The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

In fact, Pannekoek’s position on these questions was expressed some 15 years later in the book The Workers’
Councils (1946). It was not far removed from the theoretical conclusions of the Grundprinzipien, but it was
rather more connected to historical reality.
Like the Grundprinzipien, Pannekoek was in favour of the system of accounting on the basis of labour time:
“...in the new system of production, the essential element is the hours of labour, whether expressed in the initial
period in monetary units or in a real form”. 868 Like the GIC, Pannekoek had a tendency to reduce the economic
problems of the transition period to a technical and statistical matter: “The general accounting system, which
concerns and encompasses the administration of the different enterprises, unites them all in an economic process
of society as a whole... The basis of the social organisation of production is good management through the use of
statistics and accounting... The production process is revealed to all in the form of a simple and intelligible
numerical image”. 869
This administrative conception, determined by a statistical rather than a social reality, led to the idea of an
administrative organisation of the new society, a pure “administration of things” in the form of “accounting
offices”: “Once production has been organised, administration becomes the relatively simple task of a network
of inter-connecting ‘accounting offices”. 870
Like the GIC, Pannekoek only dealt with the higher stage of communism. The workers’ councils, the
organisations of real workers’ democracy, only have a decision-making role at the level of production, not at the
political level. Because “politics itself will have disappeared”. 871 the councils have no governmental functions.
There is no ‘council government’, which had been the slogan in the revolutionary period of 1917-21. “The
councils are not a government. Even the most centralised councils do not have a governmental character,
because they have no way of imposing their will on the masses; they are not organs of power”. 872
The aspects of maintaining social order and of class violence, typical of any state structure, could not be in the
hands of a central power: “All social power belongs to the workers themselves. Wherever the exercising of this
power is necessary – against disturbances or attacks on the existing order – it emanates from the workers’
collectives in the workshops and remains under their control.”. 873
This affirmation of the ‘social power’ of the ‘workers’ collectives’ by Pannekoek shows that the question of the
withering away of the state and of social classes, as analysed by Marx and Engels, was not dealt with in The
Workers’ Councils. It seems in fact that Pannekoek envisaged the existence of a semi-state in the higher stage of
communism, still exerting a form of violence. If “workers’ collectives” – and thus classes, not a classless society
of producers – still existed, was this not an admission that the state still existed as well? Even if this state power
was called ‘social’, even if it was decentralised from councils to “collectives”, was this not an admission that
class political power still existed? To these questions, there was no response from Pannekoek.
The Workers’ Councils implicitly criticised the Grundprinzipien on two essential points:
–The beginnings of the period of transition between capitalism and communism would be marked by
scarcity, given the necessity to reconstruct an economy ruined either by the civil war or the world
economic crisis (Pannekoek wasn’t precise about this). It would still be an economy of war and scarcity,
in which justice in the distribution of consumer goods would be based not on a fair accounting of hours
of labour but on the coercive – but moral – principle of obliging everyone to work for the community:
with Jan Appel and expressed agreement with Lenin’s view in State and Revolution: production organised as it is on the
railways.
868 Les Conseils ouvriers (Paris: Bélibaste, 1974), p. 78.
869 Idem, pp. 86-7.
870 Idem, p. 86.
871 Idem, p. 125.
872 Idem, p. 126.
873 Ibid.
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