The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

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”. 1122 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. 1123 The terms are almost
identical:
“In this second world war the workers' movement has fallen much deeper than in the first. In the first world war
its weakness, so sharply in contrast with former pride and boasting, manifested itself in that it was dragged
along, that deliberately, by its own will, it followed the bourgeoisie and turned into underlings of nationalism.
This character persisted in the next quarter of a century, with its idle talk and party intrigue, though gallant
fighting in strikes occurred. In the present war the working class had no will of its own any more to decide on
what to do; it was already incorporated into the entirety of the nation. As they are shuffled to and fro over
factories and shops, uniformed and drilled, commanded to the fronts, mixed up with the other classes, all
essence of the former working class has disappeared. The workers have lost their class; they do not exist as a
class any more; class-consciousness has been washed away in the wholesale submission of all classes under the
ideology of big capital.” 1124
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”. 1125 How was the working class going to be reborn
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 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 a class
consciousness concretised by the formation of a revolutionary class – workers in the workers’ councils.
It is true that, for Pannekoek, the main thing was less to draw a balance sheet of the counter-revolution which
had destroyed proletarian organisations than to see 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”. 1126 But “with a constant progression”, he added. 1127 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
1122 Op. cit., p. 368.
1123 Vercesi wrote in 1944: “The class has not existed socially for 15 years”. The Bordigist Italian Fraction in Marseilles
replied (Bulletin de discussion international, 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: 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).
1124 Op. cit., p. 386.
1125 Ibid.
1126 Ibid.
1127 Op. cit., p. 377, and the chapter on “Thought”.
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