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Pannekoek himself managed to avoid being troubled during the occupation. Having ‘officially’ retired from political life in 1921, he had become an astronomer of international renown working as a research professor at the University of Amsterdam. From 1941, he had begun to draw up the first chapters of the book which was to be published in 1946 under the title of The Workers’ Councils.8 These chapters show that Pannekoek did not give in to discouragement and remained an indomitable adversary of capitalist society: “Knowing the enemy, knowing his resources, his strengths and his weaknesses is necessary in any struggle. It is the one primordial condition, which will permit us to avoid discouragement when we measure the forces of the enemy, and any illusions when we have gained a partial success”.9
Like many revolutionaries at the time - particularly the Italian Left10 - Pannekoek was convinced that the defeat of Germany was inevitable: “The objective of the National Socialist dictatorship, the conquest and domination of the world, makes it probable that it will be destroyed in the course of the very war that it unleashed with this aim...”.11
However, contrary to other revolutionary groups in France and Italy and unlike the MLL-Front (see below), Pannekoek did not think that revolution would come out of a German defeat. He thought that history could not repeat itself and that the forces of the Allies would do everything to prevent a new November 1918: “... contrary to the previous history of Germany 1918, political power will not automatically fall into the hands of the working class. The victorious powers will not allow it: all their forces, if necessary, will serve in the repression”.12
The military defeat of National Socialism would clearly leave American capital dominant in Europe: “...the Allied armies will liberate Europe in order to permit its exploitation by American capitalism”.13
In fact, for the theoretician of the ‘councilist’ movement, the fate of the revolution was to be played out, in the USA and not in a Europe “devastated, prey to chaos and misery, its productive apparatus, adapted to equipping the war, completely worn out, its land and inhabitants exhausted...”,14 “The working class in America will have to undertake the most difficult war against the capitalist world. This war will be decisive for its liberation and that of the entire world”.15
This being said, Pannekoek was far from underestimating the subjective conditions of the revolution in the USA, and in particular the factor of class consciousness:
The main weakness of the American working class, is its bourgeois mentality, its total submission to bourgeois ideas, to the black art of Democracy. The workers will only be capable of disentangling themselves from capitalism the day that their spirits ascend to a more profound class consciousness, the day they regroup in a stronger class unity and when they enlarge their vision to a class culture never before reached in the world.16
As for the potential of the Russian proletariat following the war, he remained sceptical. In a chapter of his book written in 1944, he noted that Russian state capitalism had engendered “extermination camps for the work force where millions of victims are crammed together in the plains and icy deserts of Siberia”.17 He considered that the revolutionary impulse given to the Russian workers would come from central Europe, on condition that the workers of this zone “undergo a profound change in their mode of thought and in their determination”,18 and above all could “face the formidable material power of victorious world capitalism” as much as the “spiritual forces” of bolshevism and nationalism.19
However, it was on Asia, and particularly Japan and China, that Pannekoek concentrated all his attention. He was convinced that the end of the war would mark the dawn of a new era in these countries.20 It was inevitable “that the Japanese ruling class would succumb” faced with “the colossal industrial resources of America”. This defeat would allow an exploitation of the Japanese workers “under more modern forms” with the disappearance “of the feudal forms of oppression”.21 Thus the installation of a more “modern” capitalism would permit the proletariat of the ‘Empire of the Rising Sun’ to join the ranks of the world proletariat: “... Japanese workers, like their American and European class comrades, will be capable of participating in the general struggle for liberty”.22
Pannekoek nonetheless did not exclude the possibility that following the defeat of Japan “with the collapse of repressive power, a revolution of the peasants and workers would break out”. This forecast of an Oriental ‘November 1918’ was to prove false.
We see the same fascination for the Orient, as some sort of regenerator of the ‘old workers’ movement’ in the chapter on ‘the rise of China’.23 Not that Pannekoek was given to infatuation with the nationalist movement of Mao Zedong, whose partisans “under cover of communist ideas and slogans... are the heroes and champions of capitalist development in China”.24 In fact, it was not “the label under which a mode of thought or action is presented which determines the real content but its class character”. Despite the ‘communist’ label the CCP remained a bourgeois organisation in the same way as the Kuomintang of Chiang-kai Chek.
Far from showing that a development of capitalism was impossible in the backward zones of the world in the decadence of the system - a theoretical analysis of many revolutionaries at the time25 - Pannekoek considered a Chinese bourgeois revolution possible. Without saying who would carry it out - Mao or Chiang - he believed in “the accession of China to the status of a new capitalist world power” through “the intensity” of its “economic development”.26 This ‘development’ would be carried out under the direction of American capital, without that bringing into effect the installation of a ‘democracy’. On the contrary there would be “a dictatorship at the level of central government, completed perhaps by a type of democratic autonomy at the level of the district or village”. In effect this meant that the old system of despotism at a central level would co-exist with the more or less autonomous village units.
These contradictory views on the evolution of Chinese capital did not call into question the role of the Chinese proletariat. More than a presumed ‘development’, Pannekoek expected “a more rapid take off than in Europe of a powerful movement of the working class”.27
Remarkably, the guide of the council communists foresaw that the upheavals at the end of war would lead to ‘de-colonisation’. This, termed “self-determination” in his book, would benefit the indigenous upper classes:
In these countries self-determination will not only be the prerogative of the upper classes; not only will their members insert themselves in the subordinate ranks of the colonial administration of yesterday, but they will finish up by occupying the leading places, assisted, it goes without saying, by white ‘advisers’ and specialists charged with ensuring that the interests of capital are served as necessary.28
Thus the proletariat of the colonies could struggle directly against its own national bourgeoisie, “independently for [its] class interests and for liberty, alongside the western workers”.29
Such was the political vision of Pannekoek in 1944. Retiring in 1943, he devoted himself simultaneously to writing his Memories of the workers’ movement and his Memoirs of an Astronomer.30 Perhaps feeling that his life was in danger, with the proliferation of arrests and deportations in occupied Holland, he wanted to leave to posterity a political, as much as a scientific, testament. However, these memoirs were only published nearly 40 years later.
Towards the end of the war, he was equally isolated in writing the last chapters of The Workers’ Councils. Pannekoek’s retirement was not political. His hope for a revolutionary upsurge was dimmed. The end of the war strikingly demonstrated that capitalism was leading society “to an inferior level of civilisation”.31 In fact this regression was a “fall into barbarism”. Was this fall the expression of an economic system going into its phase of decline? Pannekoek did not answer and refused to use the term ‘decadence’, doubtless because he still thought an ‘intensive development’ possible in Asia. In essence, the class consciousness of the proletariat in the European countries seemed to have disappeared. The decline of the workers’ movement accompanied that of Europe.
It is particularly interesting to note that this vision of the ‘disappearance’ of class consciousness was symmetrical to that of Vercesi around the same time, in the Italian Fraction in France.32 The terms are almost identical:
With the Second World War, the workers’ movement has fallen even lower than in the First... During the course of the present war, the working class has no will of its own. It finds itself incapable of deciding what it wants to do: it was already incorporated into the national body. As the workers are dragged along from factory to factory, as they wear the uniform and join the exercises, as they are sent to the front and mixed with other classes, all that once formed the essence of the working class has disappeared. The workers have lost their class. They no longer exist as a class. Their class consciousness has been swept away in the submission of all classes to big Capital. The class language particular to them: socialism, community, has been adopted by capital for different concepts.33
As so often in The Workers’ Councils, the most clear-cut assertions are nuanced some lines later. This disappearance of the working class was true “more particularly in Central Europe”; by contrast “in the western countries, there remain sufficient class feelings for the workers soon to take up the struggle for the transformation of the industry of war into the industry of peace”. How was the class going to be re-born with peace, and on what basis was the class consciousness of the workers going to be re-formed if it no longer existed? All these questions remained unanswered. Unless he thought - as Vercesi did at the time - that class consciousness was ‘eclipsed’, disappearing in war to be re-born in times of peace. But, if such were the case, it became difficult to explain why the First World War gave rise to revolution - which essentially showed the development of a class consciousness concretised by the formation of a revolutionary class by workers in the workers’ councils.
It is true that, for Pannekoek, the main thing was less to draw a bilan of the counter-revolution which had destroyed proletarian organisations than to show the way that the revolution must necessarily take in the distant future. The revolution, in fact, “would not be the result of a few years, no more than a brief revolutionary combat. It is a historic process which will cover a whole period, with its highs and lows, with its storms and calms”. But “with a constant progression”, he added.34 Developed in three chapters of the book, the idea of the workers’ councils was only really discussed and criticised in the ‘councilist’ movement after 1945. The same went for the question of the party, on which the movement was far from unanimous (see below). All these questions went beyond the immediate framework of the war in order to open up and enlarge a theoretical vision of marxism.
Pannekoek’s activity during the war was theoretical. It can be compared to that of Bordiga. For the first time in the history of the workers’ movement, some recognised ‘leading figures’ abandoned all revolutionary activity within an organisation in order to withdraw into theoretical studies, even to dedicate themselves to their professional activity. Following from a distance the activity of the organisations claiming their orientation, they contributed to it sometimes - and this was much more true of Pannekoek than of Bordiga in the 1930s - they never underwent either exile or the illegality required for militant work. Despite their fidelity to the revolutionary cause, they took refuge in the silence of their studies. Their contributions became personal and exterior to their movement.
The personal nature of Pannekoek’s contribution allows a better understanding of its limits. Outside the battle of fractions, he seemed35 - like Trotsky before the First World War - to have a more serene and lucid view of the historic course followed by capitalism in these years of war. On the basis of his revolutionary experience, he could grasp the consequences of the war for the workers’ movement: the confirmation of a defeat and not, as in 1917-18, the opening of a period of social upheaval. He understood that the end of the war would not mean the proletarian revolution in the colonies - which could only come from the developed countries, and in the first place, according to him, the USA - but the domination of the indigenous bourgeoisie.
More ambiguous was his vision of a possible development in the backward areas, since described as the ‘Third World’, or as the ‘developing countries’. Like Bordiga36, he thought that these countries could become new economic and social poles. In some way the history of capitalism would repeat the 19th century. But whereas Bordiga supported the struggles of national liberation and ‘coloured people’ – in the tradition of the Baku Congress37 - Pannekoek defended the principle of a workers’ struggle for international social liberation.
The theory of consciousness defended in The Workers’ Councils was contradictory. According to him, the physical disappearance of the proletariat in the war was the reason for the disappearance of the ‘class for itself’ as a class conscious of its aims. For Pannekoek the dominant idea was that class consciousness could only be a reflection of the general consciousness of the class at a given moment (real consciousness or level of consciousness). Consequently the smothering of this real immediate consciousness led to the disappearance of class consciousness, as a political revolutionary consciousness. Since class consciousness was not seen also as a product of revolutionary organisations, it could only exist as an individual consciousness: “thought by oneself, a knowledge acquired by oneself of the method for determining what is true and right”.38 Thus, class consciousness, far from being a collective product, emerged through “self-education... through the intensive activity of each brain”. This made class consciousness, as a generalised consciousness of the class, more the fruit of a self-education than a maturation in depth coming to the surface in the form of mass movements.
Council communist theory had a revolutionary impact in the Netherlands, by developing within the organised framework of the Spartacus Communist Union. The positions of the GIC and of Pannekoek found an echo through this organisation, that followed its paradoxical evolution.
Notes
8. The book came out under the pseudonym of P. Aartsz, in the ‘De Vlam’ editions. These editions were those of the Spartacus Communistenbond.
9. Les Conseils Ouvriers (The Workers’ Councils), Belibaste, 1974; p. 219.
10. See Contribution to a history of the revolutionary movement: The Italian Communist Left, 1980. Published by the International Communist Current.
11. Les Conseils Ouvriers, p. 331.
12. Op. cit., p. 331.
13. Op. cit., p. 331.
14. Op. cit., p. 331.
15. Op. cit., p. 278.
16. Op. cit., p. 278.
17. Op. cit., p. 376.
18. Op. cit., p. 377.
19. Op. cit., p. 377.
20. Op. cit., p. 344. Pannekoek was optimistic for the future: “This war is one of the last convulsions in the irresistible process leading to the unification of humanity; the struggle which will result from it will make this unity a community led by itself” (p. 335).
21. Op. cit., p.344.
22. Op. cit., pp.344-345.
23. Op. cit., pp.347-359.
24. Op. cit., pp.356-357.
25. The partisans of the ‘Luxemburgist’ theory of the decadence of capitalism - such as the French Communist Left, and before that the German and Dutch Lefts, except Pannekoek - showed the impossibility of bourgeois revolutions in what would become the ‘Third World’. After the war, on the other hand, Bordiga’s current, tried hard to show that the ‘revolt of the coloured people’ would be the starting point for a formidable development of the productive forces.
26. Op. cit., pp.358-359.
27. Op. cit., p.359.
28. Op. cit., p.367.
29. Op. cit., p.368.
30. Pannekoek’s archives were collated after his death by B. A. Sijes. Sijes prepared the edition of “Herinneringen” (Memories) published by Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1982. Herinneringen was written by Pannekoek by candlelight because of the periodic power cuts. The Memoirs of an Astronomer was left to his son and grandson. It is interesting to note that Pannekoek wrote his Herinneringen uit de arbeidersbeweging (‘Memories of the workers’ movement’) with a militant concern: “It is necessary that the new conception [of councils, ed. Note] little by little penetrate the masses; from this comes the necessity for a literature of propaganda which is easily readable and assimilated in its content. Clarification is the greatest force which makes the workers’ revolution possible; without this conception, without this clarification any movement of revolt is deviated into a dead end or to failure. Our task must be the following: have a concern for good propagandist literature; untiringly, here in this country, but also in England, Germany and America. The book by P. Aatsz (written in 1941-42) must contribute to that” (Herinneringen uit de arbeidersbeweging, p.218).
31. Op. cit., chapter V, ‘Into the abyss’, pp.379-387.
32. Vercesi wrote in 1944: “The class has not existed socially for 15 years”. The Italian Fraction replied firmly (International Discussion Bulletin, no. 5, May 1944): “Social existence cannot be the consciousness that a class has by itself of the place that it occupies in history, of its historic mission”. And further on: “The vanguard organisation is engendered by historic evolution; its existence is justified historically and without interruption; at each moment there is a place for its existence... there cannot be stages of social disappearance of the class, nor a fading away of the conditions for the existence of its political organism” (op.cit. p.36).
33. Op. cit., p.386.
34. Op. cit., p.377 and the chapter on “Thought”.
35. It is this independence of spirit that Pannekoek claimed: “Through my material situation made possible by a bourgeois position, scientific work and teaching in the service of bourgeois science, I was completely independent and without prejudice as regards the workers’ movement; I had no duty to accomplish; I can calmly reorient myself and aim for a new, better and more general vision. Independence of existence is the condition for independence of thought. And that, perhaps, still can continue to bear fruit” (‘Herinneringen’, p. 218).
36. See Bordiga: I fattori di razza e nazione nelle teoria marxista, Iskra edizioni, Milan, 1979. Bordiga, however, unlike Pannekoek, left the theoretical framework of marxism behind when he substituted the concept of race and nation for that of class, exalting the ‘revolt of coloured peoples’ - ‘black’, ‘yellow’ and ‘olive’ (sic) in the Third World.
37 See The First Congress of the Peoples of the Orient. Baku, 1920, Maspéro Reprint, 1971. At the time the Dutch Communist Party, to which Pannekoek belonged, launched an appeal to the peoples of the Orient: “Brother Hindus! [Indonesians, ed. Note] Join up with your oppressed brothers of the Orient who, in their turn, revolt against the English capitalists, allied to your oppressors, the Dutch capitalists!” (p.228).
38. Op.cit., pp.490-494.
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