Anton Pannekoek

Archive of texts and documents on libcom.org by and about Anton Pannekoek, (2 January 1873 – 28 April 1960), a Dutch astronomer, historian, philosopher, Marxist theorist, and socialist revolutionary. He was one of the main theorists of council communism.

Letter to Socialisme ou Barbarie - Pannekoek

Letter from Anton Pannekoek in the 1950s to Socialisme ou Barbarie discussing his theories of workers councils....

Anton Pannekoek

Workers' councils - Anton Pannekoek

Anton Pannekoek's seminal texts describing how workers' councils have been and can be organs of self-organised working class power in struggle -…

Anton Pannekoek.

State capitalism and dictatorship (alternate translation)

On the limits of state capitalism as a strategy for the ruling class. This article was apparently…

Trade unionism - Anton Pannekoek

"... there comes a disparity between the working class and trade unionism. The working class has to look beyond capitalism. Trade unionism lives…

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…

Anton Pannekoek

Why past revolutionary movements have failed

Anton Pannekoek, from "Living Marxism" Vol. 5, # 2 - Fall 1940.

German Communist Party election poster, 1924.

Party and working class - Anton Pannekoek

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,…

Young Marx, Engels and others in conspiratorial mode.

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…

Lenin As Philosopher - Anton Pannekoek.

Lenin as philosopher - Anton Pannekoek

Pannekoek's classic work analyses Lenin's philosophical views as being determined by the historical circumstances they emerged from; the battle…

The Failure of the Working Class (1946)

Having been victimized by capitalism, the working class were deluded by state socialist parties German and Russian, who only engineered a return…

Destruction as a means of struggle - Anton Pannekoek

Prompted by the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 - by Marinus van der Lubbe, a council communist bricklayer and other possible accomplices -…

Anton Pannekoek.

The theory of the collapse of capitalism - Anton Pannekoek

Pannekoek applies his critique to the theories of Luxemburg and Grossman - and shows why capitalism…