The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

knowledge of the day, which explains the slow development of a socialist synthesis in all areas (social, political,
economic, scientific, cultural). He also leaves out the fact that in the revolutionary movement of his time, there
were no more ‘great thinkers’ like Marx, capable of synthesising all the new knowledge elaborated in capitalist
society; and that, consequently, Marxism, in its political form of praxis, is disseminated collectively in the mass
of revolutionary militants, without all of them having assimilated all its theoretical bases. In fact, politics
becomes the ‘specialisation’ of these militants. Pannekoek who, after 1921, was more a theoretician than one of
these militants, expressed in a striking manner a reality of the workers’ movement: very often marxist
theoreticians like Pannekoek could make a profound analysis of the social and scientific evolution of their time,
while being essentially outside the real movement, observers rather than actors. It can thus happen that
theoreticians of the workers’ movement, whose studies can be so profound, find themselves in contradiction
with, even in opposition to, the real revolutionary movement. This was the case with Kautsky. The inverse is
also true: theoreticians whose marxist bases seem incomplete, vague or imbued with pre-marxist concepts, can
be fully adapted to the real movement.
Pannekoek’s book was revelatory of council communism’s ‘philosophy’. If we remove the profound Marxist
philosophical critique of Lenin’s bourgeois materialism, Lenin as Philosopher exposed the contradictions of the
‘councilist’ movement. Pannekoek himself expressed in a striking manner the separation between scientist and
militant. In council communism, there was undoubtedly a separation between the theoretical struggle and the
practical combat. An ‘economist’ vision in practice could perfectly well co-exist with a ‘pure’ theory.
But essentially, this book revealed a growing tendency in the councilist movement, including with Mattick in the
USA, to consider political activity purely from a theoretical angle. The praxis of Marxism, seen as an ‘organised
militant activity’, was relegated to second place. More and more the council communists presented themselves
as marxist ‘thinkers’, as pedagogues of socialism like Otto Rühle. Ben Sijes recognised later that for him, selfeducated,
the GIC had been his ‘university’. Their goal was to ‘enlighten the proletariat’ and not to act within it,
for fear of imposing a political line on it. The class struggle was portrayed in ideological form, as a struggle of
ideas. The proletariat had to free itself from ‘modern superstitions’, from ‘idols’ like the state and the nation, and
from ‘spiritual power’ like democracy, unions and parties. For this it was necessary that “workers themselves,
collectively and individually, act and decide, and thus educate themselves and form their own opinions”. 928 In
the council communist conception, Marxism appears less as praxis than as an ethic to be realised in the future.
The ‘philosophy’ of council communism was a striking mixture of historical materialism in ‘pure theory’ and
ethical idealism in practice.
Finally, on the political level, in line with the Theses on Bolshevism, Pannekoek seemed to display a tendency to
conciliation with the New Left socialism. The theory that the politics of Bolshevism could only lead to the
‘bourgeois revolution’ in Russia had already been defended by Kautsky in 1922. 929 The search for a conciliation
between council communism and ‘New Left socialism’, already evident in the ‘Rote Kämpfer’ group, continued
after the Second World War, especially in Germany. Nevertheless, these ‘linkages’ were superficial and can not
hide a deep antagonism so much with the social democracy than with stalinism and the various currents resulting
from Leninism, like the trotskyism.
‘Anti-Leninism’ was the cement of the council communist groups, their political and philosophical basis. 930
‘Anti-Leninism’, reaction to the course of the state-capitalist counter-revolution in Russia and Europe, was
928 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 109.
929 See K. Kautsky, ‘Rosa Luxembourg et le Bolchevisme’, from: L'Avenir, revue du socialisme (Bruxelles: Librairie du
Peuple, 1922): “...Russia is essentially at the stage of the bourgeois revolution... the West has its bourgeois revolutions
behind it and proletarian revolutions before it... Russia, by contrast, was so backward that it still had to go through the
bourgeois revolution, the tail of absolutism”.
930 Paradoxically, the council communists laid claim to a strict ‘Leninism’ when it came to rejecting the economic theses of
Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital. See Paul Mattick, ‘Die Gegensätze zwischen Luxemburg und Lenin’
(The differences of principle between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin), in: Rätekorrespondenz, No. 12, Sept. 1935. For him,
Luxemburg’s economic theory was one that “Lenin was right to qualify as erroneous and foreign to Marxism”.
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