The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

“At the beginning of the period of transition, where the economy will be in ruins, the essential problem will be to
set up an apparatus of production and to ensure the immediate existence of the population. It is very possible that
in these conditions, basic food supplies will be distributed uniformly, as is always done in times of war or
famine. But it is more likely that in this phase of reconstruction, in which all available forces will be used to the
full, and in which the new moral principles of common labour will only take shape in a gradual manner, the right
to consume will be linked to the accomplishment of some kind of labour. The old popular adage, ‘he who
doesn’t work, doesn’t eat’ expresses an instinctive feeling of justice.” 874
–The accounting of the hours of labour carried out by each worker would not imply that each individual
would consume an equivalent to the hours of work he had carried out. The distribution of consumer
goods would not be an egalitarian principle for each individual; it would still be based on inequality.
Consumption was to be a general social process, eliminating the direct relationship between producer
and product. This was an implicit criticism of the GIC:
“…This does not mean that the whole of production will be distributed among the producers on a pro-rata basis
according to the number of hours of labour carried out by each individual, or, in other words, that each worker
will receive in products the exact equivalent of the time he has spent working. In reality, a very considerable part
of work will have to be devoted to the common property, to perfecting and enlarging the productive apparatus...
Moreover, it will be necessary to allocate part of the overall labour time to activities which are unproductive but
socially necessary: general administration, education, health services...”. 875
Pannekoek’s analysis, in the light of his brief theoretical forays into the period of transition, seems to be much
more nourished by concrete historical experiences (the Russian revolution and war communism) and less marked
by an egalitarian utopianism than that of the GIC. In his rejection of ‘equal rights’ in the distribution of
consumer goods, he seems to be closer to the analysis of Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. The
latter showed that an equal distribution based on labour time would straight away lead to new inequalities, since
the producers necessarily differed from each other in their own capacity for work, their family and physical
condition, etc.
However, like the Grundprinzipien, the Workers’ Councils remained stuck in a technical, accounting, clearly
‘economist’ problematic. The complex issues of the state and the proletariat’s rule in the transitional society
were never posed. On the economic level, the work completely ignores the decisive question of whether an
abundance of consumer goods under communism would make the calculation of individual labour time useless.
It seems that council communism found it hard to conceive of a communist society based not on scarcity but on
abundance?
An anti-Leninist philosophy? – Pannekoek’s book: Lenin as Philosopher (1938)
In 1938, Pannekoek published in Amsterdam the book Lenin as Philosopher which was written directly in
German. 876 Published under the pseudonym John Harper, this work can be considered, along with the Theses on
Bolshevism, Towards a New Workers’ Movement and the Grundprinzipien as one of the four pillars of
‘councilist’ theory. For Pannekoek and the council communist movement, this was a ‘marxist response’ to
874 Ibid., pp. 84-85.
875 Ibid., p. 85.
876 Lenin als Philosoph. Kritische Betrachtung der philosophischen Grundlagen des Leninismus, Bibliothek der
‚Rätekorrespondenz’, No. 1, Ausgabe der Gruppe Internationaler Kommunisten in Holland 1938; reprinted in 1969,
Frankfurt/Main. English translation: Lenin as Philosopher (New York 1948). Dutch translation in 1974 with an introduction
by B.A. Sijes, ‘De Vlam’. The French translation was published for the first time by the Gauche Communiste de France
(GCF) in its theoretical review Internationalisme, in 1947, Nos. 18-29. A critique of both was written by ‘Mousso’ [Robert
Salama (1919-1979)] and ‘Philippe’ (Pierre Bessaignet, who became later an ethnologist) in Nos. 30-33, 1948. The articles
criticising Pannekoek were republished in the ICCs International Review Nos. 25, 27, 28, 30, 1981-82. A new French
translation was made in 1970 by Daniel Saint-James and Claude Simon, published by Cahiers Spartacus.
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