Despite an impressive and insightful body of work, Dutch astronomer and revolutionary theorist Anton Pannekoek has remained a remarkably neglected figure and thinker in the history of Marxist thought. Caused to a large extent by Lenin’s (in)famous rebuttal of ‘left communist’ thinking in his 1920 pamphlet Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Pannekoek’s tireless efforts to develop a revolutionary practice that put the people before the party, that prioritised autonomous workers’ emancipation of the kind that Marx and Engels called upon in their manifesto, and one that finds radical light even in the most unusual moments of counterrevolutionary darkness – all of these striking contributions have failed to obtain their due acclamation by both academics and practitioners beyond the academy gates. As a result, very little of his writings remain in circulation in the Anglophone world, and Pannekoek, along with his ‘infantile’, like-minded revolutionary fellows, suffer a relative neglect by many of today’s radical circles.
In light of this situation, the recent publication of The Workers’ Way to Freedom & Other Council Communist Writings is certainly cause for celebration. In an effort to ‘widen the reach of Pannekoek’s ideas’ (4), editor Robyn K. Winters has admirably assembled the author’s most important polemical writings from the period of 1935 to 1954 – even going as far as consulting and transcribing the author’s own handwritten and unpublished manuscripts, doing so from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the timely publication of these writings will do more than simply shed light on a neglected revolutionary thinker and theorist; Winters’ volume will also aid further in attempts to shed the skin of some of the most restrictive trends of socialist thought. In a time when Marxism has become synonymous with Leninism, when ‘the Russian Revolution and its ideas still have such a strong influence over people’s spirits’ (211) (as Pannekoek put it in a letter to Cornelius Castoriadis), and when it is now ever more crucial for Marxian thought to recover its humanist image which it had lost in the previous century at the hands of its bloody counterfeits, Pannekoek’s writings, his polemics against Lenin and the bureaucratic elite that promised, yet failed, to carry out socialism in the workers’ name, as well as his attempts to promote genuinely emancipatory ties between workers through the council system, pose a unique alternative to the mainstream of ‘revolutionary’ thinking, and will no doubt be a vital guide for future emancipatory projects that endeavour to do right by Marx’s words.
It is thus significant that many of Pannekoek’s writings here, especially those from The Workers’ Way to Freedom which make up the collection’s first half, concern Lenin and the direction Marxism took, both politically and economically, in post-revolutionary Russia. Against the celebratory fervour that enthused the left-leaning European intelligentsia in the aftermath of Lenin’s successful revolution against the provisional government in Russia, a fervour for which Pannekoek too was found briefly guilty, Pannekoek argues that what was taking shape in Russia under the leadership of Lenin did not seem to fulfil the promises of a classless utopia devised by Marx. In this world of the party’s making, workers did not assume control of the means of production, nor did they gain any privileges over decision making processes in the political domain. The working class, in fact, was expropriated of all power to impose its revolutionary will on the new society; while the Party, and the developing bureaucratic elite who claimed to be building socialism on the workers’ behalf, enjoyed all the privileges promised to the proletariat in Marx’s account of history.
Alongside equally impressive, though equally neglected, ‘left communist’ theorists, from the German Marxist politician and theorist Otto Rühle to the Russian revolutionary and feminist theoretician Alexandra Kollontai, the latter Lenin would charge with the scathing accusation of ‘petty-bourgeois anarchism’, Pannekoek suggests that the Bolshevik Party was in fact not building socialism but developing a highly sophisticated form of state capitalism, abandoning the socialist aims of the leaders of the October Revolution and instead developing an oppressive state apparatus that would perform ‘the role of capitalist employer’ exploiting workers ‘in the interest of the state.’ (137) Even if these measures were, for Lenin and the Party, temporary, a mere means, as Pannekoek writes, ‘to do away with the enormous backwardness of Russia’ and bring ‘it in line with the old capitalist countries’ through ‘rapid development’ (68), they were also the same measures that put an oppressive bureaucratic elite in charge of the new society, that restored and normalised exploitative practices of the free market reintroduced by Lenin’s economic policies, and one that inhibited the autonomy of the working class who had played such a formative role in the Bolsheviks’ rise to power.
Even beyond the domain of industry, workers in Lenin’s Russia gained little by way of new freedoms following its so-called overthrow of capitalism. ‘There is no free press’, Pannekoek writes in ‘The Russian Revolution’, ‘nor the right of free speech for contrary opinions. The workers have not the right to strike. They have fewer rights than in capitalist countries. […] When workers criticise the government and speak up for real communism, they are persecuted for being “counterrevolutionary”.’ (69)
Such disdain for workers’ autonomy which characterised the leadership of Lenin would ultimately characterise the Soviet governments that followed. Even after Pannekoek’s death, and even in spite of a period of (apparent) progressive democratisation proceeding Stalin’s own demise, Soviet governments would intervene militarily to violently suppress two workers revolutions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) respectively. Pannekoek’s claim that when ‘the working class fights for its real freedom’, when it takes ‘the rule of society into its own hands’, it will find multiple parties, the Communist party included, completely ‘opposed to it’ (298), seemed to be a kind of warning as well as a bleak prophecy.
In his ruthless offensive on Lenin’s government, Pannekoek even takes on those institutions historically associated with preserving and developing worker autonomy. Though he concedes to it being a genuine action of the workers, Pannekoek argues trade unionism is one of such institutions which, for him, did ‘not go beyond the limits of capitalism’ (30). ‘Its aim’, he says, is ‘not to replace capitalism by another form of production, but to secure good living conditions within capitalism.’ Its character, therefore ‘is not revolutionary but conservative’ and thus, wholly ill equipped to carry the revolutionary project to its natural conclusion.
This is not to say trade unions are not relevant for the class struggle. If the workers’ desire is to increase their wages and to shorten their hours, in short: to improve their living under capitalism, trade unionism is the natural organisational tool to meet such demands. It also might develop the necessary class unity and feeling which would support and launch a future revolutionary offensive. Pannekoek is not prepared to dismiss positive gains made by trade unions. But, as Pannekoek forcefully reminds us, ‘they also serve the interests of capitalism itself and of the capitalist class.’ To be sure, it is an enterprise for workers to renegotiate various elements of their work, from their wages to their hours, but at the same time, it is an equally important mechanism for preserving the interests of capitalism. The unions, which do not allow the workers whom they represent to go beyond capitalism, becomes a mechanism for undermining the class struggle, instead of allowing it to flourish. To quote one of Pannekoek’s most radical claims: ‘Capitalism is not complete, it is not true capitalism, without trade unionism.’ (31)
But despite this, Pannekoek’s position is ultimately one of hope. In fact, now that the Party and its allied institutions have shown themselves completely hostile to the revolutionary project of the workers, the working class is forced to confront its situation alone, without the artificial guiding arm of party politics. Coming out of this depression ‘wiser and more conscious of its task’ (81), the workers are now prepared to reject ‘ready-made opinions’ offered by dictator parties ‘which claim to do the thinking for it’ and are instead pushed ‘to think out and to find out the way for itself.’ (296) For Pannekoek, this situation would inevitably lead the workers to ‘forms of mass action’ such as the council system ‘that are proper to the working class’ and its desire for liberation (216). In another moment of genuine optimism, Pannekoek, in the unpublished ‘Marx and Utopia – Party and Class’, looks at the situation the revolutionary movement found itself in in the aftermath of two world wars – a situation, eerily echoing our own, which seemed ‘to reveal capitalist supremacy in blazing terror’ and which made ‘Marx’s prediction an illusion and socialism a utopia again.’ (176) But what was destroyed in these decades, according to Pannekoek, was not the revolutionary movement itself; what was destroyed, in fact, was the idea that the Party could be ‘an instrument for liberation of the working class.’ While socialist parties taking the lead of the working class was necessary in the movement’s early years – at a time when the working class was not ready to take its fight for liberation into its own hands (177) – they eventually, much like trade unionism, develop ‘into instruments in the hands of [the new] leaders’ who are, as Pannekoek puts it in one of the collection’s most insightful chapters, ‘General Remarks on the Question of Organization’, ‘unwilling to engage in the revolutionary fight’ (167) and unable to ‘destroy capitalist power and annihilate capitalism.’ The destruction of capitalist power and the liberation of the working class, Pannekoek notes, can ‘be done only by the working class itself.’ (179)
For all Pannekoek’s insights, however, the book could have done with a more extensive introduction, particularly given the nature of the author’s neglected status in the West. Placing his writings in its appropriate historical and theoretical context – for example, not simply giving visibility to Pannekoek’s enemies but also his ‘left communist’ allies too – along with greater biographical insights, would have helped better position the reader approaching Pannekoek for the first time. The fact, for instance, that Pannekoek’s primary interest and specialism was in astronomy not political theory is an important detail that gets a minor mention at the back of the book, though is neglected in Winters’ introduction. This is a great shame given that Pannekoek belonged to a renaissance of Dutch astronomy in the interwar years, and whose contributions to academic astronomy, from his research on the astrophysics of stellar atmospheres to the distribution of Milky Way light which gives this book its cover, are among the most significant in the development of the field in the first half of the twentieth century. An asteroid and moon crater even bear his name. One might interpret these details as insignificant given that the work here concerns Pannekoek’s contributions as a political theorist. And yet this certainly is not the case. In fact, as Paul Mattick’s (insightful) article (225-238) found in the collection’s Appendix testifies, it was Pannekoek’s interest in the scientific study of the universe which would first lead him to embrace the historical and political doctrine of Marx. Further, his commitment to revolutionary politics would even compromise his professional career. Not only was he dismissed from his role at the prestigious Leiden Observatory for his public support for the protests of railway workers against a proposed law that would prevent government personnel from striking, but he was even later unable to accept the role of assistant director at the same observatory in 1918 (an institution that Pannekoek himself described as ‘tomb-like, full of stagnation and boredom’) as the Dutch government took issue with his political sympathies. These details are all significant, not simply because they provide vital guidance for contextualising Pannekoek’s political theories and academic achievements, but because they also sketch a striking portrait of a committed thinker willing to sacrifice his professional career for the success of the revolutionary movement.
All in all, however, Pannekoek’s ideas fortunately speak for themselves, and these are ideas certainly worthy of consideration in our own historical moment. Exemplified by the growth of a powerful authoritarian right-wing across the world, a climate emergency that threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of oppressed and working people, and the widespread failure of the so-called ‘left’ parties in the developed nations to stem the tide or offer programmes based on true socialist principles, important questions about workers’ organisation, the role of party politics in revolutionary movements, and what techniques should be employed to pave the path of revolution, are now being raised again, and along with that, the need for a genuine Marxist alternative. Pannekoek’s example offers us a platform on which to build such a true Marxism, based not on the artificial institutions which held back workers’ emancipation in the past, but on the organs of workers’ democracy and their flourishing. For those of us concerned with responding to the above crises and who remain committed to preserving and developing the most revolutionary aspects of Marxism, this volume, despite its minor shortcomings, will be welcome reading.
Reviewed by Reece Rogers