Anton Pannekoek
Dutch Marxist and one of the founders of council communism, best known for his writings on workers' councils.
Pannekoek, Anton and the Quest For an Emancipatory Socialism
A short biographical article on the famous council communist theorist and astronomer.
Anton Pannekoek and the Quest For an Emancipatory Socialism
(John Gerber, 1988)
Anton Pannekoek's Letter to Sylvia Pankhurst
Pannekoek discusses the failings of the programme of the newly formed Irish Communist Party.
Anton Pannekoek's letter -
DEAR COMRADE,
Letter to Socialisme ou Barbarie - Pannekoek
Letter from Anton Pannekoek in the 1950s to Socialisme ou Barbarie discussing his theories of workers councils....
Workers Councils - Anton Pannekoek
Anton Pannekoek describes how workers councils have been and can be organs of self-organised working class power in struggle - and a means towards overthrowing capitalism and creating a classless society.
State capitalism and dictatorship (alternate translation)
On the limits of state capitalism as a strategy for the ruling class.
This article was apparently first published in Raete Korrespondenz. This translation was published unsigned in the American journal International Council Correspondence Vol. III No. 1 January 1937.
Trade Unionism
"... there comes a disparity between the working class and trade unionism. The working class has to look beyond capitalism. Trade unionism lives entirely within capitalism and cannot look beyond it. Trade unionism can only represent a part, a necessary but narrow part, in the class struggle. And it develops aspects which bring it into conflict with the greater aims of the working class."
Pannekoek's text first appeared under his pen name "J Harper" in the American journal International Council Correspondence, (Vol II No 2, Jan 1936).
Revolt of the scientists - Pannekoek
Pannekoek considers the possibility of resistance to the threat of Cold War annihilation in the then-dawning "Atomic Age".
(From "RETORT", Vol. 4, # 2, Spring 1948)
Why past revolutionary movements have failed
Anton Pannekoek, from "Living Marxism" Vol. 5, # 2 - Fall 1940.
Thirty years ago every socialist was convinced that the approaching war of the great capitalist powers would mean the final catastrophe of capitalism and would be succeeded by the proletarian revolution. Even when the war did break out and the socialist and labor movement collapsed as a revolutionary factor, the hopes of the revolutionary workers ran high.
Party and Working Class (1936)
Pannekoek hammers at the idea that party and class must be antagonistic, as the history of German and Russian parties had shown by 1936.
Rather, the working class must self-actuate and self-organize: "Practical action, that is, concrete class struggle, is a matter for the masses themselves, acting as a whole, within their natural groups, notably the work gangs, which constitute the units of effective combat."
General Remarks on the Question of Organisation (1938)
"There are many who think of the proletarian revolution in terms of the former revolutions of the middle class, as a series of consecutive phases: first, conquest of government and instalment of a new government, then expropriation of the capitalist class by law, and then a new organisation of the process of production. But such events could lead only to some kind of state capitalism. As the proletariat rises to dominance it develops simultaneously its own organisation and the forms of the new economic order."
