The Workers’ Way to Freedom and Other Council Communist Writings 
Anton Pannekoek, edited by Robyn K Winters, PM Press, £23.99

WHEN Lenin wrote “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” in 1920, he was taking aim at diverse critics of the Bolshevik party’s tightening international grip over the interpretation of Marxism.

One of the bones of contention between the “left communists,” as they became known, and Leninists was about the role of political parties themselves, and hence the participation by communists in bourgeois parliaments. Foretelling later doctrinal divergence, this was a dispute about socialist strategy in Western Europe and how best to read the array of class forces confronted by workers — and hence how best to organise — in countries markedly different to revolutionary Russia.
 
A majority of the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in December 1918 was opposed to electoral politics and trade unionism, positioning themselves to the left of Bolshevik orthodoxy. However, divisions sundered the new organisation precisely over these issues, fuelling the denunciations of Lenin and others at the Comintern whose official line called for participation in parliamentary elections and fighting to control established trade unions.

This split has been obscured in the shadows of history, yet it remains relevant today because of the questions raised by left communists about the behaviour of labour parties, supported by trade unions, that accept bourgeois parliamentarism uncritically as so-called representatives of workers’ interests. 

One strain of such positions, found mostly among the Dutch and German left and associated with the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, became known as “council communism” whose beef with the Bolsheviks was based on an instinct that the party was gradually displacing the source of the revolution — the workers’ soviets. Some left communists later went so far as to argue that the Bolshevik revolution had not had a proletarian or socialist character at all but was the instrument of a bourgeois revolution because it had led to the eventual creation of state capitalism, and that the avant-garde party model of the Bolsheviks was an obstacle to revolution.

In retrospect, council communist thinkers such as the Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek can be seen as doctrinal puritans presciently alienated by Lenin’s uncompromising domination of Marxist interpretation — “Marxism-Leninism” — which would reach a peak with the “Bolshevisation” of the Comintern under Stalin.

Beneath the juggernaut of history, it’s easy to forget marginal characters such as Pannekoek feeding into the momentous debates of the era that stirred workers across the world like a vast whirlpool, but there are aspects of his thought today that deserve another look. 

First, Pannekoek had much to say about parliamentary democracy in bourgeois states which, he argued, was merely instrumental to capitalism: universal suffrage gave an outlet to discontent, thereby preventing workers from rebelling. The illusion of parliaments, he said, was that they gave workers the hope of gaining control without ever actually being able to do so because this would be intolerable to the bourgeoisie. 

So while social democracy in European countries did what trade unionism had done in England — awakening the class consciousness of workers, thereby embodying “the noblest hopes, the deepest idealism, the best revolutionary ideas of the working class” — it did so unwittingly in the service of capitalism. Pannekoek wrote: “Thus the Socialist Party is a natural and necessary member in capitalist society. Capitalism is not really complete without a political workers’ party.” The “honest and devoted Socialists” delegated by workers to represent them in parliament in the conquest of state power are soon “transformed into petty capitalist politicians.” 

Trade unions, he added, were equally valuable to capitalism and accepted by employers to the extent that they ensured industrial peace by allowing bosses to buy off workers with tidbits, small concessions in wages and conditions. Moreover, trade unionism regulated relations between members of the bourgeoisie themselves, guarding employers against rivals attempting unfair competition by underpaying their workers.

“Its aim is not to replace capitalism by another form of production, but to secure good living conditions within capitalism. Its character is not revolutionary, but conservative... Capitalism is not complete, it is not true capitalism, without trade unionism.” 

The solutions to all these problems, Pannekoek and his peers believed, lay in how the workers organised. He envisaged revolution not as an armed uprising against the state but as a universal strike led by workers’ councils motivated explicitly to wrest power from the capitalist class. The new society could escape the pitfalls of “officialdom” — the seeping party bureaucratisation that became the real enemy of Soviet communism — by going back to basics, to the “strike committees” from which had emerged the soviets (councils).

Pannekoek wrote: “The workers’ councils as the new form of political organisation take the place of parliamentarism, the political form of capitalist rule. Parliamentary democracy is considered by capitalist theorists as well as by social democrats as the perfect democracy, conforming to justice and equality. In reality it is only a disguise for capitalist domination, and contrary to justice and equality. It is the council system that is the true workers’ democracy.”

While the precise form in which workers’ councils are organised, operate and interact remained a matter of debate, Pannekoek saw factory or shop-level councils forming “natural groups” of working-class organisation and political power.

Council communism was riven by its own internal disputes, but arguably suffered more at the hands of the dominant communist parties with the most famous expulsion being that of the former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who was also opposed to parliamentary politics.

It enjoyed a brief resurgence during the student rebellions of the 1960s, but has remained marginal on the socialist left and is of interest today, ironically, mainly to libertarian anarchists whom Pannekoek was critical of.

Yet we can recognise the relevance of its critique more than ever right now in a context in which the capitalist character of labour parties, nurtured by essentially conservative trade unions, is increasingly evident.