenin, for rather different reasons, make reference to the Dutch left radical Anton Pannekoek (1873–1960), now very much a forgotten figure in European Marxism, and in a sense they track the political dissociation that occurred between these two Marxist theorists as the Bolshevik regime consolidated. In 1917, when The State and Revolution was written, Lenin saw Pannekoek as a theoretically forceful ally in the struggle with Karl Kautsky, the leading Marxist thinker of the Second International from 1889 to 1914. A key centrist and moderate figure in the mass German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Kautsky had by the second decade of the twentieth century clashed publicly with revolutionary leftists on the issues of mass strikes, political tactics, forms of democracy and the role of the state. In 1912, Pannekoek, then based in Bremen, emerged as one of the principal and most coherent advocates of the revolutionary position against Kautsky’s gradualist Marxism, which he denounced as quietism. The fundamental divergence arose from markedly different understandings of the process of social revolution: Kautsky believed that socialism was inevitable and could be brought about through the state; Pannekoek (and Lenin) believed that mass action by the working class was essential and that the state must be smashed. Hostility from the revolutionary left to Kautsky’s gradualism increased after 1914, when he failed to take a strong stand against the SPD’s support for the German war effort. In The State and Revolution, Lenin expressed his support for Pannekoek and contended that ‘in this controversy, it is not Kautsky but Pannekoek who represents Marxism.’

Lenin’s tone, however, had changed dramatically by 1920, when his principal targets for condemnation in ‘Left-Wing’ Communism included Pannekoek (‘K. Horner’) and the German and Dutch left radical movements with which he was associated. Pannekoek and a significant number of other western European Marxist activists, from Germany to Italy, had resisted political direction from Moscow after 1917 and expressed serious disagreement with what they saw as a crude attempt to apply Bolshevik forms and methods to the very different conditions of industrialised Europe. Moreover, drawing on their own political experience and the observations of theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, some of the left radicals suspected the Bolsheviks of substitutionism, particularly in Russia, where ‘rule by the working class’ in practice increasingly meant authoritarian ‘rule by the party’. Luxemburg, in a polemic not published until 1922, but written in 1918, was sharply critical of the Bolshevik attitude to democracy and worried that they were making a virtue of one-party dictatorship. She applauded the Russian revolution, describing it as ‘an act of world-historical significance whose traces will not be extinguished for aeons’, and supported the Bolsheviks in large measure, but, nonetheless, questioned their understanding of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy not in its elimination, in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class.

Her fears for Russian working-class democracy were clearly informed by her much earlier critique of Lenin’s centralist and authoritarian tendencies. In 1904, she asserted that socialists should oppose centralism ‘based on the mechanical subordination and blind obedience of the party membership to the leading party centre.’ She identified this tendency in Bolshevism:

Now the two principles on which Lenin’s centralism rests are precisely these: 1. The blind subordination, in the smallest detail, of all party organs, to the party centre, which alone thinks, guides, and decides for all. 2. The rigorous separation of the organised nucleus of revolutionaries from its social-revolutionary surroundings.

Such centralism is a mechanical transposition of the organisational principles of Blanquism into the mass movement of the socialist working class.

There have been attempts to amplify Luxemburg’s critical remarks into a general condemnation of the Bolsheviks, but this is to misunderstand her political position; at bottom, she was supportive of the Bolshevik party, although gravely concerned by aspects of its behaviour. Her murder in Berlin in 1919 by counter-revolutionary troops means that we can only guess at how her position on the Soviet Union would have developed, had she lived. Pannekoek shared her enthusiastic reaction to the Russian revolution and, unlike her, he initially expressed few reservations about the political character of the Bolshevik party; on the contrary, he repeatedly praised the Bolsheviks’ militancy and resolute adherence to Marxist principles. However, he also argued from an early stage against the blind application of the Bolshevik model to the very different societies of western Europe. Though continuing to defend the 1917 revolution, he became by 1921 a trenchant opponent of Leninism.

As the Bolsheviks consolidated and extended their power over the subsequent months and years, within both Russia and the international socialist movement, Pannekoek and the left radicals grew increasingly sceptical of their commitment to genuine working-class democracy. The Leninist position on the role of revolutionary organisations, with its elitist overtones, and the ‘democratic centralism’ employed internally were anathema to Pannekoek. In the end, his fundamental criticism of Leninism rested on his belief that socialist democracy was expressed through soviets (workers’ councils) and not through either representative democracy (no matter how wide the franchise) or one-party dictatorship; he came to believe that Lenin’s promotion of soviet government was essentially rhetorical and that the Bolsheviks had hollowed out the soviets thrown up by the revolution in order to consolidate their own rule. By the 1930s, he defined the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism created by state socialists. Writing as late as 1952, he continued to emphasise the democratic content of socialist revolution, insisting on the centrality of participatory democracy at the point of production:

The development towards state capitalism – often propagated under the name socialism in Western Europe – does not mean the liberation of the working class, but greater servitude. What the working class strives for in its struggle – liberty and security, to be master of its own life – is only possible through control of the means of production. State socialism is not control of the means of production by the workers, but control by the organs of the state. If it is democratic at the same time, this means that workers themselves may select their masters. By contrast, direct control of production by workers means that the employees direct the enterprises and construct the higher and central organisations from below. This is what is called the system of workers’ councils…Organised autonomy of the productive masses stands in sharp contrast to the organisation from above in state socialism. But one must keep the following in mind. ‘Workers' councils’ do not designate a form of organisation whose lines are fixed once and for all, and which only requires a subsequent elaboration of the details. It means a principle – the principle of the workers’ self-management of enterprises and of production.

For Pannekoek, workers’ councils simultaneously represented real working-class democracy and vehicles for revolutionary action; they were not static sites of government and they necessarily entailed direct control of the means of production. Nationalisation of the means of production and distribution had occurred in the Soviet Union but, according to Pannekoek, the social relations of production remained unchanged.

The political trajectory of Anton Pannekoek:

History, it is often said, is written by – and about – the winners and, with regard to the history of 20th-century European Marxism, this cliché contains more than a grain of truth. Leninist dominance of the Marxist movement has contributed to the neglect of once important figures who became critics of Leninism. Indeed, many people stumbling across the volume under review, Workers’ Councils, will wonder who in the world is Anton Pannekoek and why is this book important. Such non-recognition was not always the case; he was widely known in the international socialist movement before the First World War and for a few years after. For instance, the historian Theodore Draper, when writing of early US communism, remarked that Pannekoek was a familiar name ‘to many American socialists when Lenin and Trotsky were virtually unknown.’

Pannekoek was, relatively speaking, a latecomer to socialism. Born in on 2 January 1873 in the Dutch village of Vaassen in the poor agricultural province of Gelderland, he came from a family that was lower middle class but upwardly mobile. As a boy, he developed a strong interest in science and ultimately entered the University of Leiden in 1891 to study astronomy; indeed, many of those who do recognise Pannekoek’s name may do so because of his internationally influential work as a scientist, particularly in the field of astrophysics. In 1902, while working at the Leiden Observatory, he received his doctorate and then began a decades-long investigation of stellar distribution and the structure of the galaxies. In 1906, he moved to Germany and did not return to the Netherlands until 1914, when war broke out. Back home, he taught for a period at secondary school level before receiving an appointment in 1919 as a lecturer at the University of Leiden – an astronomical institute that he founded at the university now bears his name. He later published his groundbreaking and still valuable book, A History of Astronomy, and in 1936 was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard University for his work in astronomy. By the standards of academia, he had an illustrious career in his chosen field.

His earliest political involvement was as an activist with the Dutch Liberal Party and as chairperson of a student debating society. Indeed, he remained an active member of the Liberal Party until 1899, when, aged 26, he began to read socialist literature and engage in dialogue with local supporters of the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiders Partij (SDAP), a small socialist party formed in Holland in 1894 and which, to a large degree, followed the programme of the German SPD. ‘While others are actively striving to improve the world,’ he wrote in his diary at the time, ‘I sit reducing meridian plates. Science can only remain living when it changes men and conditions. It must help prepare a better future…to enable humanity to become free and happy.’ His conversion to socialism was the culmination of prolonged intellectual reflection, but his commitment to activism was also clear from the outset and he immediately helped to form a Leiden branch of the SDAP. From 1899 until his departure to Berlin in 1906 (to work as a lecturer at the SPD Party School), he was involved heavily in organising activities in the Leiden area, in theoretical work for the SDAP and in editing a local weekly party newspaper. In fact, by the time he left for Germany, he had made a name for himself as a soft-spoken but thoughtful and convincing socialist orator and polemicist. Moreover, he established strong links with the German socialist movement – he was, for instance, a regular correspondent of Kautsky’s from 1901 and, from 1904, a regular contributor to the important SPD papers, Neue Zeit and the Leipziger Volkszeitung.

Pannekoek taught at the SPD Central Party School in Berlin until September 1907 when he and Rudolf Hilferding, the prominent Austrian Marxist, were forced by the Prussian police to resign their posts because they were foreigners.18 He remained active in Germany as a freelance journalist and part-time book review editor for Neue Zeit before moving to Bremen in 1910 to establish a local SPD Party School – he already had deep connections with the left in Bremen and the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung regularly published his theoretical articles. Pannekoek became the leading theoretician behind that city’s ‘left radical’ (Linksradikale) revolutionary current, whose most prominent leader was Johann Knief (1880–1919), and between 1910 and 1914 he played a central role in defining its theoretical base. His reputation and influence as a Marxist theorist grew and were enhanced significantly in 1912 by his prominent role in the controversy with his erstwhile personal friend and comrade, Karl Kautsky (the ‘pope of Marxism’). Pannekoek laid particular emphasis on the concept of working-class self-emancipation and, like Luxemburg, he saw enormous potential in the spontaneity of the ‘mass strike’. The cultivation of a revolutionary class consciousness through spontaneous and expanding mass action was seen as crucial and, in his opinion, parliamentary politics and elitist revolutionary parties could not act as substitutes for self-emancipation. Writing in April 1910, he argued that:

It is not merely a question of the labouring masses simply acquiring consciousness of this task, but one of them grasping it firmly and decisively. The movement will never be able to take its proper course as long as they sit around waiting for their leaders to give the word. An acceleration of our struggle is possible only when the masses themselves seize the initiative, leading and pushing their organisations forward.

War and revolution

In conjunction with his role on the left-wing of German social democracy, Pannekoek maintained a strong involvement with the Dutch socialist movement and supported the Tribunist group in its challenge to the gradualist approach of the SDAP. He was especially close to the Dutch poet Herman Gorter (1864–1927), who remained a key ally and was himself an important influence on German Marxism after 1918. The interplay between the Tribunists and the Bremen left radicals helped to shape the theoretical outlooks of both groups, and they shared a strong belief in mass action as a catalyst for social change; they also vigorously denounced German social democratic support for the war. Indeed, the SPD’s support for the war effort was the straw that broke an already creaking camel’s back and forced a major split in the German socialist movement, a division that ultimately saw the post-war SPD act with the state to crush the revolutionary movement.

Pannekoek was obliged to return Holland in 1914, at the outbreak of war, but he continued to be the primary theoretical influence on the Bremen left radicals, whose anti-war activity gathered pace from the autumn of 1915. Knief, a relentless and capable activist, was the key figure in Bremen at that time and instrumental in building up an extensive network of shop-floor militants as well as establishing contacts throughout the country. By the end of 1915, as the anti-war movement expanded, the left radicals had become a significant force in Bremen, Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Stuttgart and Brunswick. International links were also established and, through Karl Radek (who had lived in Bremen), a relationship was formed with the Zimmerwald Left, including the Bolsheviks. Relations with the Spartacist (Spartakus) group, and Rosa Luxemburg in particular, were strained because of previous disputes and were not fully overcome, despite shared opposition to the war and official SPD policy. An attempt to agree a common strategy occurred in early 1917, but the political differences were substantial; the left radicals favoured a new party of the left (and the abandonment of the SPD), while the Spartacists remained wedded to the SPD tradition, despite the recent mass expulsion of the entire anti-war opposition from that party.21 The chances of a rapprochement received a severe setback when the majority of the Spartacists, rather than linking with the left radicals, joined with the centrists, including Kautsky, to form the Independent SPD (USPD). The Bremen left, according to John Gerber, reacted by accusing them of trying to restore ‘old leader politics’ and they continued to push for the formation of ‘a separate anti-bureaucratic revolutionary party of the left.’22 In fact, Luxemburg and the Spartacists would have preferred continued membership of the SPD, but this was made impossible. As J.P. Nettl, Luxemburg’s biographer, has observed:

Spartakus would have preferred to remain within the SPD – that ‘stinking corpse of 4 August 1914’ – rather than set up on its own in what might well prove to be a political vacuum. The only ones to criticise Spartakus at the time were the Bremen radicals. This small group, with whom Radek had been associated until the beginning of the war, was alone in calling for a complete organisational break and thus earned the credit of Lenin and later Communist historians.

Significant differences also existed with regard to parliamentary politics and the existing trade unions, both of which were utterly rejected by the left radicals. Left radical – or ‘left communist’ – politics, as they developed, involved an explicit rejection of old forms of working-class organisation. Revolutionary syndicalist-type unions were promoted as an alternative to working within the existing unions, which were deemed conservative and an obstacle to the growth of a revolutionary class consciousness. Lenin and the Bolsheviks viewed this position as a form of ‘ultra-leftism’.

These disagreements on strategy meant that in 1917 the revolutionary left in Germany was divided as events unfolded in Russia. However, Pannekoek and Luxemburg were united in welcoming the October Revolution, believing that it could be the beginning of a European revolutionary conflagration; Pannekoek’s disillusionment with the Bolsheviks was a gradual process (though the German and Dutch left radicals, from the outset, were against adopting the Bolshevik model for the industrialised West). At any rate, the turmoil that existed across Europe as the war ground to a conclusion meant that the German revolutionaries soon had a discernable political impact. The German revolution of November 1918, and the widespread establishment of soldiers’ and workers’ councils, mirrored developments elsewhere on the continent and seemed part of an international rising tide of revolution that, for a while, posed a real threat to capitalism in western Europe. This revolutionary situation forced a realignment on the left, with the Spartacists and the left radicals finally coming together at the very end of December 1918 to form the German Communist Party (KPD). Similarly, in Holland, Pannekoek and the Tribunists moved in late 1918 to form a distinct Dutch Communist Party. Moreover, when the Communist International (Comintern) was formed, the Dutch communists played a key role in organising a Comintern congress in Amsterdam in February 1920. The attendance at the Amsterdam conference, while thin, is accepted by historians to have been more representative of the international communist movement than the first congress hosted by the Bolsheviks in Moscow. However, to the dismay of the Bolsheviks, those gathered in Amsterdam – and the Western European Bureau that emerged – were not interested in applying the Russian example to the western situation. The ‘left communists’, soon to be condemned by Lenin, dominated the proceedings and, consequently, within three months of the setting up of the Bureau, Moscow radio broadcast news of the Russian decision to abolish it. The Bolshevik-run Comintern executive committee had decided, in the words of James W. Hulse, that ‘the refusal to employ parliamentary means or to work within existing trade unions showed an insufficient appreciation of the role to be played by Communist parties as agents of the world revolution.’ The Bolshevisation of European Marxism was under way.

In Germany, the KPD split as disagreements surfaced between those sympathetic to Bolshevism and those from the left radical tradition. Following the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, the leadership passed into the hands of Paul Levi, who, by June, in pursuit of a tight centralisation (argued for by the Bolsheviks), was attacking the Bremen and Hamburg branches for their alleged lack of ‘discipline’. In fact, Levi’s belief was that the left was undermining the KPD and that the best way forward was to ditch the party’s left-wing, adopt parliamentary politics and attempt to attract the USPD’s 800,000 members. In the event, a split was forced which saw the KPD reduced from 107,000 to 50,000 members in October 1919, with the left leaving to form, in March 1920, a new party called the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). Membership of the KAPD was roughly 38,000 at its formation, making it larger than the KPD, which had continued to lose members. An associated union – the AAUD – had 80,000 members, rising to 200,000 by the spring of 1921. From the outset, the KAPD was inspired by the theoretical positions of Pannekoek and his close collaborator Herman Gorter. It considered itself a new type of organisation and, in line with Pannekoek’s emphasis on participatory democracy, it posed workers’ councils as an alternative to parliamentary politics. Its programme was based very much on Pannekoek’s ideas and analyses, as the following excerpt indicates:

The more or less strong echo that the idea of the councils arouses in the consciousness of the masses is the thermometer which makes it possible to measure the development of the social revolution. The struggle for the recognition of the revolutionary factory councils and political workers’ councils in the framework of a given revolutionary situation logically gives rise to the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat against the dictatorship of capitalism. This revolutionary struggle, whose specific political axis is constituted by the idea of the councils, is compelled, under the pressure of historic necessity, to come up against the totality of bourgeois social order and thus also against its political form, bourgeois parliamentarism. The system of councils or parliamentarism? It is a question of historic importance. To build a proletarian-communist world or to be shipwrecked in the storms of bourgeois-capitalist anarchy? In a situation as totally revolutionary as the present situation in Germany, participation in parliamentarism thus signifies not only the sabotage of the idea of councils, but also helps to give the putrefying bourgeois order a new lease of life, and thus to obstruct the progress of the proletarian revolution.

With the left radicals making some organisational headway, Pannekoek continued to reach out to the Comintern, though the extent of the differences was becoming increasingly clear. A final break between the Leninists and the left radicals – now known as the ‘left communists’ – occurred with the publication in 1920 of Lenin’s relentlessly hostile and patronising polemic, ‘Left-wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Gorter responded vigorously with an Open Letter to Comrade Lenin in which he detailed the left communist case against the adoption of Bolshevism, and accused Lenin of political opportunism and of a poor understanding of conditions in western Europe. Reflecting the turmoil then gripping Germany, he countered Lenin’s defence of parliamentary agitation with an argument for extra-parliamentary direct action:

First of all, the argument about propaganda in parliament. This is an insignificant argument, for the non-communist workers – that is the social-democratic, christian, or other bourgeois-oriented workers – usually do not hear anything about our parliamentary speeches from their newspapers. The speeches are mostly distorted. We therefore do not reach them with these parliamentary speeches. We only reach them through meetings, pamphlets, newspapers. We – and I speak frequently in the name of the KAPD – are reaching them (and we speak now of the period of revolution) particularly through our actions. In all larger cities and villages, they see us act: our strikes, our street-fights, our councils. They hear our slogans. They see us go forward. That is the best propaganda and it does the most convincing. Such actions do not occur in parliament! The as yet non-communist workers, petty bourgeois, and small peasant elements are reached quite well without parliamentary activity.

Lenin, however, was not for turning and the Comintern moved to suppress the left communists, who were fast becoming openly hostile to Bolshevik policies and methods of organising. For Pannekoek and the left communists, their distrust was heightened by the intolerance shown by the Russian and German Leninists towards opposing points of view within the revolutionary movement, by the Bolsheviks’ treatment of the Workers’ Opposition in Russia and by the brutal crushing of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921. Pannekoek, Gorter and the left communists were hugely enthused by the emergence of workers’ councils across Europe after 1917 and this, to a large degree, explains their enthusiasm for the Russian revolution. It also explains the vehemence with which they rejected the Leninist tradition when, as they saw it, the soviets were neutralised as the Bolsheviks concentrated state power in their own hands. The Bolsheviks, in Pannekoek’s view, gutted the soviets – the only means through which the revolution could be carried forward – in the process of consolidating a one-party dictatorship. The use of terror as an instrument of control by the Bolshevik state further appalled Pannekoek. Moreover, the anti-statism advocated by Lenin in The State and Revolution was contradicted by Bolshevik practice. Within Russia, some critics of Lenin were eager to highlight this particular contradiction; for example, Julius Martov, a Menshevik and erstwhile collaborator on Iskra, led a ‘loyal’, yet fiercely critical, opposition to the Bolshevik regime until his exile to Germany in 1920. Turning the anti-statist ambitions of The State and Revolution against its author, he railed:

The ‘Soviet state’ has not established in any instance electiveness and recall of public officials and the commanding staff. It has not suppressed the professional police. It has not assimilated the courts in direct jurisdiction by the masses. It has not done away with social hierarchy in production. It has not lessened the total subjection of the local community to the power of the state. On the contrary, in proportion to its evolution, the Soviet state shows a tendency in the opposite direction. It shows a tendency towards intensified centralism of the state, a tendency toward the utmost possible strengthening of the principles of hierarchy and compulsion…In the crucible of reality, the ‘power of the soviets’ has become the ‘soviet power’, a power that originally issued from the soviets but has steadily become independent from the soviets.

As a political current, the left communist movement was able to withstand attacks from the Leninists while revolutionary conditions existed in Germany. However, as the political and economic situation changed after 1920, there was a general decline in working-class militancy that undermined the communist left, eliminating its mass character. As the far left became marginalised, the KPD had powerful outside forces to sustain it, while the KAPD – relatively isolated as a political current – soon fractured. By 1923, the entire left communist movement in Germany numbered roughly 20,000 members and this had diminished to no more than a few hundred by 1933. As the left communist movement lost critical mass, the Bolshevisation of international communism greatly assisted its further decline. Thereafter, the politics of left radicalism were reinvented as ‘council communism’, an anti-Bolshevik Marxist tradition that has few adherents, although it enjoyed a small, albeit brief, revival in the late 1960s and 1970s.33 Prominent figures associated with this political current included the German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, who was expelled from the KPD in 1926. However, council communism, not unlike strains of Trotskyism and Leninism, was prone to dogmatism and theoretical inflexibility, and there was a sectish quality to many of the groups that emerged. The council communists did receive the support and encouragement of Anton Pannekoek, but following the collapse of left communism in Germany in the 1920s he withdrew from direct involvement in political activism.

Arguing for participatory democracy:

The demise of the non-Leninist revolutionary movement after 1921 meant that Pannekoek became a marginal figure on the political left for the remainder of his life. Disillusioned by the failure of the German revolution, he wrote little between 1921 and 1927. During that period, he established an astronomical institute at the University of Leiden and absorbed himself in his academic work. By 1927, however, he was again writing and from then, until his death in 1960, he wrote several books and many articles on Marxist theory. His two best known works from that time are his critique of Lenin’s understanding of philosophy, Lenin as Philosopher (1934), and Workers’ Councils (1950).

Pannekoek was aged 77 when Workers’ Councils was published and, although it was not intended as a summation of his political philosophy, it does contain the most detailed exposition of his views on participatory democracy. Indeed, while Marxist theorists have tended to focus on the past and the present, Pannekoek in this book looks also to the future and delineates the type of democratic society that he desires. It was published initially on the continent by the council communists, but Pannekoek, anxious to reach the English-speaking world, sought a publisher in the United States at the conclusion of the war. He was unsuccessful but his friend and former KAPD member Paul Mattick suggested Australia and put him in touch with a contact called J.A. Dawson. Writing to Dawson in 1946, Pannekoek explained the theme of the book in the following terms:

Whereas all socialist writers proclaim as their goal state socialism, where the workers are dominated and commanded by managers in the shops, by a bureaucracy of intellectuals in social life…freedom from exploitation is only possible when the workers are themselves masters of the shops, direct and manage the shops by their community, and build up a social organisation of all the shops and enterprises into a united system of production by means of workers’ councils. At present, we see how state socialism in making headway – as propagated by the socialist and communist parties – just means the tendencies of monopolist capital linking itself narrower to state power (what the English Labour government is doing is only modernising capitalism, abolishing its worst ignominies while securing state-guaranteed profits to capital). So, we see the future of the real class-fight of the workers in big strike movements, increasing in importance…acquiring the character of political strikes, finding its organisation the germ of future world organisation in their strike committees turned into workers’ councils.

Dawson agreed to publish the book, which came out first in serial form during 1948 and then in book format in 1950.

Much of the book was written during the Second World War while he lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland and, for that reason alone, its optimism is striking. The war hangs heavily over the book; the author is clear that Europe was then in a period of reconstruction rather than social upheaval. Nonetheless, his faith in the working class and in socialism was undiminished; his arguments for working-class self-emancipation and his insistence on democratic control of the means of production are of a piece with the ideas he had advanced decades before:

At the end of the First World War, world revolution seemed near; the working class arose full of hope and expectation that now its old dreams would come true. But they were dreams of imperfect freedom, they could not be realised. Now, at the end of the Second World War, only slavery and destruction seem near; hope is far distant; but a task, the greater aim of real freedom, looms. More powerful than before, capitalism rises as master of the world. More powerful than before, the working class has to rise to fight for mastery over the world. More powerful forms of suppression, capitalism has found. More powerful forms of fight, the working class has to find and use. So, this crisis of capitalism at the same time will be the start of a new workers’ movement…The call for unity must be supplemented by indication of the goal: take the factories and machines; assert your mastery over the productive apparatus; organise production by means of workers’ councils.

Workers’ Councils is a book that must be seen in the context of its time, but the central themes remain of relevance. It is a challenging text by a once prominent theorist that the Marxist tradition and historians have largely forgotten. Indeed, his antipathy to Leninism and social democracy – and his revolutionist outlook – means that even today, despite the retreat of orthodox communism, his ideas would be dismissed as ‘ultra-leftist’ in some quarters. Such a dismissal could only be based on an ignorance of the history of Marxism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Left radicalism, if only for a brief period, was once a political force with significant weight.

AK Press has done a fine job in republishing Workers’ Councils and the cover is festooned with recommendations from prominent figures such as Noam Chomsky, Mike Davis, Howard Zinn and Peter Hitchcock. The work itself is prefaced by a number of interviews, one of which is with Chomsky, who expresses his admiration for Pannekoek’s politics and emphasis on economic democracy. Chomsky recommends this book and it is hard to do otherwise, particularly when one knows something of the man who wrote it. This is a classic of twentieth-century Marxism and should be read.

This essay-in-review by ISN member Fintan Lane is published in Saothar (the journal of Irish labour history), vol. 30 (2005) - Fintan Lane, 2005

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