The Second World War officially ended in 1945. Despite episodes of mass struggle in a few select countries, there was no widespread working class movement to end it like that in Russia in 1917, and Germany in 1918. The war only ended with the total victory of one imperialist camp over another ("unconditional surrender") which brought about a new world order. A world order in which the capitalist states of both East and West played an ever more active role in mediating the relations between the classes, completely integrating the social democratic and labour mass parties and trade unions which claimed to represent workers' interests. Revolutionaries who survived the war had to re-examine the changes in the terrain of struggle and what that meant for the working class and the fight for a new society.

It's in this context that Anton Pannekoek⁽¹⁾, a key figure of the Dutch-German Communist Left, wrote his Theses On The Fight Of The Working Class Against Capitalism. This short document was published in May 1947, in the pages of the Southern Advocate for Workers' Councils.⁽²⁾ A year later, the theses received a critical reply from Onorato Damen, a representative of the Italian Communist Left.⁽³⁾ This reply was published in Prometeo, the journal of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt).⁽⁴⁾ We have been asked about this exchange, so for the first time in English, we publish here Damen's critique of Pannekoek's "five theses" as an example of the debates that took place within the broader Communist Left following the Second World War.

Although Pannekoek recognised the fact that parties would exist as part of the class war, he gave them only a propagandist and educational role. He put his faith in "spontaneity" expressed in wildcat strikes, strike committees, and workers' councils. Damen saw this as a misunderstanding of the role of the party and how class consciousness develops. For him the class party is not just a propaganda organisation. It is an indicator of the level of the revolutionary consciousness of the class: "The class gives rise to the party as a condition of its existence". However, they both learned from the counter-revolution in isolated Russia that class rule cannot be substituted by party rule. As Damen later wrote:

It would be a gross and dangerous error for the future to believe that the moment the working class creates their party, then they somehow relinquish – totally or even partially – those attributes which make them the gravedigger of capitalism, as if others could act as an alternative and have the same consciousness of the need to struggle against the class enemy and to overthrow it in revolution. At no time and for no reason does the proletariat abandon its combative role. It does not delegate to others its historical mission, and it does not give power away to anyone, not even to its political party.

1952 Platform of the Internationalist Communist Party

Pannekoek could have agreed with this himself. This is why Damen's main criticism of the council communists is that, while they have assimilated certain key lessons of the revolutionary upsurge following the First World War, they have since politically detached themselves from the struggles and experiences of the proletariat. He argues that revolutionary activity cannot amount to shouting "empty slogans that no one or almost no one is willing to carry out", that a class party has to be re-built in the "fire of daily struggle".

Damen takes Pannekoek to task on the question of abstentionism and workers' councils. Firstly, he does not completely rule out the tactical possibility of using elections as an opportunity for revolutionary agitation. In practice, the PCInt only ever found it worthwhile to do so twice, in 1946 and 1948 (i.e. at the time this article was written). This was done not in order to ask for votes, but to put forward the internationalist and anti-parliamentary message to a wider audience, and to reveal the counter-revolutionary role played by the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI).⁽⁵⁾ Like we pointed out in the introduction to another Damen translation published by us recently,

As Damen later wrote, it was "probably the last time" that such an opportunity would present itself, and in the pre-internet (and indeed pre-television) era the odds were not so heavily stacked against the tactic of using the electoral process to make revolutionary propaganda. Today any such participation is more likely to strengthen the ideological power of capital considering the financial resources given by the capitalists to the parties inside the system.

Parliamentary Democracy and Fascism: The Two Faces of the Bourgeoisie

In his response to Pannekoek, Damen shows how the boycott of elections only becomes more than a slogan at high points in the class struggle, when an alternative to bourgeois parliaments actually exists – the workers' councils. Secondly, Damen argues that these workers' councils are not a permanent alternative to the trade unions, because in the absence of the right revolutionary conditions they can end up carrying out the very same functions of mediation between labour and capital as trade unions (today we could point to Germany 1920, Yugoslavia 1950 or Poland 1956 as examples of what happens when workers' councils become recognised by the capitalist state).⁽⁶⁾ To overcome the separation between class and party, which is inevitable particularly during phases of retreat, Damen points to internationalist factory groups.⁽⁷⁾ In the 1940s the PCInt had an active network of such intermediary bodies. Although they also incited struggle at the economic level, they primarily acted as a means of winning workers to the revolutionary cause. They did not take on trade union responsibilities, but regrouped revolutionaries in the workplace on a political basis.

Today, after fifty years of class defeats, revolutionary minorities everywhere are reduced to little more than propaganda groups. This however, more than ever, calls for the need to "painstakingly rebuild and develop, day by day, the concrete grounds for a recovery." The symptoms of the capitalist drive to war – nationalism, militarism, repression and austerity – are already throwing up isolated instances of class resistance. Revolutionary minorities have to be able to relate constructively to the struggles happening now, no matter how limited they may seem.

Notes to the Introduction:

(1) Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) was, along with the likes of Lenin, Luxemburg and Bordiga, a representative of the revolutionary wing of Social Democracy. With the likes of Herman Gorter (1864-1927), he later played an influential role in the foundation of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) but retired from active political militancy after the 1920s and focused on his astronomical career instead. He continued to write for various magazines and journals of the Dutch-German Communist Left and in the 1940s he was loosely associated with the group Communistenbond Spartacus in Holland, but was never a member. For more on Pannekoek, see: leftcom.org

(2) The Southern Advocate for Workers' Councils was a short-lived magazine published in Melbourne in the 1940s and edited by James Arthur Dawson (1889–1958). Previously a militant of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Australia, Dawson gradually moved closer to the positions of the Dutch-German Communist Left. He helped to publish Pannekoek's book Workers' Councils in English, but in his magazine he also reprinted articles from the PCInt and other groups. Pannekoek's 1947 theses are available here: marxists.org

(3) Onorato Damen (1893-1979) was a militant of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I), and played a key role in the fight against the Stalinist takeover of the party. Remaining in Italy, he spent many years in fascist prisons, but he did not cease his political activity, which eventually resulted in the foundation of the PCInt in 1943 in the midst of the Second World War. The PCInt is today the Italian affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT). For more on Damen, see: leftcom.org

(4) Prometeo was first a periodical published in 1924 by the Italian Left under the direction of Bordiga, later continued – from 1928 to 1938 – as the organ of the Italian Left Fraction in Exile. In 1943 it was the underground magazine of the clandestine PCInt, and after the war it became the official journal of the party which continues to be regularly published to this day. The article in question was published in Prometeo 10 (Series I), June-July 1948. leftcom.org

(5) For how and why the PCInt intervened in those elections, see: leftcom.org

(6) In Germany, the Betriebsrätegesetz (Works' Councils Act) of 1920, institutionalised and transformed the workers' councils which sprang up in the context of the post-war revolutionary wave into works' councils, organisations representing workers in collective bargaining negotiations at the shop-floor level. In Yugoslavia, the Zakon o samoupravljanju (Self-Government Act) of 1950, set up workers' councils under the guise of "socialist self-management", in reality serving as advisory bodies promoting post-war capitalist reconstruction and production increases. In Poland, the Ustawa o radach robotniczych (Act on Workers' Councils) of 1956, was introduced following the emergence of workers' councils during the mass protests of the Polish October, in order to bring them under the control of the party-state and its trade unions and quickly sideline them afterwards.

(7) Today, in the face of the changes in the composition of the working class over the last fifty years, we tend to speak of "workplace" rather than just "factory" groups. leftcom.org

On Pannekoek's "Five Theses"

It was the critical thinking and a firm and sometimes light-hearted attitude which had initially drawn our attention to and sympathy for the group of the Dutch Tribunists⁽⁸⁾, today known as the council communists. However, reading the recent "five theses" by Comrade Pannekoek makes us more strongly and bitterly feel the distance that separates them from the original positions of this group which, if nothing else, had the appeal of a bold polemic, albeit overshadowed by that slight touch of idealism that is, after all, characteristic of every form of political extremism.

We seem to discern in these "five theses" the final stage of a whole process of decline in the Dutch workerist group⁽⁹⁾, due to its lack of adherence to the classical line of revolutionary Marxism and its tenuous connection to the struggles and experiences of the proletariat.

Added to this, we see how movements, such as those of the Tribunists or council communists, lose their impact and prestige as events force them to rely solely on their own inner light. The potential they had when they were part of that powerful complex of parties of the Communist International has been reduced to negligible proportions. Having ceased to juggle ideas, theories, and programmes, these movements are forced to confront the course of events with their own ideological and critical baggage, and their particular tactical approaches to the proletarian struggle.

In short, in the theoretical positions, conceptions, and attitudes of schools, groups, and isolated revolutionaries – in all these fragments that survived the enormous upheaval that befell the political movement of the international proletariat with the victory of the counter-revolution in Russia and the Second Imperialist War – there is, we keep saying, a tendency that no longer coincides with the traditional line of Marxism. It attempts to escape the harshness of the defeat suffered with purely subjective expedients and stratagems, rather than subjecting this defeat to critical examination in the light of the objective possibilities of working class struggle. Instead of the hard and inexorable method of drawing out the motives and limits of the proletarian struggle from within, from its own class experience, they prefer the easier method, that of operating outside this experience according to ideal schemes to which the needs and actions of the masses are raised from time to time, attributing to them possibilities and virtues that the masses have never historically demonstrated in their own right.

Thus, both the theories and politics of mechanistic spontaneity and wait-and-see pessimism, as well as those who believe in the mystique of a self-sufficient workerism in terms of will and revolutionary concreteness, derail Marxism.

In this flurry of iconoclasm against every position achieved by the proletarian movement, against certain established principles, and against ideas that have become cornerstones of the revolution, which recent and ruthless verifications of events have validated both doctrinally and politically, the Dutch group of council communists is perhaps the only one that still appears anchored to a continuity of thought, and it is this consideration that prompted us to examine Pannekoek's theses closely. They bring together, in a strange synthesis, two major deviations from Marxism: the theory and politics of spontaneity and empirical voluntarism, the idea that organisational forms have the miraculous power of overcoming opportunism.

For the past thirty years, the theory of boycotting parliament and the reactionary trade unions has been the main theme of the controversy that already pitted Lenin against some left-wing groups within the Communist International⁽¹⁰⁾; not to mention the identical attitude which, before and during Lenin's time, has been and still is a characteristic feature of the followers of Sorelian syndicalism⁽¹¹⁾ and anarcho-syndicalists.

Can we say that the terms of the controversy that arose back then between the Bolsheviks on the one hand, and the Dutch Tribunists and German workerists on the other, more precisely between Lenin and Gorter-Pannekoek, are the same as those that recur today in the controversy between us and the council communists? It seems not.

Our Dutch comrades have generally stuck to their theoretical and tactical positions, without questioning whether a single episode in the great and harsh experience of the international proletariat in recent years has given those positions historical validity, that is, whether the path they have traced and pursued is truly the right one, the only one left to revolutionaries to go beyond capitalism. Rather than repeat the polemical arguments formulated in Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism, which it would be absurd to do today, we prefer to place before us the results of an experience that critically takes into account all those lessons assimilated in these last decades by the proletarian movement.

This experience warns against facile individual extremism or making sharp turns when faced with the responsibility of leading the revolutionary party, it warns against the amateurism of boycott slogans when the masses are objectively very far from "feeling" the historical necessity of such an action and thus lack the specific organs for a boycott. But it also denies class consistency, and therefore the possibility of tactical development and ferment to Lenin's beloved theory of revolutionary parliamentarism. Today, Lenin's other statement, that the activity of communists in bourgeois parliaments should be considered as a section of our work, is also being examined with a more realistic and informed approach, and there is a tendency to place greater emphasis on the policy of participation in certain electoral battles. The parliamentary tactic is either synonymous with revolutionary defeatism or meaningless, given that normal parliamentary practice is inconceivable for the proletarian party today. And it would not be in the interests of the revolutionary struggle to preclude the party from the tactical possibility of operating in concrete terms as a force of revolutionary defeatism à la Liebknecht⁽¹²⁾ in moments of high historical tension and in the lead up to war.

The tactic of dual deployment, in the country and in the parliament, such as was carried out in Germany at the time of the Saxony and Thuringia governments⁽¹³⁾, can only ultimately lead to Hitler, under no circumstances to the revolutionary conquest of power; it has thus been proven to be the most effective weapon of opportunism. One cannot and must not manoeuvre within a bourgeois fortress, such as the parliament, at the very moment when the proletarian masses are pressing in from all sides and attacking it head-on.

The tactic of dual deployment has so far been proven to be the basis for compromise and has never served as a springboard for revolutionary action.

So why should emphasis be placed on the revolutionary party's participation in this or that electoral battle, which is in any case anything but revolutionary?

The tactical importance of this participation must be understood in Leninist terms⁽¹⁴⁾: because the masses actively participate in the election, and they participate under the leadership of the parties of betrayal that control them and imprison them with the suggestion of the democratic conquest of power. And until capitalism is on the verge of collapse, this suggestion will retain its intrinsic originality and strength.

The masses, on their own, are not capable of forming an anti-parliamentary, anti-electoral and anti-majoritarian consciousness, in a word, an anti-democratic one. And even when they come up against the reality of most open and blatant denial of all the promises of parliamentarism and feel the sting of electoral mockery, there may be reactions of mistrust and disgust and individual cases of active aversion, but if there is no critical, careful, constant and persuasive class action by the proletarian party, history teaches us that everything will once again be reduced to a moment of confusion and passive indifference, more or less generalised, which will inevitably be sucked up by a new wave of parliamentary and electoral euphoria, and so on.

For the purposes of revolutionary struggle, it is a question of creating the awareness of a class divide among the masses corrupted by the ideology of democratic parliamentarism, in order to prevent them from once again being lured, through the suggestion of a hypothetical revolutionary parliamentarism, towards the shallows of compromise during the revolutionary offensive.

But awareness of this class divide cannot be created unless steps have first been taken to ensure that it is alive and active among the physical forces of the proletariat, in the daily conflict of its interests. And this will not come about as a result of a sudden enlightenment from outside, from the explosive power of the idea, but only by virtue of the action that the revolutionary vanguard will be able to carry out in terms of bringing together the most sensitive and effective energies of the proletariat and the political struggle inspired by the revolutionary aims of the class.

A boycott of parliament and of elections will only come about when the course of events has historically created the conditions for a consciousness that can be translated into a willingness to take a boycott action. The boycott, for example, of the industrial apparatus of capitalism would not have gone down in history as a method of struggle if it had not had the practical possibility of being translated more or less effectively into actual action against the machine. The same applies to the boycott of war as to the boycott of elections and parliament. It is an amateurish and impotent tactic to shout empty slogans that no one or almost no one is willing to carry out when the objective situation pushes the proletariat into the arms of the parties of parliamentary compromise.

It would not have been difficult in 1919 or 1920 to implement the boycott policy when the masses were rushing beyond bourgeois institutions towards revolutionary goals. It is very difficult to implement the tactic that allows the party to slowly ride the wave of the class movement and reach the situation of revolutionary attack with the masses, without acting on the basis of objective possibilities and returning to work in order to prepare the cadres of the class party for the fire of daily struggle, unless one wishes to adopt the theory of those who remain in passive waiting as a matter of principle.

Those who operate differently, following a pattern of principled abstentionism and allowing the masses, even the most lively and sensitive ones, to spontaneously develop their own abstentionist consciousness outside the struggle and without the active participation even in certain electoral carnivals full of political dynamism, carnivals which are the historical product of bourgeois practice and whose effectiveness is always to be measured by its continuing ability to attract the proletariat and bend it to its own ends; those who reject this form of struggle not because of a political assessment of class interests, but out of a sense of moral disgust and misunderstood revolutionary aestheticism, would show themselves to be alien to the revolutionary realism that must characterise the activity of a proletarian party today, a party forced to fight an adversary who does not hesitate to raise the banners of socialism and communism in order to better cover up the extreme necessity of defending its own class privilege. And it inevitably lends support to Lenin's argument in "Left-Wing" Communism.

The only way the class party can become the effective guiding body of the masses in the transition from bourgeois parliamentarianism to the dictatorship of the proletariat is through manoeuvring with the forces of revolution and not with the "bavardage" of an abstentionism worthy of being compared with what has now gone down in history under the name of parliamentary cretinism.

On the other hand, abstentionism on principle cannot be justified or substantiated by basing its critical analysis on the observation that in the phase of monopoly capitalism everything, from the economy to social and political superstructures, tends towards concentration, iron-fisted authority from above and violence, and concluding that the era of parliamentarism and electoral struggles is definitively over. It is true that we are living in the classic era of dictatorship, of both bourgeois dictatorship in the phase of extreme decadence of capitalism, and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is already in the making and is slowly translating itself into the consciousness of the proletariat as an essential and indispensable moment for the construction of socialism. But this does not mean that parliamentarism does not continue to play its nefarious and corrupting role, intertwining with dictatorship or operating in its service; and the reason for the coexistence of the two methods of political rule and their mutual integration can be found in certain objective data on the uneven development of the various sectors of the capitalist economy.

If it is a sign of revolutionary maturity to be able to subject the ideas and practical conduct of an entire historical period to critical scrutiny, it is the duty of the Italian Left to re-examine, in the light of recent events, the most striking, if not the most consistent, of its theoretical and tactical positions: that of abstentionism, which the powerful, absolute and highly concentrated action of the Communist International did not allow to translate into concrete political experience.

There is indeed a strength, as well as weakness, to the arguments for abstentionism that the Italian Left presented at the Second Congress of the Communist International. The strength consists in the position taken in favour of the boycott of parliament and elections, given that this tactic was the only one possible from a Marxist point of view in the historical era of the dictatorship of the proletariat, particularly at a time when the conquest of power was an immediate goal of action. The weakness, on the other hand, consists in the failure to consider the tactics of the revolutionary party in relation to the prospects of a retreat by the proletarian masses, a decline in their unified class consciousness and a reduced capacity for struggle.

When the tactic of frontal attack is considered untimely, the proletarian party must be able to adopt that of active defence, which allows it to painstakingly rebuild and develop, day by day, the concrete grounds for a recovery.

Objectivity, however, requires us to acknowledge that the council communists, compared to abstentionists in general, have a more pronounced sense of revolutionary practicality when they place the organisation of workers' councils, or rather their active existence, as the basis for the policy of boycotting bourgeois parliamentarism. These comrades have understood that the axis of political action based on the boycott of parliament cannot be shifted into a vacuum.

However, the organisation of the workers' councils cannot be conceived and realised according to the ideal schemes and tactical and political needs of the Dutch communists, but rather along the lines of a movement aiming for power, imposed on the proletarian struggle by the revolutionary turn of the current crisis of capitalism.

To think of the workers' councils as a permanent mass organisation to be pitted against reactionary trade unions, towards which all spontaneous workers' unrest now converges, is to think idealistically and to act out of step with the times.

Yet the experience of the workers' councils is still recent, and the reasons that made their establishment and development possible are well defined.

The revolutions of February and October 1917 led to the all-round development of the soviets on a nation-wide scale and to their victory in the proletarian socialist revolution. In less than two years, the international character of the soviets, the spread of this form of struggle and organisation to the world working-class movement and the historical mission of the soviets as the grave-digger, heir and successor of bourgeois parliamentarism and of bourgeois democracy in general, all became clear.

Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism

Although the organisation of the workers' councils in Germany did not fulfil its historical function at that time, it clearly demonstrated that it was possible because it had sprung up on the fertile ground of a revolutionary turning point and the move to the offensive by the great mass of the working class. On the other hand, and this serves as indirect historical proof, the post-Second World War period did not see the emergence of workers' councils, despite the openly reactionary action of the trade unions, which had become instruments of imperialist policy.

It is true that our party put the issue of workers' councils on the agenda at a time of great unrest among factory workers, when they, with weapons in hand, deluded themselves into thinking they could resolve their class interests and take control of their destiny by obeying the national-communist⁽¹⁵⁾ suggestion of a democratic war of liberation and the destruction of fascism to be carried out within the framework of the capitalist state and without affecting the regime of private property. The offensive surge of the masses found its limits not so much in the strategic requirements of the war, which was not yet over, as in the openly counter-revolutionary conduct of the PCI. And the objective conditions that had favoured the revival of the workers' offensive, if they gave rise to affirmations of principle such as that of the workers' councils, were in no way decisive in the creation of new organs of workers' struggle.

Having thus clarified the historical phase in which workers' councils can arise and establish themselves, it is obvious that only when they are a consistent, functioning and widespread reality will the consciousness of proletarian power appear, and the revolutionary party will feel that it has the weapon for concrete action to boycott the bourgeois parliament.

But our disagreement with the council communists deepens when we examine how and when to create mass organisations, their relationship with traditional trade unions, and their constitutional inability to assume the revolutionary leadership role that historically belongs to the class party.

It seems strange that precisely in the constructive part of his theses Pannekoek indulges in a futuristic vision in which lyricism replaces dialectics, and the love of the thesis makes us forget that the history of revolutions is above all the history of understanding how objective possibilities and human material are interdependent on each other at the level of revolutionary action.

The landscape after the Second World War does not really give us grounds for lyrical flourishes when it comes to considering the conditions of the international proletariat and the real possibilities of it resuming the struggle.

Capitalism today appears overwhelmingly powerful in its attempt to organise the economy in a unified and global manner, not because it has found the means to resolve its crisis, but because it has once again been able to bend the forces of labour to its imperialist policy and its war, manoeuvring the leadership of the workers' parties with their wide-ranging influence among the masses. This has led to the paradoxical situation in which we find the active forces of workers' politics at the heart of the process of war and reconstruction; the traditional workers' parties are now welded to the imperialist state, and the trade unions even more so than the parties themselves. And, in order to understand and implement class politics today, this salient feature of the post-war period is the fact from which we must start.

The vast majority of workers still believe in trade unions as the traditional body defending their interests. Clever corporate policies and a well-disguised use of trade union agitation for better wages or against unemployment at parliamentary and government level have reinforced this illusion. And even when particular conditions push them into spontaneous agitation, openly setting them against the trade union leadership, against the wage truce and against the policy of social peace, it is ultimately still the trade unions that are at the heart of the agitation and take the lead, with the certain and immediate result of dragging the unruly workers back and leading them docile and chastened onto the path of duty as imposed by the higher and patriotic necessity of rebuilding the national economy.

As long as workers believe in the trade unions and in the mass parties that monopolise them, a fact reflected in the general decline of the labour movement, thinking about creating a revolutionary trade union is like chasing rainbows; and in this situation, even the slogan of destroying the trade unions is simply a polemical stance that goes no further than the usual propaganda.

First and foremost, it is up to the incurable crisis that is breaking the back of decadent capitalism to bring to fruition the causes underlying the slow transformation of the collective consciousness of the masses in an anti-imperialist direction. And this is the fundamental, dialectical condition from which will spring the drive towards the construction of new mass organisations capable of fulfilling the historic task of bringing all the forces of labour into the sphere of action of the class party and the revolutionary offensive.

We do not know when this will happen, but we know that it will happen and that this is the direction of our daily work. In the meantime, we must not turn our backs on reality, however harsh and bitter it may be, but work within it, leveraging the best aspects to create, alongside ideological and political premises, physical and, where possible, organisational premises in expectation of the resumption of class conflict. Walking with the forces, however scarce, that currently express the class divide; broadening the scope of their influence; leaping with them to the forefront of spontaneous unrest; orienting them towards the general and political struggle of the proletariat, working with the material available and with the modest possibilities offered by the current historical course of capitalism; this is what it means to work along the lines of revolutionary Marxism.

The council communists are following this line but have allowed themselves to be carried away by facile constructive euphoria, devising a kind of revolutionary élan vital that would originate in the spontaneous uprisings of the masses, pass through the experience of the strike committees and their generalisation into a unified movement, and culminate in the era of the workers' councils.

We believe that it is a virtue of the revolutionary to know what needs to be done in a given situation, but woe betide the revolutionary who ignores or pretends to ignore what should not be done in the same situation. And what should not be done today is to make empty theoretical plans, given the obvious impossibility of being able to implement them in practice.

Certainly, the spontaneous unrest among the masses that has occurred and will continue to occur outside and against their own union leadership is a new and interesting experience, albeit still in its early stages and extremely sporadic in nature. But only if their leadership is replaced by a body firmly and solidly anchored within the workplace and the union, with workers who may or may not be union members, and under the stimulating action of internationalist factory groups led by the class party, can spontaneous unrest be channelled and strengthened on the level of revolutionary struggle.

However, if strike committees are the result of a temporary agreement between representatives of various, and almost always too diverse and generic, trade union oppositions and inefficient and ineffective political groups, when not directly linked to imperialist politics, as in the case of the Trotskyists, they are ultimately nothing more than opportunistic organisational expedients; they exist without a strong guiding idea and without method, almost by force of inertia, during the ascendant phase of agitation, and are swept away by the abrupt return of the reactionary trade union leadership. And every experience based on this guideline generally ends in failure. It must therefore be agreed that the workers' councils will in no case be the result of a sum of negative experiences.

We believe that it would distort the task that the history of revolutionary struggles has entrusted to the workers' councils to consider them to be, in the same way as the trade unions, capable of resuming their normal function, perhaps under the banner of a revolutionary postulation.

Assuming that the organisation of workers' councils could, at the current stage of the workers' movement, take the place of traditional trade unions, it would not achieve much more or better results, for the reason that it is not the particular organisation that creates the conditions for revolutionary struggle, but rather the change in the objective situation in a revolutionary sense that will give the organisation the opportunity to operate and achieve class conquest. It would move between theoretical abstraction and the reality of trade union life, which is short-sighted, contingent, demand-making and essentially reformist, with the sole result of discrediting in the consciousness of the proletariat the future possibilities of an organisation born out of the crucible of workers' struggles, seriously undermining the role entrusted to it by the recent history of the revolutionary achievements of the proletariat.

The trade union, as it stands, represents a historical and vital necessity for the imperialist state; therefore, it will live as long as this state exists, and will be destroyed with its destruction. Only then will the workers be able to take their destiny into their own hands, but Comrade Pannekoek can rest assured that they will no longer be so naive as to dabble in corporate and factory democracy, but will act on the basis of revolutionary violence, because everything from the state to the trade union, from the church to the factory, as secular encrustations of capitalism, will have to pass under the steamroller of communist dictatorship.⁽¹⁶⁾

Notes:

(8) In the Netherlands in 1907, a group of Marxist revolutionaries around David Wijnkoop emerged within the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP). They published the paper De Tribune (hence the moniker, the Tribunists) and opposed the reformist party leadership of Pieter Jelles Troelstra. The Tribunists were soon expelled and instead founded the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1909. In 1918, the SDP renamed itself the Communist Party of Holland (CPH) and in 1919 affiliated to the Communist International. Pannekoek and Gorter both contributed to De Tribune, but they split from the CPH in 1920.

(9) In the 1960s and 70s the term operaismo (workerism) became associated with groups like the Quaderni Rossi and Lotta Continua. Writing in the 1940s, Damen uses it to refer to the Dutch-German Communist Left.

(10) Lenin published "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1920, which was then distributed to delegates at the Second Congress of the Communist International. In 1921 Gorter replied with his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin.

(11) Georges Sorel (1847-1922) was a French thinker who influenced some of the syndicalist movement. He rejected parliamentary politics in favour of violent revolution by means of the general strike.

(12) Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919) was on the left of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1912 he was elected to the Reichstag, where he publicly opposed attempts to increase military spending. Following the outbreak of the war, he attempted to continue his anti-war opposition despite pressure from the SPD leadership. In the parliamentary session of 2 December 1914, Liebknecht was the only deputy not to approve the new war loan bill. Together with Rosa Luxemburg he became a key figure in the Spartacus League. On 1 May 1916 he led an anti-war demonstration in Berlin and was charged with treason for shouting "Down with the war! Down with the government!". His father, the socialist politician Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), had previously also been charged with treason for publicly opposing the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

(13) In October 1923, members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) entered coalition governments with the SPD in Saxony and Thuringia. This was a step in preparation of an insurrection that then failed to materialise, as the SPD threatened to walk out of the coalition if a general strike was declared. Soon government troops occupied Saxony and dissolved the government there by force, while in Thuringia the government resigned voluntarily. The whole episode was an attempt to put into practice the new tactics of "united front" and "workers' government" advocated by the Communist International. See also Damen on the "German October": leftcom.org

(14) At the time both Damen and Bordiga used the term "Leninist" as synonym for "revolutionary", since they did not attribute the counter-revolution to Lenin personally. Today we tend not to use the label since it creates more confusion than clarity. See: leftcom.org

(15) i.e. Stalinist

(16) Here of course Damen means the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of the party. See, again, the 1952 Platform of the PCInt: leftcom.org