Anton Pannekoek and the Origins of Leninism

Author(s): H. Schurer
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 41, No. 97 (Jun., 1963), pp. 327-344
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of
Slavonic and East European Studies
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 Anton Pannekoek and the
Origins of Leninism

H. SCHURER
I

W HEN Lenin returned to Petrograd in April I 917 his political ideas

were in some ways very different from what they had been before
I9I4. Conditions in a Europe at war had added new weapons to his
intellectual armoury and led him to attach great significance to
ideas which had previously made no particular impact on his mind.
Prominent among the men whose pre-war theories helped to bring
new conceptions into his thinking after August 19I4 was the Dutch-
man Anton Pannekoek (I873-I960). For several years during the
war Pannekoek was one of the handful of people who took Lenin's
side in the movements of Zimmerwald and Kienthal. This not un-
naturally made Lenin specially interested in the theories which
Pannekoek had put forward in pre-war days, and as a result some of
Pannekoek's ideas found their way into his thinking as it crystallised
during his wartime exile in Switzerland. Pannekoek was a man who
distinguished himself in two completely unrelated fields. He is best
known as an astronomer of international repute whose book on the
history of astronomy was translated into English in I96I. But during
the first two decades of the century he played an important part in
the labour movement of both the Netherlands and Germany. Par-
ticularly significant for their impact on Lenin's thinking after I914
are his pre-war writings reflecting his experience of German social
democracy.
Between the end of the igth century and I914 the German social
democratic party, which remained the model party of the second
international, was dominated by the conflict between the revisionists
and the orthodox. After the Russian revolution of I905 an extreme
left wing gradually emerged in the orthodox Marxist camp. It tried
to apply the lessons of the Russian revolution to the German social
democratic movement and was led to advocate new forms of political
struggle. In contrast to most German socialists who continued to rely
entirely on parliamentary work and trade union organisations this
left wing pinned its main hopes on mass actions such as political mass
strikes. The same two currents also existed in the labour movements
of other countries. After the Russian revolution of I905 an extreme
left-wing group of intellectuals formed in the Dutch socialist party
and attacked the leaders of the party majority for relying too much

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328 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

on parliamentary work. Among them were writers of national emi-

nence like Herman Gorter and Henriette Roland-Holst, and also
Anton Pannekoek who was already showing promise as a young
astronomer. In I907 the group founded a journal called 'Tribune'
as the organ of the extreme revolutionary left wing and fought so
bitterly against the party leadership that at the beginning of I909 its
members were expelled from the party. This led them to found a new
party of their own, but it remained a small minority within the
Dutch socialist movement. The case of the 'Tribunists' prompted one
of Lenin's interventions at meetings of the second international. In
November i 909 the international socialist bureau had before it an
application from the new Dutch revolutionary socialist party to
affiliate to the second international and had two motions to consider.
One of them, which was backed by the German social democrats,
supported the application. The other, which was proposed by Victor
Adler of Austria, favoured the majority group in the Dutch socialist
movement. Lenin spoke emphatically for the application and was at
one with the official spokesman of the German party in backing the
'Tribunists'. But it was Adler's motion which was carried.
The bitterness between the majority and minority in the Dutch
socialist movement in the years before I914 is reminiscent of con-
ditions in the Russian and Polish movements during the same period.
It also anticipated the situation which arose in the German move-
ment after 4 August I914 when it was no longer possible to contain
political differences within the same organisational framework.
Pannekoek during this period had one foot in the Dutch movement
and one in the German. From I906 he worked as a journalist in the
service of German social democracy and lived in Berlin and later in
Bremen. After about i908 Karl Radek, a native of Austrian Poland
and a member of Rosa Luxemburg's Polish social democratic
movement, also lived in Bremen, and the influence of Pannekoek and
Radek made Bremen the centre of an extreme left-wing group which
was near to becoming in the war years a group of Leninists on German
soil. Already before the war Radek drew close to Lenin, especially
after 1912 when the split in Rosa Luxemburg's Polish party left
Rosa Luxemburg and Tyshko on one side and Lenin, Radek and
Hanecki on the other.
The repercussions of this Polish factional split put Radek in an
extremely difficult position within the German party and brought
demands for his expulsion. It was Pannekoek who defended Radek
against his accusers at the Chemnitz party congress in I912,1 and
when Radek was eventually expelled in I9I 3, the two men were
1 Protokolliuberdie Verhandlungen
des Parteitagsder S.P.D., Chemnitz, I912. Berlin, I9I2,
P. 515.

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 329

drawn even closer by the common experience of their expulsion from

the great official labour movements. The publication of Rosa Luxem-
burg's 'Accumulation of Capital' in 19I3 deepened the rift beween
Rosa Luxemburg's group in Berlin and the Pannekoek-Radek group.
When Pannekoek published a sharp criticism of Rosa Luxemburg in
the Bremen party paper and condemned her basic thesis as incorrect,
Lenin backed him fully.2 In view of the relations between the Pan-
nekoek-Radek group in Bremen and the bolshevik party, with Radek
as the connecting link, it is not surprising that in a letter to Hanecki
of I9I3 Lenin urged that he should introduce to Pannekoek as a
prominent leftist the bolshevik guest delegate to the German social
democratic congress in Jena.3
Lenin evidently studied Pannekoek's writings of this period with
great interest.4 But their real impact on his thinking was only to
show itself in the war years. In I 909 Pannekoek published a pamphlet
on tactical differences within the labour movement which appeared
under the imprint of the official publisher of the Hamburg social
democratic party organisation.5 Its tone was sharpened by the
experience of the split in the Dutch socialist party, which had
occurred in the same year owing to the unusual bitterness of the
antagonism between left and right in the Dutch labour movement.
Antagonism between left and right was acute enough in German social
democracy; but in Germany the fighting went on within the frame-
work of a single organised movement. Much of Pannekoek's pamph-
let covered familiar ground: the common world of ideas of left-wing
Marxism in pre-war Western Europe with its stress on the need to
prepare for a new age of mass actions and warnings against excessive
reliance on parliaments and trade unions.
What was new in Pannekoek's discussion of the revisionist devia-
tion from the orthodox revolutionary Marxist course was his attempt
to penetrate through the ideology of the revisionist heresy to its social
roots. For the first time a writer in the Marxist camp laid down that
the tactical differences between left and right in the labour movement
sprang from the class structure of the movement. He suggested that
any large mass movement of opposition and protest developing in
the conditions which prevailed in imperial Germany was bound to

Lenin, Sochineniva,3rd ed., Moscow, I931-3, vol. XVIII, p. 42.

2

Lenin, Sochineniya,3rd ed., vol. XXIX, p. 69. Letter of 12 September 1913.

3
4 E.g. he had reviewed Pannekoek's TaktischeDifferenzenof I909, which will be dis-
cussed below, in Zvezda, No. i of I6 December i9IO. Lenin, Sochineniya,3rd ed., vol.
XV, pp. 5-9. In a letter to Gor'ky of February 1913 he praises Pannekoek's Klassenkampf
undNation (Reichenberg, I 9 I 2). Sochineniya,
XVI, p. 328. Its title-page as well as a specimen
page of Pannekoek's pamphlet with annotations by Lenin are reproduced in Biblioteka
V. I. Leninav Kremle: Katalog, Moscow, I96I, pp. 658-9.
5 A. Pannekoek, Die taktischenDifferenzenin der Arbeiterbewegung, Hamburg, Dubber,
I 909.

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330 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW
be a coalition of several social groupings, of several social classes.
'The followers of social democracy', he wrote, 'the members of the
party, form no homogeneous mass with identical views, ideas and
aspirations. Different classes and groups with-in some cases-diff-
erent interests are covered by this name and by this party label.
If these interests are held in common on a temporary or permanent
basis, these groups are welded together, but interests which differ or
are even mutually hostile will lead to conflicts. This battle of interests
then assumestheform of tactical differenceswithin theparty.'6
If social democracy was the political exponent of several social
groups associated in a common struggle against a common adversary
and not a unified association of like-minded people, it was only to be
expected that in this coalition of different groups each group would
try to press its own particular interests. The core of the movement
consisted of the workers in large-scale industrial enterprises. In the
mass actions to come their power would be decisive. Centred round
them were other social groups which supported social democracy in
parliamentary elections. Pannekoek enumerated and analysed these
groups. He distinguished first the 'traditional middle classes' com-
posed of small proprietors in the countryside and independent
craftsmen in the towns. Their economic existence was threatened by
capitalism and they were being increasingly proletarianised. They
therefore represented groups which belonged to the past. He next
singled out classes created only recently by the new economic de-
velopments of his time, in particular the class of white-collar workers,
whom the Germans termed the 'new middle class'. Thirdly and most
important of all, he pointed to the rise of an upper layer within the
working class itself. 'These groups of the industrial proletariat,' he
wrote, 'which by powerful organisations have achieved a privileged
position, higher wages and shorter working hours and form a kind of
labour aristocracy, do not feel the same urge for the overthrow of
capitalism as the lower layers of the working class.... Their ideal is
a gradual rise to better economic conditions; their views approximate
to those of the traditional middle classes and their condition resembles
that of the lowest layers of the new middle classes'.7
Pannekoek argued that a serious contrast of interests existed be-
tween the 'traditional middle classes' and the labour aristocracy
among the workers on the one hand and the industrial proletariat on
the other. It was therefore not surprising to find an intense conflict
of ideas within the social democratic movement as well. 'Revision-
ism', he said, 'represents the interests of these traditional middle
classes and the interests of the highly skilled labour aristocracy in
6 A. Pannekoek, op. cit., p. I24.
7 A. Pannekoek, Op. cit., pp. 125-6.

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 33I

contrast to the interests of the masses of the industrial proletariat.'8

The political battles in the social democratic movement were based
on the clash of economic interests of the various classes which the
party represented. Hence the violence and passion with which they
were waged. Particularly interesting from the point of view of future
developments was Pannekoek's suggestion that the paramount im-
portance attached to organisation, particularly trade union organisa-
tion, and to the need for keeping it intact could be a factor which
weakened the working class in the class struggle and produced a
tendency towards accommodation to the status quo. The extent and
strength of class organisation, on which the German socialists prided
themselves, had thus altered the function which organisation fulfilled.
What had begun as an expression of protest against capitalism was
now serving to bridge the gulf between the proletariat and the capital-
ists and lead to the embourgeoisement of the working class. To regard
a mass party like German social democracy as a coalition of warring
interests and ideologies held together by common antagonism to the
political structure of imperial Germany implied that the coalition
might break apart in times of crisis and strain, particularly as the
issues at stake were not simply theoretical niceties but real class
interests and the clashes between them. To an orthodox Marxist
like Pannekoek, the labour aristocracy thus became a veritable
bete noire. For him a split between left and right would be a split
between the mass of the industrial proletariat and a small minority
of privileged labour aristocrats.

II

After I909, when Pannekoek published his pamphlet against the

background of the bitter struggle in the Dutch labour party and the
expulsion from it of himself and his friends, the process of differentia-
tion in the German social democratic movement quickened. Pan-
nekoek and Radek formed the Bremen group of extreme left-wingers;
Rosa Luxemburg, Tyshko and Marchlewski formed the Berlin group
of left radicals. In I909 the struggle, as Pannekoek's pamphlet had
delineated it, was still between orthodox Marxism and revisionism
with each of the two currents representing the appropriate social
classes. But in I9IO Rosa Luxemburg and Kautsky clashed over the
use of the mass strike to win universal suffrage in Prussia. From now
onwards German social democracy had three wings not two, and the
party majority with Kautsky as its ideologue had to turn its guns
against the left extremists of the Berlin and Bremen groups as well as
8 A. Pannekoek, op. cit., p. I26.

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332 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW
against the revisionists. The result was a series of polemics in the
columns of Neue Zeit between Kautsky on the one hand and Rosa
Luxemburg, Radek and Pannekoek on the other. But the Berlin
group never used the theory of the labour aristocracy in these polemics.
This remained Pannekoek's own special contribution.
Two main issues arose between Kautsky and his assailants. These
were the nature of imperialism and the role of mass action in the
struggle to come. Historians of the German social democratic move-
ment during these years have to use terms taken from the history of
religion, such as 'an apocalyptic mood' and 'expectation of the
parousia to come', when they try to describe the emotional world in
which the left radicals lived. It is therefore hardly surprising to find
that one of these theoretical tournaments between Pannekoek and
Kautsky in i9i2 greatly influenced Lenin's thinking just before and
during the early days of the February revolution of I9I 7. The mood
of the extreme left-wingers in German social democracy in the years
immediately before I 9I4 and their firm conviction of tremendous
upheavals to come were not unlike Lenin's mood and conviction
when news of the February revolution first reached him in his exile
in Switzerland.
The controversy between Pannekoek and Kautsky in IqI29 arose
out of differences in their evaluation of mass action and parliamen-
tary work in the conditions of the time. Only the points relevant to
the future need be mentioned here. Pannekoek envisaged a long-
drawn-out battle between the working class and the bourgeoisie,
which would cover a whole period characterised by a series of
graduated mass movements. By this he meant successive waves of
political strikes. He believed that the collision between the state of
the bourgeoisie and these graduated waves of proletarian mass action
would be a lengthy process. For him the essence of the transfer of
power to the working class was not the gradual attainment of a
majority in parliament and the concentration of power in parliament,
but the gradual erosion of the bourgeois state and the simultaneous
development of a proletarian counter-state as a result of series of
mass movements. 'The essence of the revolution', he wrote, 'is the
destruction of the political power apparatus of the bourgeois state by
the political power apparatus of the proletariat'.10 In the process of
revolution the bourgeois state apparatus would thus be destroyed
not taken over. The process would be long-drawn-out: the revolution
would be achieved not by a single blow but by the gradual dissolution
of the political forces of the capitalist state and the gradual building
9 A. Pannekoek, 'Massenaktion und Revolution' (Neue Zeit, XXX, vol. 2, Stuttgart,
1911-12, pp. 541-50, 585-93, 609-I9); K. Kautsky, 'Die neue Taktik' (ibid., pp.
688-98, 723-33)-
10 A. Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 544.

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 333
up of the power of the working class. This idea that the fundamental
task was the gradual destructionof the existing state organisation by
the socialist revolution was wholly alien to the traditional thinking
of German social democracy. Pannekoek also argued that existing
working-classorganisationscould not accomplish this task. To some
extent they still reflected the stability of the capitalist society of the
day. The degree of integration into a powerful fighting organisation
depended on the total transformationof the psychologyof the working
class in the smelting furnace of the socialist revolution. This process
would create new forms of organisations, new organs of political
power, completely new institutions.11'At the end of the revolutionary
process', he maintained, 'nothing is left' of the material power of the
ruling class. 'The whole working class has become a highly organised
class, determining its own fate with clear consciousness,is fit to rule
and can begin to organise production'.12Though he frequently re-
ferred to the experiencesof the Russian revolution of I 905,13 he spoke
only of political and economic mass strikesand emphasisedthe poss-
ibility of great spontaneous outbursts of unorganised masses. At
the same time he was by no means unaware that the existence of
large organised movements in the west differentiated the coming
socialist revolution of the 2oth century from the revolutions of the
i gth century.14In all these forecastsPannekoekkept to large abstrac-
tions. His only reference to the forms of struggle was to the mass
strikesin Russia, and he deliberately made no attempt to forecastthe
kind of political organisationwhich the struggling working class was
likely to evolve. He left it instead to the creativepowersof the working
class of the future, since its character and the nature of its organisa-
tions were certain to be completely transformedin the process of the
socialist revolution. He made no reference to Marx's writings on the
Paris Commune of I87I or to the Russian soviets of I905. He prob-
ably ignored the first as belonging to an early phase of the socialist
movement and the second as typical of a backward,primitivecountry
where no large-scale working-classorganisations existed and where
an unorganised working class had thrown up soviets for want of
something better. After the war, when Rosa Luxemburg addressed
the founding congress of the German communist party at the end of
I9I8, she envisaged the future in Germany in the same kind of terms
as Pannekoek had envisaged it in I9I2: a series of graduated mass
actions in the form of political as well as economicstrikes,which would
lead to the formation of a proletarian counter-state and the simul-
taneous erosion of the foundations of the existing state.15
11 A. Pannekoek, OP.cit., P. 548. 12 A. Pannekoek, OP.Cit.,P. 550.
13 A. Pannekoek, op. Cit.,PP- 541, 54 Pannekoe7k A op. Cit., P. 587.
15 Rosa Luxemburg, Rede zum Programm, Berlin, 1919, p. I8.

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334 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Kautsky was obviously taken aback by Pannekoek'sconceptions,

which were formulated in I9I2 when imperial Germany was still at
the height of her power. He followed the line which he had adopted
in his controversieswith Rosa Luxemburg since i9IO and charged
Pannekoek with mechanically translating the Russian experience of
I 905 to the completely differentconditions of western Europe. Waves
of lengthy mass strikes were possible under special conditions in a
backward country like Russia, but were out of the question in
Germany under prevailing conditions.16Pannekoek's basic idea of
the destruction, the breaking, and the smashing of the bourgeois
state apparatus seemed to Kautsky to show complete confusion of
thought. 'Hitherto', he wrote, 'the difference between social demo-
crats and anarchistsconsisted simply in this, that the first wanted to
conquer state power, the others to destroy state power. Pannekoek
advocates both aims at the same time'.17 He also derided and dis-
missed as 'social alchemy' the further ideas of the spiritual trans-
formation of the working class in the process of revolution, of which
Pannekoekhad made so much. For him the aims remained a majority
in parliament, full powers to parliament, large-scale nationalisation
by a socialist majority in a democratically elected parliament. If
the entire state apparatus had been destroyed by mass action, as
Pannekoek thought, how on earth could all this be achieved,
Kautsky demanded.18
Pannekoek had broken entirely new ground with his theory of a
labour aristocracy as the social basis of reformism within social
democracy and with his suggestion that in the great struggle to come
new political institutions would very likely be created in place of
existing institutions which were unsuitable to the needs of the new
society of the future. Among the other membersof the extreme left
of the social democratic movement, Rosa Luxemburg never tried to
explain the existence of the reformist current by linking it to any
social group. It was not an idea which belonged to her theoretical
armoury. Nor did she suggest the likelihood that new institutional
forms would be thrown up in the great struggle of the coming epoch.
The referencesin her writings to the St Petersburgsoviet of I905 are
concernedwith trade union problems, not with the political structure
of a socialist society.

4III
It takes a real effort of the imagination to appreciate the shattering
effect of the deep shock which Lenin experienced when the German
16 K. Kautsky,'Die neue Taktik' (Neue Zeit, XXX, vol. 2. I9I I-I2, p. 695).
17 K. Kautsky, op. cit., p. 724- 18 K. Kautsky, op. cit., p. 732.

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 335
social democratic party voted for war credits on 4 August I914. Not
only had the German party been the teacher of Russian social
democracy, but Germany's whole development from I870 to 1914
had seemed to the Russian Marxists to provide historical proof of
the correctnessof Marx's predictions. Economic progress, rapid in-
dustrialisation, the flow of a large part of the rural population into
the towns where it had been transformedinto an industrialproletariat,
and the seemingly irresistiblerise of German social democracy from
a splinter party to a mass party backed by a third of the population
had all appeared to bear out Marx's prophecies that capitalism
would be its own gravedigger. But the events of August 1914 shat-
tered this image once and for all. The revolutionary determination
of Lenin and his associates still remained unshaken. But the link
which they had seen between economic progress and their hopes of
revolution had now snapped. In their view yesterday'sidol, the social
democratic party of the most advanced capitalist country of Europe,
had collapsed and betrayed their faith in it, while the socialists of
backward peasant countries like Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria and
Rumania had kept firmly to a policy which Lenin considered to be
the only possible socialist line in war conditions. The explanation for
what had occurred lay ready at hand in Pannekoek's sociological
theory of the labour aristocracy.
The socialist movements of the highly developed countries like
Germany, France, and England had allowed themselves to be cap-
tured by the revisionistswho were the exponents of the labour aris-
tocracy. As the reasons which were held responsiblefor the patriotic
attitude of the socialist parties were gradually elaborated, new ele-
ments were added to this basic concept. The synthesisof these various
ideas was destined to form a central part of orthodox Leninism. The
main idea was that revisionism or reformism was linked with a
definite social layer of the working class. This had come from
Pannekoek. In Leninist terminology revisionismwas dubbed 'oppor-
tunism' and was regarded by Lenin as very definitely the root of
'social patriotism' and 'social chauvinism'. Other elements came to
be grouped round Pannekoek's initial thesis. Scattered passages in
the correspondenceof Engels with Kautsky and Bebel had tried to
explain the attachment of the British working class to the liberal
party at the end of the i gth century by pointing to Britain'scolonial
wealth which had supposedly been used to bribe and corrupt some
sections of the British workers.19As imperialism had begun to be
19 Engels to Kautsky on x2 September i 882. 'You ask me what the English workers
think of colonial politics. Exactly the same as they think of politics in general, viz. what
the bourgeois think! The workers participate joyfully in the fruits of the British monopoly
of world market and colonial empire'. K. Marx und F. Engels, Briefe an A. Bebel, W.
Liebknecht,K. Kautsky und andere,Teil I, Moscow, 1933, p. 269. Engels to Bebel on 30

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336 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

widely discussed in Marxist circles in the years before the war, these
remarks of Engels about the colonial wealth of Britain were now
taken to apply to all the advanced European countries with either
colonial empires or a favoured position in the world market. Their
privileged position was held to bring them extra profits with which to
bribe and corrupt a privileged minority of the working class and
create the kind of labour aristocracy to which Pannekoek had
referred.
In I9II Robert Michels, a former social democrat who was later
to be attracted for a time by syndicalism, had published a book
entitled Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernenDemocratie in
which he had shown, with a wealth of supporting material, that the
labour bureaucracy in the European labour movement was a force
whose very function made it tend to dominate the movement, seek
an accommodation with the status quo, and swing the movement to
the right.20 This tendency had shown itself first in the bureaucracy
of the trade unions and had now spread to the party bureaucracy as
well. Shortly after the outbreak of the war Pannekoek published
an article in the bolshevik journal Kommunistdenouncing the venera-
tion of organisation and giving it as one of the reasons why German
social democracy had changed front.21
Zinov'yev, who was one of Lenin's closest collaborators in Switzer-
land during the war years, referred extensively to both Pannekoek
and Michels in an ambitious book, one chapter of which tried to
propound a coherent theory of the social roots of opportunism in the
labour movement. He wrote the book in 19I5-I6 and published it
in Petrograd in I9I7 soon after the October revolution under the
title 'The war and the crisis of socialism'. In it he recalled how
Pannekoek had suggested that revolutionary fervour might be weak-
ened as well as fortified by the rise and strengthening of organisations
whose character 'reflected the stability of the present-day order',
and how he had argued that pressure from strong organisations
helped to transform certain sections of the working class into a
labour aristocracy. He pointed out how Michels had exemplified
the role of the labour bureaucracy and shown its tendency towards
oligarchy and towards accommodation with the capitalist system.
He also quoted from the article in Kommunistin which Pannekoek
had denounced the cult of organisation in German social democracy
August i 883. 'A real working class movement will only arise in England when the workers
come to realise that the British world market monopoly has come to an end. Participation
in this monopoly is the economic basis of the political nullity of the English working class.
Trailing behind the bourgeoisie in the economic exploitation of this monopoly, in the
political field they trail behind the liberal party'. op. cit., p. 310.
20 R. Michels, Zur Soziologiedes Parteiwesens in dermodernen Demokratie,Leipzig, I 9 I I.
21 A. Pannekoek, 'Imperializm i zadachi
proletariata' (Kommunist,No. 1-2 Geneva,
.19I5, p. 71).

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 337
and blamed it for helping to cause the movement's change of course.22
Once this sociological rationalisation had been found of why the
situation had developed differently from what had been expected,
the next step was to urge that the ideological exponents of the labour
aristocracy and the labour bureaucracy should be separated from
the ideological exponents of the true revolutionary proletariat, what-
ever might be the temporary relations of forces and influence. Given
the theory that the working class movement was a coalition of social
groups, it was not unlikely that in times of crisis this coalition would
fall apart. Lenin, Pannekoek and Radek all saw clearly and correctly
that the second international would not recover from 4 August I9I4.
In this respect their views proved to be more acute than those of many
of their contemporaries in the socialist camp.23
The earliest official statement of the bolshevik party on the war
was the resolution of the Berne conference of February and March
I9I5. Lenin himself drafted it. It indicated his full acceptance of the
Pannekoek-Michels theory of the social roots of 'opportunism', 'social
patriotism', and 'social chauvinism'. 'Certain strata of the labouring
class', it said, '(the bureaucracy of the labour movement and the
labour aristocracy which have received crumbs of the profits made
from the exploitation of colonies and from the privileged position of
their country on the world market) and also petty bourgeois associates
within the socialist parties have become the chief social support of
these tendencies and the channels of bourgeois influence within the
proletariat'.24 From this it went on to deduce the need for a radical
split in the whole European working class movement. But the call
for a split was still limited to Lenin and his tiny handful of Zimmer-
wald left-wingers. It was made in the teeth of opposition from many
other left-wingers and had no practical significance at the time. The
German social democratic party was the only important party which
split substantially during the war, and it was the patriotic majority
and not the left extremists who caused the split. The dividing line
was not between revolutionary and non-revolutionary but between
patriot and pacifist; and even Bernstein, the venerable founder of
revisionism, was included among the opposition leaders whom the
majority expelled. But it is significant from the point of view of
theory that in i9i6 when Radek, who was one of Lenin's closest
22 G. Zinov'yev, Voynai krizis sotsializma, 2nd ed., Petersburg, 1920, pp. 3I8-20.
23 Lenin in a letter from Berne to Shlyapnikov of 27 October I9I4: 'The only one to
tell the truth to the workers. ... was Pannekoek.... His words to the effect that if the
leaders of the International, which was killed by the opportunists and by Kautsky, now
gather and attempt to "mend" the cracks, their efforts will have no significance whatso-
ever-these words are the only socialist words. This is the truth'. (Lenin, Sochineniya,
XXIX, p. I44). This refers to Pannekoek's articles 'Der Zusammenbruch der Inter-
nationale' published in BernerTagwacht,No. 245-7, 20-22 October I94.
24 Lenin, Sochineniya,XVIII, p. I27.

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338 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

war-time associates, urged his German followers to take the initiative

in splitting the German party, he referred explicitly to Pannekoek's
pamphlet of I909 and followed its enumeration of the strata which
formed the social basis of reformism. He completely endorsed
Pannekoek's analysis, merely adding his own suggestion that the
labour aristocracy and the labour bureaucracy were closely linked
by the similarity of their origins. In Radek's view the events of I914
had proved the falsity of the old idea of the extreme German left
that pressure from the masses would push the leaders forward. A
split in the movement was inevitable, given the profound social
differentiation within the working class. The same arguments were
to be heard after I917 when the Comintern was founded.
Far more immediate importance attached to a further implication
of the views which Radek expressed about the labour aristocracy.
This labour aristocracy was typical of the advanced capitalist coun-
tries and, as I 9 I 4 had shown, it had captured their labour movement.
But countries also existed where the labour aristocracy was insigni-
ficant, and what happened there ? 'In Italy and Russia', Radek wrote,
'the group of privileged workers is very small, and for this reason the
great majority of the socialist party has remained faithful to
socialism'.25 The implication was, particularly in view of the reference
to Russia, that the development of capitalism created conditions for
the reformist corruption of the working class in the advanced coun-
tries, while the less advanced countries remain untainted by the
reformist poison. Economic progress had meant that capitalism in the
advanced countries had built stabilisers to ensure its survival. But if
economic advance and reformist corruption go hand in hand, so do
economic backwardness and revolutionary socialism. Thus, in the
period after I9I4, when belief in the great revolutionary German
social democratic party lay shattered, the theory of labour aristocracy
forms the connecting link with the idea that socialism might come
first in backward Russia. In lines written in i 9 I 9 under the impression
of the recent assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
Lenin was to formulate this idea with great clarity:

England served as an example of a country in which the bourgeoisie

... created the most bourgeois upper stratum of the proletariat. For
several decades the advanced capitalist country proved to be backward
in regard to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat... Then
hegemony in the International passed to Germany, in the 70s of the I gth
century, when Germany was economically behind England and France.
When Germany finally surpassed these two countries economically,
Bremen, second half
25 K. Radek, 'Einheit oder Spaltung der Partei' (Arbeiterpolitik,
of I9I6, reprinted in K. Radek, In den Reihen der deutschenRevolution,Munich, I92I,
p. 319).

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 339
i.e. in the second decade of the 20th century, a handful of arch
scoundrels, the filthiest blackguards who had sold themselves to the
capitalists .., the most revolting executioners risen from the ranks of
the workers to enlist in the service of the monarchy and the counter-
revolutionary bourgeoisie were found to be at the head of the Marxist
workers' party in Germany, which had been a model for the whole
world.26

In this passage he sums up the basic concept of the connection be-

tween the revolutionary spirit and economic backwardness on the
one hand and the reformist spirit and economic progress on the
other.
Lenin naturally realised that this concept flatly contradicted the
predictions of Marx. He therefore found it necessary to add: 'World
history marches inevitably towards the dictatorship of the proletariat,
but it does not move towards this goal by a smooth, straightforward
and direct road.' Engels had noted a connection between economic
progress and reformism and between backwardness and socialist
militancy as early as I884 and had found it 'curious'.27 The implica-
tions for Russia were clear and may help to explain why Lenin had
rejected Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution in pre-war days
when he still believed firmly in Kautsky and German social democracy
and in the connection between economic progress and social advance.
But after I9I4, when his idols lay shattered, he gradually came round
to Trotsky's idea, which linked economic backwardness and revolu-
tion. At the fifth congress of the Comintern in 1924, when Heinrich
Brandler was defending his leadership of the unsuccessful attempt at
a communist revolution in Germany in I923, he also argued from
this same standpoint, which had originated with Radek and Pan-
nekoek. 'In Russia in 1917', Brandler insisted, almost pathetically,
'there was no labour aristocracy'.28
When Lenin eventually accepted the theory of permanent revolu-
tion, it was in the firm belief that the impact of a socialist upheaval in
Russia would be so tremendous that even the power of the labour
aristocracy would be swept away by a general mass revolt against
the horrors of war. But it would be an unorganised and elemental
revolt, as no revolutionary organisations existed to lead it. The basis
of Lenin's strategy in April I9I7 thus becomes clear. What he did
26 Lenin, 'The Third International, its place in history' (April I9I9. Sochineniya,XXIV,
p. 249).
27 Engels to Kautsky on 8 November I 884: 'For the first time in history a solid workers'
party [i.e. German social democracy] presents itself as a political power .... It is curious
-what helps our cause most is the retarded industrial condition of Germany. In England
and France, the transition to industrialisation is more or less completed. The conditions
in which the proletariat exists have already become stable'. K. Marx und F. Engels,
Briefe an A. Bebel etc., pp. 371-2.
28 E. H. Carr, Historyof Soviet
Russia, vol. 4, London, I954, p. 228.

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340 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

was to link his acceptance of the theory that the socialist revolution
would start first in a backward country like Russia with the idea
that in advanced countries like Germany the socialist revolution
would be stimulated by Russia's example and would take the form
of a spontaneous uprising of the masses in defiance of the conserva-
tive influence of their traditional leadership and organisation. In all
this Lenin was not as far removed from reality as he seems to have
been now. The October revolution soon stimulated a huge inter-
national mass strikemovement in the countriesof the central powers
in which political and economic motives were mingled and which
developed entirely against the wishes of the traditional organisations,
with the rank and file taking the lead. It was a unique, international
action uniting Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin in the kind of great
spontaneous movement which Lenin had expected when making
the October revolution in Russia.

IV
This idea of an elemental uprising of the masses was in the fore-
front of Lenin's mind during the early weeks of 917I when he began
to collect material for an essay on the Marxist conception of the state
under the stimulus of an article by Bukharin.29After 4 August I914
when the traditional parties and trade unions had shown that they
were clearly unfitted to organise a protest movement against war a
spontaneous elemental movement was the only form of protest
which could be envisaged. When Marx discussedthe Paris Commune
he too had put all his emphasis on the creative action of the Paris
working class and had paid scant regard to the role of the revolu-
tionary leaders. During his examination of the Marxist literature on
these problems in the winter of I9I6-I 7 Lenin realised that the idea
of the destructionof the bourgeoisstate and its replacement by a new
type of government machinery, which he regarded as Marx's central
contribution, had been plainly restated by Pannekoek in his con-
troversywith Kautsky in I9I 2. When Lenin was making notes on the
controversy at the beginning of 1917, chiefly to expose Kautsky's
'betrayal' of Marxism in the course of it, his sympathieswere plainly
with Pannekoek. By linking the experience of the Paris Commune
as Marx had describedit and the Russiansovietsof 1905,30 he reached
conclusions which approximated very closely to ideas of direct
democracy, of self-governmentof the masses without intermediary
political organs. In I9I2 Pannekoek had advanced the idea of a
29 R. V. Daniels, 'The State and the Revolution'
(AmericanSlavic Review,XII, New
York, 1953, pp. 22-43)-
30 LeninskySbornik,XIV,
Moscow, 1930, pp. 310-14.

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 34I

proletarian counter-state fighting the existing order over a long period

of time in a series of graduated mass movements taking the form of
mass strikes. But Lenin's notes indirectly criticised Pannekoek's exclu-
sive reliance on the mass strike by stressing the possibility of an armed
rising, with explicit reference to the Moscow rising of December
1905.31 Lenin made his notes in January and February I9I7 and
developed them into 'State and Revolution' during August and
September. Their tenor is unmistakable: reliance on the creative
potentialities of the working class masses. They make hardly any
mention of the role of the party, which has always seemed puzzling.
If Lenin's notes are read against the background of the period,
when all that he could hope for was that the masses in western
Europe would rise without and against their traditional leaders, his
emphasis on the spontaneous creative energies of the masses becomes
intelligible. In this context his stress on the soviets of the I905 revo-
lution, which had been an outstanding example of a spontaneous
unorganised movement without direction by political and trade union
organisations, clearly fits the general pattern of his thinking during
these months. Whether Lenin was correct or not in his interpretation
of Marx is irrelevant. What matters is what weapons were ready in
his ideological armoury when he returned to Russia in April I9I 7.
Once Lenin reached Petrograd he immediately applied to the
situation which had arisen after the downfall of tsarism his idea that
the new proletarian state would be born as a creative act of the
masses. What had still been an academic exercise in his examination
of the Kautsky-Pannekoek controversy now became a practical issue
of crucial importance. The rise of the Petrograd soviet as a 'counter-
state' to the provisional government fitted in completely with the
Pannekoek thesis of a proletarian counter-government wrestling
with the bourgeois government. The ideas which Lenin had formed
during his study of Marxist texts and the Kautsky-Pannekoek con-
troversy of I912 no longer remained theoretical speculations. Instead
he promptly applied them to the situation which he found in Russia in
April 19I7. He now accepted Trotsky's theory of permanent revo-
lution with its burning faith in the revolutionary creative powers of
the Russian proletarian masses and its belief that the impact of an
upheaval in Russia would break the crust of organisational conserva-
tism in German social democracy. At the same time he applied the
Pannekoek theory of the two governments, each of them representing
a different class, locked in a struggle which would lead to the destruc-
don of one and the triumph of the other. The soviets against the
provisional government was the Russian version in I9I 7 of Panne-
koek's forecast of 1912.
31 Ibid., p.
370.

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342 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

In a lecture on Russia, which Lenin gave in Zurich in March I 9I 7

just after the Februaryrevolution, he had brought into his discussion
of the new situation all his recent ideas on the Paris Commune, the
soviets of I 905, the Kautsky-Pannekoek controversy of I 9 I 2, and
the soviet of 19I 7. He had applied these ideas to the tasksnow facing
the movement, which he defined as the establishment of direct rule
by armed and organisedworkers.32Trotsky, who had been so closely
identified with the soviets of I905, reached similar conclusions while
still in exile in New York.33It was on the basis of their newly-found
agreement on the perspectivesof the approaching Russian and west
European revolutions and the crucial role which the soviets would
play in them that Lenin and Trotsky formed their alliance in I9I 7.
In September I 9I8 when Radek draftedhis forewordto Bukharin's
attempt to give a systematic account of Communist doctrine he
proudly claimed Pannekoek as a begetter of the Leninist theory of
the state. 'It was often asked', he said, 'how capitalist democracy
and its parliamentaryinstitutions would be transformedinto institu-
tions of the victorious proletariat. When Anton Pannekoek, the most
clear-headed theorist of west European socialism, gave the answer to
the effect that capitalism would have to be destroyed even in its
democratic forms, and that new institutions of the working class
would have to be created in the fire of the proletarian revolution,
he was accused of anarchism by K. Kautsky. However correct
Pannekoek's answer was, it was an incomplete answer.... He did
not say what kind of institutions the proletariat would have to create
in order to carry out and ensure its final victory.'34 Thus, at the end
of i9I8, Radek hailed Pannekoek, his old comrade-in-arms of
Bremen, as one of the forerunnersof Leninism.

A few months later a controversyarose between Radek on the one

side and Pannekoek and Gorter on the other which led within two
years to a parting of the ways between Lenin, Radek and the
Comintern and the two Dutch Marxists. After the October revolu-
tion and the creation of the Comintern Pannekoek was one of the
first to join the third international as a founder of the communist
32 Lenin, Sochineniya,XXX, p. 318.
33 'The revolutionary proletariat must at once oppose its revolutionary organs, the
soviets of the workers', soldiers' and peasants' deputies, to the executive organs of the
Provisional Government. In this struggle the proletariat, heading the revolutionary
masses, must aim at the conquest of power as its immediate target." (NovyyMir, No. 940,
New York, 6/ I 9 March 1917; reprinted in L. Trotsky, Sochineniya,Vol. III, ch. i, Moscow,
1925, p. 13).
34 K. Radek, Die Entwicklungdes Sozialismusvon der Wissenschaftzur Tat, written as a
preface to N. Bukharin, Das Programmder Kommunisten, Zurich, I9I8, p. x.

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 PANNEKOEK AND ORIGINS OF LENINISM 343
party of Holland. At the same time he resumed his political work in
Germany. But soon after the end of the war he clashed with the leader-
ship of official communism over the issue of communist participation
in parliamentary elections and trade unions. Together with his old
friend Gorter of 'Tribune' days, he was among the leading exponents
of the trend which Lenin denounced in his pamphlet of I920 as
'ultra-leftism the infantile disease of communism.'
For all practical purposes this controversy was settled in Lenin's
favour in I 920 and I92I and is irrelevant in the present context. Of
much greater interest are the views which Pannekoek expressed in
his polemics against Radek and official German communism. In the
middle of I 91 8 his friend, Herman Gorter, had published a pamphlet
in Amsterdam entitled 'The world revolution'. In it he had whole-
heartedly supported the bolshevik revolution, but had also been at
pains to emphasise the profound differences which were bound to
exist between Russian and west European communism owing to the
differences in the position of the peasantry, which was an ally of the
revolution in Russia and a conservative force in western Europe.
Even if the working class in western Europe were imbued with a
real revolutionary spirit, Gorter maintained that it would still have
to fight its battle alone and face a much stronger capitalism and a
much stronger state organisation than had existed in Russia.35 In
a pamphlet written under the name of K. Horner and published by
the Comintern in Moscow early in I920, Pannekoek proceeded from
Gorter's assumptions to a highly original interpretation of the true
character of the bolshevik revolution. The bolsheviks had made their
revolution in Russia on the basic assumption that the socialist revo-
lution would spread to the advanced countries of western Europe.
Pannekoek now had the courage to tell them that this basic assump-
tion had proved to be false.36 The west European working class had
accommodated itself to existing conditions and decades would pass
before a militant revolutionary spirit could possibly arise again in
its ranks. Pannekoek drew the appropriate conclusions without
equivocation:
The communist world revolution is not properly understood if it is
regarded only from the viewpoint of western Europe. Russia is not
only the eastern part of Europe, but to a far greater extent-geographic-
ally, as well as economically and politically-the western part of Asia....
Russia too became a colony of west European capital.... While the
Russian working class worked under similar conditions to those of
western Europe, which led to a community of Marxist convictions,

35H. Gorter, Die Weltrevolution,

Amsterdam, I9I 8, pp. 8 I-2.
36K. Homer, Die Entwicklungder Weltrevolution
und die Taktik des Kommunismus,
Petro-
grad, 1920, p. 48.

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344 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Russia in her economic situation was the western empire of the Asiatic
empires.... The Russian revolution is the beginning of the great revolt
of Asia against west European capital. Hitherto we have only been
considering its impact on western Europe, but even more important is
its effect on the east. The problems of Asia dominate Soviet policy
almost more than the questions of Europe.... The cause of Asia is the
cause of humanity.37
Pannekoek predicted that communism's best chances would be
found in under-developed countries where the stresses and strains
of the impact of industrialisation within a non-democratic political
framework would lead to large-scale social upheavals:
New countries where the masses are not poisoned by bourgeois ideas,
where by the beginnings of industrial development their minds are
shaken out of the old lethargy and a socialist community spirit arises,
where the raw materials are available to be used by the most advanced
techniques in new forms of production replacing those which are out-
moded, where the pressure from above is strong enough to develop a
fighting spirit but where no all-powerful bourgeoisie can prevent such
a movement-such countries will be the centres of the new communist
world. The Russian revolution is the first of a series. These conditions
also prevail, more or less, in other eastern countries, in India and in
China.38

Pannekoek's bold forecast that the Russian revolution might have

more meaning for the under-developed colonial and semi-colonial
peasant countries of the east than for the advanced west is of renewed
interest to-day when many of these countries are in the process of
revolutionary change. Old controversies may soon become the dead
lumber of history. But as often happens in the history of ideas, sug-
gestions may be put forward in their margins which acquire interest
and significance much later on. If orthodox communists still remem-
ber Pannekoek and Gorter as revolutionary thinkers it is merely
because Lenin's diatribe against 'ultra-leftist folly' has perpetuated
their names and caused them to endure like flies encased in amber.
But although they were defeated in the controversy of I920 they may
prove after all to have been more perceptive than their victorious
opponents in seeing the significant trends of their time. At least they
had fewer inhibitions in stating their views on the connection between
economic backwardness and revolution. A recent study on Leninism
has claimed that what it calls 'the dialectic of backwardness'39 forms
an important aspect of Leninism. If it does, the credit for first
formulating this principle of Leninism belongs to Anton Pannekoek.
37 K. Horner, Op.Cit., pp. 52-3.
38 K. Horner, op. cit., p. 51-
39 A. G. Meyer, Leninism,Cambridge, Mass., I957.

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