Deviations, part 1: the Castoriadis-Pannekoek exchange

Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi's introduction to a series of letters between Anton Pannekoek and Cornelius Castoriadis.

Submitted by Juan Conatz on October 27, 2013

In early 1953 Cajo Bren­del, a Dutch coun­cil com­mu­nist affil­i­ated with a group known as Spar­ta­cus, vis­ited the mem­bers of Social­isme ou Bar­barie (Social­ism or Bar­barism) in Paris. As mem­bers of a mil­i­tant orga­ni­za­tion harshly mar­gin­al­ized by the most blis­ter­ing win­ters of the cold war, Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, Claude Lefort, and their com­rades under­stand­ably hoped to make con­tact with other com­mu­nist ten­den­cies crit­i­cal of the offi­cial cur­rents. Delighted to dis­cover that Anton Pan­nekoek, that vet­eran com­mu­nist whose dis­sent­ing tracts had drawn the ire of none other than Lenin him­self, was quite close to Spar­ta­cus, the group decided to sup­ply Bren­del with a copy of every issue of the jour­nal, eleven in all, to pass along to the revered the­o­rist. Pan­nekoek, who read them with excite­ment, wrote later to Bren­del the French group showed much promise despite its ques­tion­able posi­tion on the party ques­tion. On Novem­ber 8, 1953, he wrote a let­ter to Cas­to­ri­adis, which was later pub­lished, along with a response, in num­ber 14 (April-June 1954) of the journal.

Span­ning an entire gen­er­a­tion, a lin­guis­tic divide, and a geo­graph­i­cal shift, the epis­to­lary encounter between Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis in many ways marks the inter­nal trans­for­ma­tion of the ultra-left. But the ultra-left, far from a his­tor­i­cal relic, is mak­ing head­lines again. The appear­ance of a mys­te­ri­ous lit­tle book called The Com­ing Insur­rec­tion on book­shelves across the coun­try in 2009 piqued an already grow­ing inter­est. Not only did Michael Moore name the “left­ist call-to-arms man­i­festo” as his most recent read in an inter­view with the Hol­ly­wood Reporter, the tract even climbed to the top of Ama­zon best­seller list after Glenn Beck told Fox News view­ers it was “the most evil book I’ve read in a long, long time.” But this pam­phlet was only, if we may lapse into pop soci­ol­ogy, the tip­ping point for a resur­gence of for­got­ten ten­den­cies, obscure jour­nals, and pre­vi­ously unheard of milieus, which are sud­denly being dis­cussed every­where from aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ences to national broad­cast­ing chan­nels. It’s likely that the “Invis­i­ble Com­mit­tee” that wrote The Com­ing Insur­rec­tion grew out of Tiqqun, a French group that offi­cially dis­banded in 2001 after releas­ing two issues of its epony­mous jour­nal. Tiqqun itself has been redis­cov­ered after the infa­mous Tarnac affair in 2008, when for­mer mem­bers of the group were arrested for sab­o­tag­ing train lines.

The appear­ance of new works and trans­la­tions by groups like Tiqqun, includ­ing Tro­ploin, Théorie Com­mu­niste, Aufheben, and Echanges et Mou­ve­ment, reflect the close engage­ment of the ultra-left with the ten­den­cies and sen­si­bil­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary activist move­ments. An arti­cle in The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion traced the “intel­lec­tual roots” of Occupy Wall Street to the anar­chist David Grae­ber, who invoked the lan­guage of the ultra-left in his descrip­tion of the polit­i­cal impor­tance of the gen­eral assem­bly: “One of the things that rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies have learned over the course of the 20th cen­tury is that the idea of the ends jus­ti­fy­ing the means is deeply prob­lem­atic… You can’t cre­ate a just soci­ety through vio­lence, or free­dom through a tight rev­o­lu­tion­ary cadre. You can’t estab­lish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same.“1

But this par­a­digm, though it is thor­oughly grounded in the present, nev­er­the­less has deep roots in the past. All of the jour­nals cir­cu­lat­ing today would deny such a strong link to their own ances­tors; they admit the influ­ence of the ultra-left, but none describe them­selves as ultra-leftists. Most believe they have made a clean break with this his­tory, and usu­ally only employ the term as an epi­thet for those still thought to be trapped in anti­quated pol­i­tics. They are on poor terms with each other, and almost cer­tainly would not con­sider them­selves to be part of the same con­stel­la­tion of theories.

Although they have their dis­agree­ments, this dis­sen­sion only con­ceals a shared unity that unsur­pris­ingly orig­i­nates from the com­mon her­itage they all seem intent on repress­ing. Many of the defin­ing prin­ci­ples of the his­tor­i­cal ultra-left per­sist, and their pecu­liar com­bi­na­tion of blind­ness and insight bears the marks of their prog­en­i­tors. Their shared empha­sis on pro­le­tar­ian self-activity, their will­ing­ness to delib­er­ately con­flate means and ends, their ten­dency to elide the moment of strat­egy, their demand for the abo­li­tion of a tran­si­tion period, and their ten­dency towards fatal­ism, are all age-old his­tor­i­cal debates. And just as before, the ultra-left ten­den­cies of con­tem­po­rary move­ments have pro­voked a back­lash from those who call for a return to the fun­da­men­tals of polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion, usu­ally rep­re­sented by the fig­ure of “the party.”

What is now com­monly called the ultra-left emerged as an oppo­si­tional ten­dency within the inter­na­tional com­mu­nist move­ment in the early nineteen-twenties. Though crit­i­cal of the right, per­son­i­fied by Eduard Bern­stein, the cen­ter, rep­re­sented by Karl Kaut­sky, and even the left, dom­i­nated by Lenin, its mem­bers never orga­nized them­selves into a coher­ent cur­rent: its the­o­rists were spread across sev­eral coun­tries, dis­agreed sharply with one another, and were only grouped together when Lenin crit­i­cized them all in his infa­mous pam­phlet, Left-Wing Com­mu­nism: An Infan­tile Dis­or­der. Some, like Amadeo Bor­diga, fetishized the van­guard party; oth­ers, like Otto Rühle, saw work­ers’ coun­cils as the only organ of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary process; still oth­ers like Paul Mattick turned to cri­sis the­ory. But what­ever their dif­fer­ences, their shared refusal to par­tic­i­pate in par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, work with trade unions, or make any com­pro­mises with any kind of reformism, unex­pect­edly brought them all together. It was this under­ly­ing stub­born­ness that allowed Lenin to trans­form them into a sin­gle tendency.

It should be remem­bered, how­ever, that the ultra-left, despite what it would later become, was actu­ally not a minor­ity ten­dency in its hey­day. Its spokes­men were all major fig­ures in the his­tory of Euro­pean com­mu­nism: Bor­diga was the first gen­eral sec­re­tary of the Ital­ian Com­mu­nist Party (PCI), Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the most respected com­mu­nists in Eng­land, and Pan­nekoek was cau­tiously praised in Lenin’s State and Rev­o­lu­tion as a bul­wark against reformism. Even more impor­tantly, the ultra-leftists had such a sig­nif­i­cant fol­low­ing in the early twen­ties that they could right­fully claim to be the dom­i­nant com­mu­nist ten­dency of the time. When the PCI was finally formed in Jan­u­ary 1921, it was Bor­diga who com­manded the major­ity. And when the Ger­man Com­mu­nist Party (KPD) split in 1920, the vast major­ity fol­lowed the ultra-leftists in form­ing the Com­mu­nist Work­ers’ Party of Ger­many (KAPD). The Com­mu­nist Party, ini­tially led by Rosa Lux­em­burg and Karl Liebknecht, had itself bro­ken from reformist groups like the Social Demo­c­ra­tic Party (SPD) at the end of Decem­ber 1918. But the KPD, despite its rev­o­lu­tion­ary stance, was pulled in sev­eral direc­tions. Dis­agree­ments over the unions, par­lia­ment, and com­pro­mise in gen­eral, ulti­mately led to another break. It’s been sug­gested, how­ever, that the new party, the KAPD, “embraced almost the entire mem­ber­ship of the for­mer KPD.”2 The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of the ultra-left – Bor­diga, for exam­ple, offi­cially lost con­trol of his party to Gram­sci in 1926 – only set in after the defeat of the rev­o­lu­tions to which they were almost organ­i­cally connected.

With their rev­o­lu­tions crushed, and now harassed by cap­i­tal on the one side and Com­intern on the other, the ten­dency itself began to eat itself apart from within as ultra-leftists fought each other over the most triv­ial mat­ters, and by the thir­ties this once vibrant milieu was reduced to a jum­ble of sequestered groups. The onset of the Cold War proved to be an espe­cially deci­sive time for the ultra-left: mar­gin­al­ized more than ever, jour­nals lost much of their already lim­ited read­er­ship, orga­ni­za­tions dis­in­te­grated, and iso­lated groups ossi­fied into myopic sects. It was in this inhos­pitable con­text that two of the most promi­nent the­o­rists of the ten­dency made contact.

Cas­to­ri­adis Meets Pannekoek

The inter­sec­tion of two lives rep­re­sents the col­li­sion of two worlds. First and fore­most, there is the gen­er­a­tional divide: Anton Pan­nekoek was born in 1873, after the defeat of the Paris Com­mune, and Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis in 1922, just as the Ger­man Rev­o­lu­tion, in which Pan­nekoek had played a part, was painfully com­ing to accept its own defeat. Then there is the implicit geo­graphic shift: Pan­nekoek, born in the Nether­lands, played a con­sti­tu­tive role in the devel­op­ment of cen­tral Euro­pean com­mu­nism, while Cas­to­ri­adis, Greek by birth, made per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the emerg­ing French scene that was made famous in May 1968. Their exchange shows the cen­ter of grav­ity of the com­mu­nist move­ment mov­ing from Ger­many back to France, while French the­ory made increas­ing ref­er­ence to Ger­man history.

And last, the pecu­liar con­ver­gence of two dis­tinct forms of ultra-leftism: one that defined itself against Lenin and another that actu­ally made a con­sti­tu­tive detour through him. Though always aware of his great achieve­ments, most of the his­tor­i­cal ultra-left, from Sylvia Pankhurst to Her­man Gorter, even­tu­ally grew quite crit­i­cal of the Bol­she­vik leader’s the­o­ret­i­cal doc­trines. Pan­nekoek stands as per­haps the great­est exam­ple of a ten­dency that crit­i­cized all that Lenin rep­re­sented, from his philo­soph­i­cal posi­tions to his polit­i­cal prac­tice. Shortly after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, Pan­nekoek devoted much of his writ­ing to refut­ing the uni­ver­sal applic­a­bil­ity of Bol­she­vik tac­tics. His famous book Work­ers’ Coun­cils sought to defin­i­tively dis­credit the the­ory of the van­guard party by demon­strat­ing the his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of the coun­cils as the only real form of pro­le­tar­ian eman­ci­pa­tion. Against both reformists and Lenin­ists, he claimed that “the new ori­en­ta­tion of social­ism is self-direction of pro­duc­tion, self-direction of the class-struggle, by means of work­ers’ coun­cils.”3

Cas­to­ri­adis, in con­trast to Pan­nekoek, had fought in the Greek resis­tance as a Com­mu­nist, later join­ing the Trot­sky­ists in France. Beyond the many pos­i­tive ref­er­ences to Lenin in his writ­ings of the time, it’s quite clear from his the­o­ret­i­cal works and his prac­ti­cal posi­tions that Lenin had left an indeli­ble stamp on him. His ultra-leftism is an unusual case: he entered it through Trot­sky­ism, but broke with that tra­di­tion when he argued that “the con­tent of social­ism” went beyond the abo­li­tion of pri­vate prop­erty to “work­ers’ man­age­ment of soci­ety,” down to the orga­ni­za­tion of work on the shop floor – a his­tor­i­cal task whose terms were estab­lished by the expan­sion and inte­gra­tion of man­age­r­ial labor in post­war cap­i­tal­ism.4 He spent a good decade furi­ously pro­duc­ing a body of work so impor­tant that it would effec­tively define the far left in France, lead­ing Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Euro­pean Green par­lia­men­tar­ian who was the most vis­i­ble stu­dent rev­o­lu­tion­ary of May 1968, to frankly admit in Obso­lete Com­mu­nism: The Left-Wing Alter­na­tive that he had pla­gia­rized Castoriadis’s work. But then Cas­to­ri­adis turned his pen against Marx­ism him­self; hav­ing already grounded self-management in the cri­tique of alien­ation in the young Marx, he con­cluded that the late Marx of Cap­i­tal had capit­u­lated com­pletely to bour­geois sci­en­tism, and brazenly declared that the only way to remain rev­o­lu­tion­ary was to break from Marxism.

The let­ters of these fig­ures not only give us a glimpse into the his­tory of the ultra-left, they also speak to our own time. True, our con­junc­ture is rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent: we no longer face the real­i­ties of the Cold War, the role of the Soviet Union, the influ­ence of the Com­mu­nist Par­ties, or the uncer­tain­ties of decol­o­niza­tion. But there are nev­er­the­less ways in which the present resem­bles the con­junc­ture in which these let­ters were writ­ten. We are begin­ning to glimpse the end of a long period of pro­le­tar­ian defeat, just as Cas­to­ri­adis and Pan­nekoek were. They had the courage and insight to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­i­ties of rev­o­lu­tion, reaf­firm the value of autonomous activ­ity, and empha­size the role of the pro­le­tariat at a time when intel­lec­tu­als of the left and right were loudly declar­ing the inte­gra­tion of the work­ing class, the defin­i­tive sta­bi­liza­tion of cap­i­tal, and the impos­si­bil­ity of rev­o­lu­tion­ary rupture.

But Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis were vin­di­cated a few years after their exchange. Hun­gary and Poland erupted in rev­o­lu­tion. Coun­cils dot­ted the social ter­rain, autonomous activ­ity was the order of the day, and sud­denly cap­i­tal did not seem so secure. If their mode of thought was in align­ment with the poten­tial and the lim­its of these nascent strug­gles, it seems that today’s ultra-left has a sim­i­lar align­ment with the erup­tions of Greece, Spain, France, and England.

Read­ing through these let­ters makes it clear that what­ever their agree­ments – and there were many – Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis dif­fered on the very two ques­tions that had defined the his­tor­i­cal ultra-left from the begin­ning: the nature of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion and the party form. Though both clearly parted ways with the offi­cial com­mu­nist move­ment, their dif­fer­ences were nev­er­the­less irreconcilable.

Although the exchange cir­cu­lated around what may appear to be a pedan­tic rehash­ing of these two seem­ingly irrel­e­vant top­ics, both were using them to think through the key con­cepts of polit­i­cal prac­tice. Beneath Pannekoek’s ques­tion­ing of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion or Castoriadis’s con­sid­er­a­tion of the pos­si­ble degen­er­a­tion of the party lies a shared attempt to ascer­tain the con­tent of the com­mu­nism of their time. With suf­fi­cient his­tor­i­cal dis­tance from every­thing that tran­spired between the storm­ing of the Win­ter Palace and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have begun to ask how the con­tent of com­mu­nism can be reimag­ined beyond sec­tar­ian cliches. For our moment, these let­ters are remark­ably con­tem­po­rary. To grasp their rel­e­vance, we will have to trace the geneal­ogy of these two major questions.

The Russ­ian Revolution

Every com­mu­nist cur­rent that sought to pose an alter­na­tive to the prac­tices, poli­cies, and pro­grams of the Soviet Union first had to explain what kind of soci­ety it really was – an attempt to under­stand the mean­ing of com­mu­nism as well as cap­i­tal­ism. The dom­i­nant expla­na­tions in the West for the nature of the USSR were vari­ants of the Trot­sky­ist analy­sis. How­ever, Lenin had acknowl­edged, before Stalin’s ascent, that the rev­o­lu­tion­ary gov­ern­ment was not only a pro­le­tar­ian dic­ta­tor­ship, but either a “work­ers’ and peas­ants’ state” or a “work­ers’ state with bureau­cratic dis­tor­tions.”5 Dur­ing the years of “War Com­mu­nism,” from 1918 to 1921, when req­ui­si­tion of peas­ant land and nation­al­iza­tion of indus­try pro­ceeded along­side the intro­duc­tion of Tay­lorism and one-man man­age­ment in fac­to­ries, it was actu­ally Trot­sky who had called for exten­sion of mil­i­ta­riza­tion to the total con­trol of trade unions by the state, as an appa­ra­tus of indus­trial man­age­ment. Lenin insisted that more inde­pen­dent par­tic­i­pa­tion would train work­ers to ulti­mately take on the task of man­age­ment them­selves, argu­ing against Trot­sky that the “sum and sub­stance of his pol­icy is bureau­cratic harass­ment of the trade unions.“6

Begin­ning in 1921 with the “New Eco­nomic Pol­icy” (NEP), Lenin argued for the replace­ment of the state’s “surplus-grain appro­pri­a­tion” with a mod­er­ate “tax in kind,” which would per­mit peas­ant pro­duc­ers to sell the remain­der of their sur­plus in order to obtain man­u­fac­tured goods at a more equi­table rate. In spite of the rein­tro­duc­tion of mar­ket rela­tions this rep­re­sented, it was a tran­si­tion to “reg­u­lar social­ist exchange of prod­ucts,” and indeed an anti-bureaucratic mea­sure, intended to avoid fur­ther devel­op­ment of the state bureau­cracy that had grown in com­pen­sa­tion for “the atom­ised and scat­tered state of the small pro­ducer with his poverty, illit­er­acy, lack of cul­ture, the absence of roads and exchange between agri­cul­ture and indus­try.” If NEP rep­re­sented a move­ment towards the free mar­ket and cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions, this was a nec­es­sary step, since it per­mit­ted the peas­antry to develop social power instead of sub­ju­gat­ing it to the inter­ests of the urban and indus­trial pro­le­tariat.7

Lenin had already argued as early as 1918, in a polemic against Russ­ian left com­mu­nists, that “state cap­i­tal­ism would be a step for­ward,” even “a sure guar­an­tee that within a year social­ism will have gained a per­ma­nently firm hold.” Since the tran­si­tion period con­tained ele­ments of dif­fer­ent eco­nomic cat­e­gories, the direc­tion of large enter­prises by the state would be a “pro­le­tar­ian weapon,” since “it is not state cap­i­tal­ism that is at war with social­ism, but the petty bour­geoisie plus pri­vate cap­i­tal­ism fight­ing together against both state cap­i­tal­ism and social­ism.”8 Now, three years later, he reit­er­ated that the fact that the pro­le­tariat, rep­re­sented by the party, held power in the state, was the pri­mary defense against the “restora­tion of cap­i­tal­ism.”9 Recall­ing his ear­lier inter­ven­tion on behalf of inde­pen­dent trade unions, Lenin empha­sized that in a social­ist tran­si­tion there would still be classes, and there­fore “the class strug­gle is inevitable” – the pro­le­tariat would have to use unions to com­bat bureau­cracy and “sur­vivals of the old cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem” in the gov­ern­ment.10 The com­bi­na­tion of an anti-bureaucratic atti­tude and the con­tin­ued belief in shared work­ers’ and peas­ants’ power coex­isted with the some­what con­tra­dic­tory project of indus­tri­al­iz­ing agri­cul­ture, to develop the pro­duc­tive forces to the level of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, and NEP man­i­fested these contradictions.

After Lenin’s death, the con­tin­u­a­tion of NEP was advo­cated by both Joseph Stalin and Niko­lai Bukharin, who were part of a hege­monic bloc within the Com­mu­nist Party. Bukharin, in spite of his ear­lier left­ist enthu­si­asm for imme­di­ate nation­al­iza­tion and indus­tri­al­iza­tion, came to believe in the grad­ual enrich­ment of the peas­ants, which would lead to their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the com­mu­nist project. This found sup­port in Stalin’s insis­tence on con­tin­u­ing Lenin’s line on the “work­ers’ and peas­ants’ gov­ern­ment,” defend­ing “the worker-peasant alliance as a car­di­nal means of achiev­ing the social­ist class objec­tives of the pro­le­tar­ian dic­ta­tor­ship in our peas­ant coun­try.“11

How­ever, the enthu­si­asm for NEP was by no means uni­ver­sal; the Left Oppo­si­tion, which included Trot­sky and Bukharin’s for­mer left­ist coau­thor Yvgeni Pre­o­brazhen­sky, had warned that agri­cul­tural mar­ket rela­tions would per­mit the devel­op­ment of a nascent cap­i­tal­ist class in the coun­try­side. Their fears were con­firmed in the rise of the kulaks, the land­hold­ing peas­ants who hired waged labor­ers and hoarded grain to coun­ter­act the drop in agri­cul­tural prices. In the 1927 plat­form of the left, Trot­sky described a grow­ing “class dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion among the peas­ants,” the slave-like exploita­tion of farmhands, and a gap between indus­trial and agri­cul­tural prices that threat­ened to sever the “alliance between town and coun­try.”12

The next year Stalin went to Siberia, to address party mem­bers who he accused not only of coop­er­at­ing with the kulaks, but also liv­ing in their homes. He con­trasted “social­ist con­struc­tion in the coun­try­side, in agri­cul­ture” with the dan­ger of cap­i­tal­ist restora­tion.13 Later that year, after return­ing to Moscow, he would rage in party plenums against the “Right devi­a­tion” which made restora­tion pos­si­ble, since in spite of the dic­ta­tor­ship of the pro­le­tariat, the roots of cap­i­tal­ism, of cap­i­tal and cap­i­tal­ists, were still embed­ded “in com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion, in small pro­duc­tion in the towns and, espe­cially, the coun­try­side.”14 The threat of regen­er­at­ing cap­i­tal­ism resulted from the con­tra­dic­tion between two foun­da­tions of pro­duc­tion in the USSR: “the foun­da­tion of the most large-scale and united social­ist indus­try and the foun­da­tion of the most scat­tered and back­ward, small com­mod­ity econ­omy of the peas­ants.” To suc­ceed, social­ist con­struc­tion would have to place “agri­cul­ture on a new tech­ni­cal basis, the basis of large-scale pro­duc­tion, and bring it up to the level of social­ist indus­try.”15 With the end of NEP and the elab­o­ra­tion of the first Five Year Plan, Stalin put into place an eco­nomic pro­gram based on the col­lec­tiviza­tion of peas­ant land, aim­ing at the rapid indus­tri­al­iza­tion of the countryside.

Writ­ing in The Rev­o­lu­tion Betrayed, Trot­sky stepped into the mid­dle of these “zig-zags” in pol­icy by paint­ing a pic­ture of the USSR as a “degen­er­ated work­ers’ state.” The work­ers had taken state power, but it had been usurped by the Stal­in­ist bureau­cracy. The dif­fi­culty of this view is that the his­tory of the bureau­cracy in the USSR could by no means be lim­ited to Stalin – Trot­sky had him­self con­tributed to bureau­cra­ti­za­tion. Fur­ther­more, Lenin had already described a close rela­tion­ship between bureau­cra­ti­za­tion and eco­nomic devel­op­ment. “Social­ism has demon­strated its right to vic­tory,” Trot­sky famously wrote in a cel­e­bra­tion of Russia’s pro­duc­tive forces, “in the lan­guage of steel, cement and elec­tric­ity”; and he made a point of not­ing that the blame for Stalin’s ter­ror “lies not upon col­lec­tiviza­tion, but upon the blind, vio­lent, gam­bling meth­ods with which it was car­ried through.”16 But next to Lenin’s acknowl­edge­ment that the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of peas­ant agri­cul­ture by indus­trial state cap­i­tal­ism forced a com­plex bureau­cratic struc­ture, the com­pat­i­bil­ity of these two posi­tions seems unclear.

An unortho­dox Trot­sky­ist shoe sales­man named Bruno Rizzi began to cir­cu­late an analy­sis, cul­mi­nat­ing in 1939’s The Bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of the World, which claimed that if the bureau­cracy had indeed usurped state power, it was impos­si­ble to retain the idea of a “work­ers’ state,” degen­er­ated or oth­er­wise. The orig­i­nal, some­what ultra-left con­cept he advanced was “bureau­cratic col­lec­tivism,” which led Trot­sky to con­clude that Rizzi had “obvi­ously lost his bal­ance.”17 Accord­ing to this the­ory, the man­age­r­ial bureau­cracy was a rul­ing class that extracted a sur­plus for its own enrich­ment, and orches­trated through a total­i­tar­ian state a highly devel­oped monop­oly cap­i­tal­ism indis­tin­guish­able from fas­cism and the New Deal.

Cas­to­ri­adis may have had Rizzi’s account in mind when he under­scored the pri­mary impor­tance of the bureau­cracy as rul­ing class, but he rejected the ear­lier empha­sis on col­lec­tivism. After all, far from a term of Marx­ist the­ory, “col­lec­tivism” is a quasi-ethical term of soci­o­log­i­cal descrip­tion – it says noth­ing about the polit­i­cal econ­omy of the USSR. For Cas­to­ri­adis, cap­i­tal­ism as a sys­tem was defined by exploita­tion – the extrac­tion of a sur­plus from labor by a non-producing class who dom­i­nated the pro­duc­tion process – and not by mar­ket rela­tions, which were essen­tially epiphe­nom­ena. The fact that the rul­ing class of the USSR oper­ated col­lec­tively, rather than com­pet­i­tively, was irrel­e­vant – the soci­ety could only be described as bureau­cratic capitalism.

When Pan­nekoek first wrote to Cas­to­ri­adis, he reminded his younger com­rade that the the­ory of a non-socialist mode of pro­duc­tion in the Soviet Union was by no means a devel­op­ment inter­nal to Trot­sky­ism. In fact, the left com­mu­nists had made the case, arguably even before the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, that the poli­cies of Lenin and Trot­sky were not con­sis­tent with the strug­gle for a work­ers’ state and its accom­pa­ny­ing social­ist mode of pro­duc­tion. This was a the­ory of “state cap­i­tal­ism,” dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent from the later Trot­sky­ist ver­sion made famous by Tony Cliff. It held that the dis­place­ment of the “sovi­ets” or “work­ers’ coun­cils” that defined the explo­sions of 1905 and 1917 by the rule of the party rep­re­sented the defeat of social­ism. In this regard they antic­i­pated the cri­tique of Social­isme ou Bar­barie.

How­ever, there was a pri­mary dif­fer­ence. Con­vinced of the cap­i­tal­ist nature of the Soviet Union, Pan­nekoek went on to denounce root and branch the very rev­o­lu­tion that brought it into being. He called the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion “the last bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion, though car­ried out by the work­ing class,” in the tra­di­tion of the Eng­lish Rev­o­lu­tion of 1647 and the French Rev­o­lu­tion in 1789. By “bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion,” he meant specif­i­cally “a rev­o­lu­tion that destroys feu­dal­ism and opens the way to indus­tri­al­iza­tion.” He pointed out that even the his­toric bour­geois rev­o­lu­tions had been enabled by the revolt of “the arti­sans, the peas­ants and the work­ers,” but since “work­ing class was not yet mature enough to gov­ern itself,” a “minor­ity of func­tionar­ies and politi­cians” emerged as the dom­i­nant class. This was inevitable in Rus­sia, “the labor­ing class being a small minor­ity among the peas­ant population.”

The para­dox­i­cal ele­ment of this ultra-left the­ory, ulti­mately shared by Rühle and Gorter, was that it swung back around to the par­a­digm of reformism. Karl Kaut­sky vehe­mently denounced the Bol­she­viks, before Stalin’s dom­i­nance and in oppo­si­tion to Trot­sky, for their notion that a social­ist rev­o­lu­tion was pos­si­ble in a Rus­sia that had not yet passed through the cap­i­tal­ist stage of his­tory. As early as 1919, Kaut­sky wrote that the objec­tive con­di­tions in Rus­sia “were not ripe for the abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal­ism,” and that the “imma­tu­rity of the exist­ing rela­tions” led the Bol­she­vik rev­o­lu­tion to pro­duce “the most oppres­sive of all forms of despo­tism that Rus­sia has ever had.”18

Castoriadis’s response was twofold. He first called atten­tion to the log­i­cal prob­lem behind Pannekoek’s purism: the ulti­mate fate of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion does not alter the fact that within it, the pro­le­tariat strug­gled for its own inter­ests, even insti­tut­ing work­ers’ self-management in the fac­to­ries, rather than sub­sum­ing its strug­gle into the pro­gram of the bour­geoisie. The fact that these inde­pen­dent demands were artic­u­lated by work­ers in Rus­sia “made the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion for­ever a pro­le­tar­ian rev­o­lu­tion.” His sec­ond point was that the con­cept of the bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion ignored a fun­da­men­tal devel­op­ment in the mode of pro­duc­tion of the 20th cen­tury: it was the bureau­cracy, rather than the bour­geoisie, which ruled in Rus­sia, and it was this same new class that was emerg­ing as a dom­i­nat­ing force through­out the world, includ­ing the cap­i­tal­ist world.

Through­out the whole ultra-left, these con­cepts of “bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion” and the “bourgeois-democratic tasks” were never put into ques­tion. In spite of Pannekoek’s knowl­edge that Rus­sia was pre­dom­i­nantly peas­ant, that pre-capitalist con­di­tions altered the sub­jec­tive devel­op­ment of the work­ing class, and that his own the­ory was devel­oped within the spe­cific con­di­tions of polit­i­cal strikes in urban Europe, he never met the chal­lenge posed by the Bol­she­viks of the­o­riz­ing com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion in a peas­ant soci­ety. And though Trot­sky did accept the Bol­she­vik chal­lenge in 1917, the approach to indus­trial devel­op­ment and “per­ma­nent rev­o­lu­tion” that would pre­dom­i­nate among Trot­sky­ists took as its start­ing premise the sub­or­di­na­tion of peas­ant demands to the indus­trial proletariat.

But it was pre­cisely the peas­ant prob­lem that was cen­tral to the the­o­ries of eco­nomic devel­op­ment within the USSR. Just before Pan­nekoek and Castoriadis’s exchange, in 1951, Stalin wrote a final reflec­tion called Eco­nomic Prob­lems of Social­ism in the USSR. There he pre­empted the entire dis­cus­sion of state or bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism in Rus­sia by frankly acknowl­edg­ing, even after the col­lec­tiviza­tion and indus­tri­al­iza­tion advo­cated in his ear­lier speeches, that the law of value “does exist and does oper­ate,” along­side com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion, in the Russ­ian econ­omy. While the goods pro­duced by state-owned indus­try were dis­trib­uted pub­licly by the state, agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion, even in the form of the kolkhoz, the col­lec­tive farm, “will not rec­og­nize any other eco­nomic rela­tion with the town except the com­mod­ity rela­tion – exchange through pur­chase and sale.”19

It is over­all an unset­tling col­li­sion of terms, which recalls Lenin’s argu­ment against the left com­mu­nists. The attrib­utes ascribed by the left to state cap­i­tal­ism were sim­ply the con­tra­dic­tions of the social­ist tran­si­tion, the per­sis­tence of ele­ments of dif­fer­ent modes of pro­duc­tion within the same econ­omy – includ­ing the sur­vivals of cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions. These con­tra­dic­tions within the USSR became clear when, after denounc­ing Stalin in the 20th Party Con­gress and call­ing for peace­ful coex­is­tence with the cap­i­tal­ist world, Nikita Khrushchev orga­nized the sale of the state-owned “Machine and Trac­tor Sta­tions” to the col­lec­tive farms – which, Stalin had warned in Eco­nomic Prob­lems, meant that the agri­cul­tural enter­prises would pri­vately own their means of pro­duc­tion, a step back­wards away from communism.

Only one ultra-leftist seri­ously engaged with this mode of analy­sis. Bor­diga argued con­sis­tently that the cen­tral dynamic of the Soviet econ­omy was the “agrar­ian rev­o­lu­tion” – the con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity for cap­i­tal­ism. Bor­diga had sup­ported the Bol­she­vik rev­o­lu­tion as pro­le­tar­ian, which he reit­er­ated in a 1926 let­ter to Korsch, who had taken the state cap­i­tal­ist line; but the same year he per­son­ally butted heads with Stalin when he called for the Soviet Union to be gov­erned by the inter­na­tional com­mu­nist par­ties that made up the Com­intern. While Bor­diga sup­ported Trot­sky and the Left Oppo­si­tion in the 1920s, by 1945 he began to argue for an analy­sis of the Soviet Union that brought him far closer to Bukharin and the right.

The year before Cas­to­ri­adis and Pannekoek’s exchange, Bor­diga wrote a response to Stalin’s Eco­nomic Prob­lems called Dia­logue with Stalin. His assess­ment of the Soviet econ­omy was broadly sim­i­lar, but with an added his­tor­i­cal dimen­sion. Not only did the law of value oper­ate in the USSR, so did all the laws of cap­i­tal­ism, since it was impos­si­ble to develop the pro­duc­tive forces “with­out pro­le­tar­i­an­iz­ing peo­ple.” This meant a rep­e­ti­tion of the “fero­cious” process of prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion that Marx described in Cap­i­tal:

It is the kolkhozians who find them­selves deprived of their cow, the nomadic shep­herds of Asia torn away from the con­tem­pla­tion of the beau­ti­ful stars of the Great Bear, or the feu­dal serfs of Mon­go­lia, uprooted from their soil of a thou­sand years. It is cer­tain that the orders demand more goods for pro­duc­tion, more work­ers, a longer labor time with a greater inten­sity of effort, which is to say, an accu­mu­la­tion and expanded repro­duc­tion of cap­i­tal to the rhythm of hell.20

The agrar­ian rev­o­lu­tion, car­ried out in the process of prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion, was the vio­lent refash­ion­ing of peas­ants into land­less pro­le­tar­i­ans, the same process that occurred in 17th cen­tury Eng­land. Unsur­pris­ingly, this returns to Preobrazhensky’s descrip­tion of the coex­is­tence of plan­ning and the law of value in “social­ist prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion.” While Pre­o­brazhen­sky had called for a gen­tle process of accu­mu­la­tion based in pro­gres­sive taxes, he had ulti­mately sup­ported Stalin’s left­ward turn.

The next step for Bor­diga was to describe the eco­nomic char­ac­ter­is­tics of cap­i­tal­ism in Rus­sia. For him, the accu­mu­la­tion of profit was epiphe­nom­e­nal. What counted instead was the exis­tence of enter­prises that engaged in account­ing on the basis of a gen­eral equiv­a­lent, the law of value, and main­tained the exis­tence of prop­erty. Even though pro­duc­tion in Rus­sia was cen­trally planned by the state, it was car­ried out by indi­vid­ual enter­prises, which meant that prop­erty was not social and col­lec­tive, but restricted to pri­vate bod­ies. The rul­ing class in Rus­sia were not bureau­crats, but entre­pre­neurs – con­sis­tent with a the­ory of com­mu­nism that opposed “human com­mu­nity,” grounded in the human essence described by the young Marx, to com­merce, rather than pro­le­tariat to cap­i­tal. For this rea­son the exis­tence of sovi­ets or coun­cils was essen­tially irrel­e­vant to Bor­diga; if the work­ers man­aged enter­prises, they were sim­ply man­ag­ing the cap­i­tal relation.

So Stalin and Bor­diga dif­fered mainly in definitions. Stalin viewed social­ism as a con­tra­dic­tory process of con­struc­tion, while Bor­diga argued for a total con­cep­tion of com­mu­nism incom­pat­i­ble with sur­vivals from the old regime. But the trick is that Bordiga’s his­tor­i­cal analy­sis, while it led him to con­demn the cap­i­tal­ist nature of the USSR, also con­strained him to see it as pro­gres­sive, as he wrote in his Dia­logue:

The homage which, in spite of a band of suck­ers, we ren­der to “Great Stalin” responds pre­cisely to this process of ini­tial cap­i­tal­ist accu­mu­la­tion. If this really reaches the provinces of immense China, mys­te­ri­ous Tibet, and that fab­u­lous Cen­tral Asia that the Euro­pean stock came from, that will be a rev­o­lu­tion­ary fact, a fact that will move for­ward the wheel of his­tory, but which, far from being social­ist, will be on the con­trary a cap­i­tal­ist fact. The ele­va­tion of the level of the pro­duc­tive forces in this immense part of the globe is nec­es­sary: but Stalin is right when he says that the credit will not go to him, but to the eco­nomic laws which have imposed this pol­icy upon him. His whole enter­prise con­sists in a fal­si­fi­ca­tion of labels which makes the cap­i­tal­ist com­mod­ity pass under the name of social­ism and which is, itself, a clas­sic expe­di­ent of the agents of prim­i­tive accumulation.

In other words, the whole of the ultra-left returned to Kaut­sky and his stages, which is why Bor­diga described Rus­sia as under­go­ing the tran­si­tion to cap­i­tal­ism. Indeed, with only entre­pre­neurs man­ag­ing pro­duc­tion, it had not yet pro­duced a prop­erly cap­i­tal­ist class.

Though Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis did not directly address these issues, their exchange offers the­o­ret­i­cal advances that put the prob­lem of stages in new con­texts. On the one hand, the skilled indus­trial work­ing class who could orga­nize coun­cils on Pannekoek’s model were a such a minor­ity in Rus­sia that is very dif­fi­cult to under­stand how this model of orga­ni­za­tion could lead the nation on a mass scale – and it gives no way of deter­min­ing how the mem­bers of these coun­cils will be fed.

On the other hand, Pannekoek’s the­ory of a “bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion,” though it did not address Bordiga’s agrar­ian ques­tion, did step away from Kaut­skyan com­mit­ment to the fixed pro­gres­sion of stages. While Rühle and Korsch ulti­mately con­cluded along with Kaut­sky that Rus­sia was too back­wards, Pan­nekoek empha­sized the sub­jec­tive devel­op­ment of the class, rather than the objec­tive devel­op­ment of the pro­duc­tive forces. He argued that if state cap­i­tal­ism led to rev­o­lu­tion, this “would not be the result of eco­nomic crises but of the class strug­gle” – a polit­i­cal rather than eco­nomic change.21 The Russ­ian work­ers, he wrote in the third let­ter, were “not yet capa­ble of tak­ing pro­duc­tion into their own hands”; and when the party bureau­cracy assumed this role in place of the pro­le­tariat, it became, ipso facto, the bourgeoisie.

But Pannekoek’s analy­sis had no way of deter­min­ing whether the class was ready, par­tic­u­larly if it was spread into dis­tinct forms of pro­duc­tion. Castoriadis’s work had focused with greater atten­tion on this prob­lem. He had described the sit­u­a­tion of the peas­antry as “feu­dal exploita­tion” by the bureaucracy, and dis­puted the clas­sic Bol­she­vik claim that the “small pro­ducer” would serve as the basis of cap­i­tal­ist restora­tion, instead argu­ing that only the bureau­cracy could play such a role.22 Though he still assumed peas­ant pro­duc­tion should be sub­mit­ted to urban pro­le­tar­ian lead­er­ship, he went on to call for a form of peas­ant auton­omy in “rural com­munes” anal­o­gous to the work­ers’ coun­cil.23 But because in Rus­sia there was no auto­matic pro­gres­sion towards rev­o­lu­tion, and no auto­matic way to unify the class, Cas­to­ri­adis con­tin­ued to insist on the form of the party – our next theme.

The Party

The his­tor­i­cal ultra-left was always some­what divided about the party form. Some, led by Bor­diga, defended the notion of a dis­ci­plined party even more fer­vently than Lenin him­self. Com­bin­ing the intran­si­gence of the Ger­man left com­mu­nists with Lenin’s cen­tral focus on the party led Bor­diga to pro­duce a pecu­liar breed of van­guardist sec­tar­i­an­ism. He soon went from reduc­ing the class to the party to reduc­ing com­mu­nism itself to lit­tle more than the real­iza­tion of an allegedly coher­ent, pure, and for­ever invari­ant pro­gram that was said to stretch back unchanged to the founders them­selves. Oth­ers, like Karl Korsch, remained ambigu­ous. Although a mem­ber of the KPD, Com­mu­nist Min­is­ter of Jus­tice in the regional Thuringian gov­ern­ment, and even a Riech­stag deputy until 1928, he even­tu­ally broke entirely with the offi­cial com­mu­nist move­ment and drew very close to Pan­nekoek, Rühle, and Mattick’s crit­i­cisms of the party, ulti­mately becom­ing some­thing of an anarchist.

It was the Ger­man and Dutch left com­mu­nists, how­ever, who were the most uncom­pro­mis­ing crit­ics of the party form. They effec­tively offered three dis­tinct, though inter­re­lated, crit­i­cisms. The first, which was often shared by the anar­chists, was a kind of moral denun­ci­a­tion of the author­i­tar­ian, unde­mo­c­ra­tic, and hier­ar­chi­cal char­ac­ter of par­ties in gen­eral. The sec­ond argued that the party, espe­cially in its van­guardist con­fig­u­ra­tion, was largely inap­plic­a­ble to West­ern Europe, since its mate­r­ial con­di­tions dif­fered so vastly from those that engen­dered it in Rus­sia. The third claimed that the pro­le­tariat had to pre­fig­ure the very world it was try­ing to cre­ate by invent­ing its own forms of strug­gle, rather than mir­ror­ing those that were firmly entrenched in the old world. Pan­nekoek sum­ma­rized this sen­ti­ment in his sec­ond let­ter to Cas­to­ri­adis, describ­ing the need to oppose the estab­lished com­mu­nist par­ties: “we can­not beat them by fol­low­ing their meth­ods. That is only pos­si­ble by prac­tic­ing our own meth­ods.” In terms of actual prac­tice, this trans­lated to a refusal of all bour­geois forms, from the trade unions to par­lia­ments. Otto Rühle cap­tured this sen­ti­ment in an essay auda­ciously titled “The Rev­o­lu­tion is Not a Party Affair.”

Even when they did pre­serve the party as a form of strug­gle, the left­ists severely restricted its role. Indeed, Lenin would at one point exclaim that they had essen­tially reduced the party of the class to a cir­cle of intel­lec­tu­als. Accord­ing to Pan­nekoek, the party could only play the ancil­lary role of clar­i­fy­ing, through dis­cus­sion, debate, and exchange, what the pro­le­tariat was already doing. As “organs of self-clarification,” such par­ties – and Pan­nekoek always imag­ined that there would be many – would have to con­tent them­selves with doing lit­tle more than offer­ing sug­ges­tions to the work­ers, cir­cu­lat­ing infor­ma­tion, and calmly debat­ing their dif­fer­ing points of view.24 They would serve as the inves­tiga­tive sub­com­mit­tees of a coun­cil, from which their des­tiny would ulti­mately be indistinguishable.

For both Cas­to­ri­adis and Pan­nekoek, there was a pri­mary log­i­cal con­se­quence of the Marx­ist premise that the eman­ci­pa­tion of the pro­le­tariat could only be the task of the pro­le­tariat itself: the coun­cil would be the prin­ci­pal organ of pro­le­tar­ian eman­ci­pa­tion. By regard­ing the coun­cil as both that which would destroy the old and cre­ate the new, both were echo­ing a char­ac­ter­is­tic trait of the ultra-left: the delib­er­ate con­fla­tion of means and ends.

But in con­trast to the sea­soned coun­cilist, Cas­to­ri­adis refused to accept that coun­cil would be the only organ of eman­ci­pa­tion. He believed that the party could con­sti­tute a sep­a­rate form of strug­gle, sub­or­di­nated to, but ulti­mately dis­tinct from the coun­cil: “the party is an organ whose form and sub­stance are unique.”25 Its tasks could not be pre­de­ter­mined, as Pan­nekoek implied, but would have to vary depend­ing on the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of the strug­gle at hand. If the rev­o­lu­tion did indeed lead to the emer­gence of a net­work of decen­tral­ized coun­cils in which unob­structed dis­cus­sion could unfold, as Pan­nekoek sug­gested in his first let­ter, then Cas­to­ri­adis agreed that the party would limit its role. But, Cas­to­ri­adis quickly added, since the coun­cils would likely become the very sites of class strug­gle rather than peace­ful oases stand­ing out­side of it, the party, as some­thing other than the coun­cil, could not limit itself to “appear­ing like the owl of Min­erva at night­fall” but would have to set the stage for this struggle:

To be rev­o­lu­tion­ary sig­ni­fies both to think that only the masses in strug­gle can resolve the prob­lem of social­ism and not to fold one’s arms for all that; it means to think that the essen­tial con­tent of the rev­o­lu­tion will be given by the masses’ cre­ative, orig­i­nal, and unfore­see­able activ­ity, and to act one­self, begin­ning with a ratio­nal analy­sis of the present with a per­spec­tive that antic­i­pates the future.26

Expe­ri­enced as he was with the dirty pol­i­tics of work­place strug­gles in an envi­ron­ment dom­i­nated by Stal­in­ists on the one hand and reformists on the other, Cas­to­ri­adis poured some cold water on his friend’s naive faith in ratio­nal dis­cus­sion. He insisted that the party would have to actively pre­vent counter-revolutionaries from co-opting the strug­gle, and there­fore began to force a dis­junc­ture between means and ends. Unlike the coun­cil, the party would not be an end in itself, but could only be a means. The destruc­tion of the old world would have to be some­thing related to but ulti­mately other than the con­sti­tu­tion of a new one. Indeed, some­times rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies would have to resort to cer­tain unsightly means in order to bring about cer­tain desired ends. This could even mean a mil­i­tant, even unde­mo­c­ra­tic, inter­ven­tion on behalf the councils.

Pannekoek’s sub­se­quent response was envi­ably sim­ple: some­times the class is just not ready to make a rev­o­lu­tion. No amount of party inter­ven­tion, no mat­ter how mil­i­tant, orga­nized, or dis­ci­plined can force that class to mature – and in fact, such inter­ven­tion would actu­ally under­mine the strug­gles of the class, by forc­ing it into a sit­u­a­tion which it did not itself will­ingly cre­ate. The result, what­ever the inten­tions of the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, would have to be a new form of oppression.

A famous strug­gle just after these let­ters serves as an exam­ple. From Decem­ber 1960 to Jan­u­ary 1961 Bel­gium was rocked by an unex­pect­edly mil­i­tant strike wave that ulti­mately involved some one mil­lion work­ers. Cas­to­ri­adis called it the most impor­tant event, after the upris­ngs of 1956, of the entire post­war period; Mau­rice Brin­ton, the guid­ing spirit of Sol­i­dar­ity, took part in them; and Guy Debord arrived the fol­low­ing year as part of a team sent by Social­isme ou Bar­barie to research the after­math of the strikes. The pecu­liar thing about these strikes, how­ever, was that despite their strength they com­pletely failed to exhibit any autonomous polit­i­cal ini­tia­tive. Cas­to­ri­adis put it as follows:

We thus find our­selves faced with a strik­ing con­tra­dic­tion between the com­bat­iv­ity of the work­ing class, its sol­i­dar­ity, its aware­ness of its oppo­si­tion as a class to the cap­i­tal­ist class and to the cap­i­tal­ist State, its dis­trust of bureau­cracy, on the one hand; and, on the other, the at-present insur­mount­able dif­fi­culty it encoun­ters as it tries to free itself from this bureaucracy’s grasp, to take on in a pos­i­tive way the direc­tion of its own affairs, to cre­ate its own insti­tu­tions, to for­mu­late explic­itly its own objec­tives.27

Castoriadis’s solu­tion was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion. But imag­ine, Pan­nekoek seemed to say, if this orga­ni­za­tion, which claimed to rep­re­sent the pro­le­tariat, had hastily inter­vened by seiz­ing the state, appro­pri­at­ing cer­tain points of pro­duc­tion, and dis­patch­ing red guards out into the streets to fight the Bel­gian police. Even if their inter­ven­tion had some­how pro­duced a rev­o­lu­tion, the con­se­quences would have been dis­as­trous. Nei­ther the pro­le­tariat, nor those other class for­ma­tions which it would have to lead down the road of rev­o­lu­tion, were pre­pared for such a sit­u­a­tion. Rather than eman­ci­pat­ing them­selves, they would only enter a dif­fer­ent kind of class society.

Cas­to­ri­adis never wrote a direct reply. But he had already elab­o­rated the basic premises of his posi­tion. Just as we can never really know if our actions will turn us into bureau­crats, we can also never know whether the pro­le­tariat is mature or not; there is sim­ply no way to sci­en­tif­i­cally mea­sure whether a class is ripe for power. In some cases, as with the Bel­gian strikes, there is some clar­ity. But in oth­ers, such as the Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion of 1905, it is sim­ply impos­si­ble to tell. When the first work­ers went on strike, no one expected the whole coun­try to explode in insur­rec­tion. Even the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies who had stud­ied the con­tours of the class strug­gle for decades were caught off guard, and had to deter­mine what to do in this new sit­u­a­tion. As it turns out, rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies chose to inter­vene and the class was defeated – but we can only imag­ine the out­come if, after a sober assess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion, the pro­fes­sional rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies had decided not to inter­vene because the class was not ripe for power. What would have been the result if the party had cho­sen to fold its arms, take a step back­ward, and sit on the side­lines? Who is to say that it was not the very inter­ven­tion of these rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, their very attempt to esca­late a strug­gle pos­si­bly doomed to defeat, that later pre­pared the mate­r­ial con­di­tions for vic­tory less than a decade later?

The messi­ness of his­tory demon­strates the dif­fi­culty of trans­lat­ing Pannekoek’s thoughts on class imma­tu­rity into con­crete prac­tice. But as we have already seen, this ambigu­ous posi­tion also con­tains an orig­i­nal answer to an old ques­tion: what are the nec­es­sary objec­tive con­di­tions for a suc­cess­ful rev­o­lu­tion? For Pan­nekoek, imma­ture objec­tive con­di­tions are not the result of under­de­vel­oped indus­trial pro­duc­tion. In fact, objec­tive con­di­tions are really noth­ing other than the gen­eral level of the class strug­gle itself. Because cap­i­tal is an antag­o­nis­tic rela­tion­ship between two classes, its matu­rity or imma­tu­rity can only be under­stood with ref­er­ence to the con­flict between these classes. So when Pan­nekoek speaks of unripe objec­tive con­di­tions, he is actu­ally refer­ring to the under­de­vel­oped sub­jec­tive con­di­tions of the class strug­gle itself. Claim­ing that Rus­sia was unripe for rev­o­lu­tion did not mean it was eco­nom­i­cally back­ward, only that the pro­le­tariat was not devel­oped enough to take power on its own.

But here, as Cas­to­ri­adis inti­mates, Pan­nekoek ulti­mately reveals his fail­ure to under­stand the spe­cific class dynam­ics of Rus­sia on the eve of the rev­o­lu­tion. For him, it is enough to claim that the class was not ready to take power sim­ply because, at the end of the day, the party had to step in. His logic is con­sis­tent only if one assumes that com­mu­nism will adopt the same form at all times: the grad­ual spread of coun­cils over the total­ity of the social fab­ric. If this fails to hap­pen, then the rev­o­lu­tion was bour­geois; if it does, which, one might add, it never has, then it was com­mu­nist. It is this sta­tic con­cep­tion of com­mu­nism, this refusal to accept that com­mu­nism may appear dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions, that it may have to be pro­duced by a diver­sity of means, that led him to mis­read the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of the Russ­ian struggle.

Now the two ques­tions, the nature of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the role of the party on the other, inter­sect dra­mat­i­cally. If Pan­nekoek had paid seri­ous atten­tion to the his­tory of class rela­tions in Rus­sia, he would have seen that the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the pro­le­tariat at that his­tor­i­cal moment – its tech­ni­cal makeup, its polit­i­cal forms, its rela­tion­ship to the other classes – made it impos­si­ble for the class to take power with­out party inter­ven­tion. Because Rus­sia was so riven by class divi­sions, a rev­o­lu­tion with any chance of suc­cess would have to find some way to forge an alliance between pro­le­tar­ian van­guards and peas­ant masses in a way that could tran­scend these sep­a­ra­tions. Pan­nekeok would have seen that the class was, at that con­junc­ture, actu­ally quite ready. It just had to assume a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal form, one dis­tinct from the sovi­ets, in order to make the revolution.

This gap goes a long way in explain­ing Pannekoek’s some­what con­fus­ing belief that the party can never actu­ally be a part of the class itself. In his let­ters, he seems to argue that any enlarged con­cep­tion of the party would nec­es­sar­ily trans­form it into a spe­cial forces team, which would be called in to bash heads when the class runs into trou­ble. He refused to enter­tain the pos­si­bil­ity that the party, as was the case in Rus­sia, may itself be a nec­es­sary ele­ment of the class. Unlike Cas­to­ri­adis, who tried to cap­ture the sig­nif­i­cance of the French Com­mu­nist Party by study­ing its pos­si­ble social bases, its par­tic­u­lar his­tory, and its broader rela­tion­ship to the class strug­gle itself, Pan­nekoek con­tented him­self with sim­ply argu­ing that it was on the side of cap­i­tal. For Cas­to­ri­adis, this was not good enough; the task was to metic­u­lously ana­lyze the pecu­liar, and rather unprece­dented, com­po­si­tion of a reformist party work­ing in the ser­vice of a for­eign coun­try, to “explain patiently the com­plete work­ings and mate­r­ial roots of Stalinism’s betrayal” in order to defin­i­tively out­flank it.28

Pan­nekoek delib­er­ately ignored these kinds of ques­tions – ques­tions, he would say, that have been posed in “an entirely prac­ti­cal way” – because his vision of rev­o­lu­tion, despite its numer­ous mer­its, was still largely informed by a kind of fatal­ism. Pro­le­tar­i­ans will nat­u­rally fig­ure every­thing out based on their imme­di­ate expe­ri­ences, as though they pos­sess some kind of innate knowl­edge organ­i­cally dri­ving them to a spec­i­fied goal, like an acorn grow­ing into an oak tree. They will spon­ta­neously become polit­i­cal sub­jects, like the log­i­cal result of an equa­tion, and make their rev­o­lu­tion on their own. If they run into any set­backs, it’s only because they still don’t have enough expe­ri­ence; if they suf­fer a defeat, it’s only because they weren’t ready. For the Pan­nekoek of these let­ters, there is no gap between imme­di­ate needs and the eman­ci­pa­tion of the class through rev­o­lu­tion. The two seam­lessly blend into one another in such a way as to entirely cover up the moment of strategy.

But in order to explore these themes fur­ther we have to take a step back­ward. Though many of the prob­lems above – the con­fla­tion of means and ends, the eli­sion of strat­egy, the sup­pres­sion of class het­ero­gene­ity, and the rever­sion to fatal­ism – per­sist within today’s ultra-left, the best way to under­stand and even­tu­ally super­sede them is to go back to their gen­e­sis. This means return­ing to another famous encounter, that between the ultra-left and Lenin him­self. It was Lenin, after all, who united a set of rad­i­cally dis­tinct groups under the umbrella of the “ultra-left.” Our forth­com­ing inves­ti­ga­tion, there­fore, will move back­wards to Lenin and his adversaries.

Until then, we present the let­ters. The first entry in this exchange, from Pan­nekoek to Cas­to­ri­adis, has been avail­able on the inter­net, and we repro­duce that ver­sion here. Pan­nekoek indi­cates that he wrote the let­ter in Eng­lish, but it was ulti­mately trans­lated into French for pub­li­ca­tion in Social­isme ou Bar­barie. It is not clear whether this ver­sion is a trans­la­tion or the orig­i­nal Eng­lish text. Castoriadis’s response, writ­ten under the pen name Pierre Chaulieu, and a final response by Pan­nekoek, have only been avail­able in French. The ver­sions avail­able here are our trans­la­tions from the orig­i­nals reprinted at mondialisme.org.

Comments

Spikymike

11 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on October 27, 2013

An interesting and useful pulling together of various earlier and more recent 'ultra-left' tendencies and I'm curious to see how the author moves on to his (I suspect) defence of Lenin. For us today it seems we can find a better theoretical understanding of modern global capitalism only by weaving together some of the better elements of these past contributions. I think maybe the conclusions in this text regarding the need to recognise that communism might come through a diversity of means and political forms, whilst being a seemingly sensible observation given the changing nature of global capitalism, is drawn here from the same narrow focus of revolution as essentially limited within a national framework which even in the time of the Russian revolution was misplaced.