Non-Leninist

Marxism

Writings on the Workers Councils

 

 

 

Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst, and Rühle

 

  

 

Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007

 

  

All of the works herein are in the public domain. 

 

Published by Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida

 

First printing 2007

 

 

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

      Non-Leninist Marxism; Writings on the Workers Councils/Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst, Rühle

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8

1.       Communism.   2. Socialism – Europe – History.  3.  Communism – Europe – History.   I. Title

 

HX237 .G67 2007

335.0094                        LCCN 2007929495

 

 

Red and Black Publishers, PO Box 7542, St Petersburg, Florida,  33734

Contact us at: info@RedandBlackPublishers.com

 

Printed and manufactured in the United States of America

 

  

 

CONTENTS

Introduction           5

 

PART ONE:   Hermann Gorter          11

 

Open Letter to Comrade Lenin (1921)          13

                        Introduction          13

                        The Question of the Trade Unions         26

                        Parliamentarianism          42

                        Opportunism in the Third International          77

                        Conclusion           82

Why We Need the Fourth Communist Workers' International (1921)          95

 

 

PART TWO:  Anton Pannekoek          101

 

The Labor Movement and Socialism (1908)          103

The German Revolution-First Stage (1918)        113

 

PART THREE:  Sylvia Pankhurst          121

 

            Communism and Its Tactics  (1921-1923)        123

 

                        Part One          123

                        Part Two          126

                        Part Three          130

                        Part Four          132

                        Part Five          138

                        Part Six          144

                        Part Seven          148

                         

PART FOUR:  Otto Rühl          155

 

            The Revolution Is Not a Party Affair (1920)           157

            Report From Moscow (1920)          165

  

 

Introduction

 

The framework of the worker’s council was born in the turbulent upheavals in Europe between 1917 and 1920. In the wake of the Russian revolution in February 1917, a wave of radicalism swept over Europe. In Italy, the industrial workers of Turin and Genoa seized a number of factories and paralyzed the authorities with a general strike. In Germany, the government tottered on the brink of collapse, as strikes and worker uprisings came within a hair’s breadth of seizing power. In Hungary, the government actually fell, and a “Soviet Government” held power for a short time. In all of these militant movements, the instrument of organization was the worker’s council, an elected body of workers from each plant who organized and carried out the rebellions.

The new form of organization was seized on by militant revolutionaries as an alternative to the reformist Social Democratic parties. The Social Democrats advocated capturing the existing state through election campaigns and then legislating for government ownership of industries—their definition of “socialism”. This strategy was attacked by the new council communists. “’Statifying’ companies,” declared Anton Pannekoek, “is not socialism; socialism is the power of the proletariat.” The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci wrote that the future instruments of worker control could be seen in the worker’s councils:

 

The socialist state already exists potentially in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited working class. To link these institutions, co-ordinating and ordering them into a highly centralized hierarchy of competence and powers, while respecting the necessary autonomy and articulation of each, is to create a genuine worker’s democracy here and now—a worker’s democracy in effective and active opposition to the bourgeois state, and prepared to replace it here and now in all its essential functions of administering and controlling the national heritage.

During the “Two Red Years” of 1919-1920, Gramsci encouraged workers in the industrial plants to transform their “workshop committees” into worker’s councils that would be capable of taking over and running the plant directly and democratically.

In 1917, the Russians had deposed the Tsar and the Provisional Government by organizing into soviets (from the Russian word for “council”). The European council communists praised the soviet form of government, believing it to be based on the direct democratic control of the workplace by worker’s councils. The Dutch communist Hermann Gorter pronounced, “This supple and flexible organism is the world’s first socialist regime.”

When word began to filter back about the Bolshevik brand of “democratic centralism”, however, the council movement changed its stance toward the Russian Revolution. In 1920, when Otto Rühle toured the Soviet Union as a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International, he reported that the Soviets were mere tools of the ruling Bolshevik Party, and were “not councils in a revolutionary sense”. Instead, he concluded, the Leninists were ruling through “bureaucracy, the deadly enemy of the council system”.

A steady stream of criticism began. Pannekoek wrote, “If the most important element of the revolution consists in the masses taking their own affairs—the management of society and production—in hand themselves, then any form of organization which does not permit control and direction by the masses themselves is counter-revolutionary and harmful.”

When the Bolsheviks, through the Third International, began to mold the other Communist Parties to their own image, the council movement responded with calls for democracy and rank-and-file control. Gramsci, from his prison cell in Italy, criticized the Italian Communists, calling for “a greater intervention of the proletarian elements in the life of the party and a diminution of the powers of the bureaucracy”:

The error of the party has been to have accorded priority in an abstract fashion to the problem of party organization, which in practice has simply meant creating an apparatus of party functionaries who could be depended upon for their orthodoxy towards the official view. It was believed, and is still believed, that the revolution depends only on the existence of such an apparatus; and it is sometimes even believed that its existence can bring about the revolution.

Hermann Gorter bluntly declared, “The Russian tactics of dictatorship by party and leadership cannot possibly be correct here.” Pannekoek attacked the elitist outlooks of the Leninists. “What can a small party, however principled, do when what is needed are the masses?” he asked. “And it also follows from this theory that it is not even the entire communist party that exercises dictatorship, but the Central Committee, and this it does first within the Party itself, where it takes it upon itself to expel individuals and uses shabby means to get rid of opposition.” Lenin responded with a work entitled Left-Wing Communism; An Infantile Disorder, which attacked the council movement as “anarchist” and “undisciplined”.

As the Communist Party entrenched itself more and more firmly in the Soviet Union, the attacks of the council communists became more vehement. In April 1920, Pannekoek announced, “The Executive Committee in Moscow and the leading comrades in Russia have come down completely on the side of opportunism.” Pannekoek charged the Soviet Union with using the international communist movement as a tool of its own nationalistic programs:

The Third International, as the association of communist parties preparing proletarian revolution in every country, is not formally bound by the policies of the Russian government, and it is supposed to pursue its own tasks completely independent of the latter. In practice, however, this separation does not exist; just as the Communist Party is the backbone of the Soviet Republic, the executive committee is intimately connected with the Presidium of the Soviet Republic through the persons of its members, thus forming an instrument whereby the Presidium intervenes in the politics of Western Europe. We can now see why the tactics of the Third International, laid down by congress to apply homogeneously to all capitalist countries and to be directed from the center, are determined not only by the needs of communist agitation in those countries, but also by the political needs of Soviet Russia.

Pannekoek’s fears were confirmed after the rise of Stalin and the subsequent flip-flops of the Comintern program. Before the outbreak of World War II, after Stalin signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler, the Communist Parties were instructed to intensify the fight against the Social Democratic parties in Europe, who were to be considered as being objectively no different from the fascists—“social-fascists”. As soon as Hitler invaded Russia, however, this tune abruptly changed: now the Communist Parties were instructed to form coalitions with the Social Democrats as part of a “united front of anti-fascist forces”. “The politics of Lenin,” Pannekoek concluded, “had their logical culmination in Stalinism in Russia.”

Karl Korsch also fought against the domination of the Comintern by the USSR, remarking in disgust that the international movement had been reduced to “the one ‘Marxist-Leninist’ doctrine which alone brings salvation.” Gorter wrote, “If the Russian tactics are still pursued here after all the disastrous consequences that they have already had here, then it will no longer be stupidity, but a crime; a crime against the revolution.”

In 1921, when the sailors at the Kronstadt Fortress mutinied in an attempt to overthrow the Communist Party and re-institute the Soviet government and direct worker control, the council communists cheered them on. “Now that the proletariat in Kronstadt has risen up against you, the communist party,” Gorter wrote, “now that you have had to declare a state of emergency in Petrograd against the proletariat . . . has the thought still not occurred to you, even now, that dictatorship by the proletariat is really preferable to dictatorship by the party?” Gorter concluded:

Your real fault, which neither we nor history can forgive, is to have foisted a counter-revolutionary program and tactics upon the world proletariat, and to have rejected the really revolutionary ones which could have saved us.

The protests of the council movement were in vain, however. The Bolsheviks succeeded in imposing a program of “21 Points” upon the Comintern parties that effectively made them instruments of Stalin’s Central Committee. The “left-wing” council communists were expelled from the party, and most went into exile and obscurity. The ruling Bolsheviks removed the last vestiges of the soviet government, crushed rank-and-file rebellions led by the Kronstadt sailors and by the Ukrainian councilist Nestor Makhno, and expelled and purged the councilist “Worker Opposition” within the Communist Party government. In essence, the Bolsheviks installed “socialism” by destroying socialism. By 1925, the council communist movement had all but ceased to exist.

By 1991, however, the council communists had been vindicated—Leninism had proven itself to be bankrupt and discredited. Leninist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe collapsed, and those in China, Cuba and North Korea were increasingly isolated, irrelevant, and seemed to be on the verge of doing the same.

This volume is a collection of writings from the council communists.  After the collapse of Leninism in the former Soviet Empire, these writings are more relevant than ever.  Leninism, in all of its various forms, cannot serve as a model for a successful anti-capitalist revolution—and Leninism in all its forms needs to be opposed by working class militants to the same extent as the capitalists.

It is my hope that, by rejecting Leninists and Leninism, the working class movement can return to its roots and transform socialism from a regimented work camp into a society with freedom and democracy within the workplace as well as outside it.

 

Editor, Red and Black Publishers

St Petersburg, Florida,   2007

 

PART ONE 

Hermann Gorter