Communism After Marx (review of Workers’ Councils)
Review of: Anton Pannekoek. Workers’ Councils. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002. Pp. 217. Paper, $15.00. ISBN: 1902593561
by Nic Veroli
The ghost of communism has been haunting philosophical thought since its origins. From Plato’s caste of guardians who owned all property in common in the Republic to the regulative ideal of Kantian morality (treating others as ends in themselves, which Marx rightly saw is incompatible with wage labor) by way of the Lockean state of nature—which prescribes an originally collective ownership of the natural world by humanity—philosophers have always known that, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, There Is No Alternative. Communism is the only truly universal moral principle, and all attempts to deviate from it, from Plato’s caste hierarchy on down, can only result in the most insuperable contradictions. So it is quite right for Hannah Arendt to have declared in The Human Condition that Marx stood at the summit of the Western philosophical tradition. Of course, Arendt famously went on to damn Marx for enshrining the laboring subject of political economy into his philosophy of history and thereby forecasting a society of biopolitical slaves. But what is interesting is that she reserved the only note of political optimism in her otherwise darkly brooding and melancholy book for the 1956 workers’ councils revolution of Hungary.(1)
Today, with the courageous republication by AK Press of Anton Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils, the ultimate albeit hard to read classic of councilist theory, we can better see the strange disparity between Arendt’s furious critique of Marx and her embrace of the only political program that logically follows from his philosophical analysis of the structure of labor in capitalist society: a direct take-over of the economic infrastructure and the legal and political reconstitution of society by councils of workers democratically organized.
What is most striking about Pannekoek’s text, in retrospect, is how well it conforms to Arendt’s critique of the biopolitical sovereignty implicit in any notion of politics based on the agency of labor. Writing about the necessity for administrative control over production by the councils, Pannekoek announces: “As a plain and intelligible numerical image the process of production is laid open to everybody’s views. Here mankind views and controls its own life” (27). In general, the overwhelming impression one gets from Pannekoek’s description of the future councilist society is that of a gigantic mechanism spinning its wheels in endless production with neither rhyme nor reason—society as a Kafkian castle. The society of workers’ councils is a society that works for no one and therefore for nothing. It is a society caught in the vicious circle of production and consumption, but without the exuberance which Bataille argued gives consumption its meaning. It is the cycle of animal or vegetal life rationalized and perfected.
And yet the subjective reality of workers’ councils, whenever it has surfaced historically— in Russia in 1917, in Italy and Germany in 1919 and 1920, in Hungary in 1956, in Chile in 1973, in Argentina since 2002, to cite only a few instances—always exceeds this numbing rationalization. This reality is also captured by Pannekoek, who was himself a militant in several revolutions. There is a prescriptive, universal element to revolutionary activism which is usually under-theorized. Revolutions, it should be clear, are not made for bread. The agents of social change do not experience themselves as rational maximizers seeking to fulfill their self-interest, but as moral agents fulfilling a universal claim for justice. Anyone who has ever participated in a mass demonstration knows this, and only the dogmatism of utilitarian doctrinaires could be blind to this reality. Pannekoek himself is very clear about this, and it is refreshing to read him reflecting on the juridical bases of anti-capitalist militancy. Clearly inspired by the work of Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis,(2) he writes:
The sense of right and wrong, the consciousness of justice in men is not accidental. It grows up, irresistibly, by nature, out of what they experience as the fundamental conditions of their life. Society must live; so the relations of men must be regulated in a way—it is this that law provides for—that production of life necessities may go on unimpeded. Right is what is essentially good and necessary for life. Not only useful for the moment, but needed generally … for people at large, for the community; … for the common and lasting weal. If the life-conditions change, if the system of production develops in new forms, the relations between men change, their feeling of what is right or wrong changes with them, and the law has to be altered. (14)
In this doctrine the legal constitution of society reflects neither an original social contract nor an ideal natural order. Its norm is rather the material constitution of social production at a particular historical moment. Revolution is thus juridically legitimate once the legal constitution falls behind or strays away from the actual material constitution of the productive apparatus of society, that is, when its productive potential enables universal satisfaction of need while its legal constitution permits only private appropriation. The tension between thought and matter, theory and practice, which first appeared in Marx’s German Ideology, thus seems finally to be resolved.
And yet, even in this moment the language of life clearly dominates Pannekoek’s thought. Perhaps it is a symptom of his remaining within the horizon of the paradigm of biopolitics that, when he tries to approach the fascinating question of the psychology of revolution, he is held back by a platitudinous tension between on the one hand the positing of a Hobbesian desire for self-preservation (which he presents as the first principle of human behavior, 85), and on the other hand the principle of solidarity (without which collective action is incomprehensible, 86). Thus, the particularity of life and the universality of the political prescription collide head on, but without any productive results.
In spite of her critique of Marx, Arendt’s embrace of councilism signifies that she never went beyond Marxist politics. And yet, today, that is precisely what we need: a theory of communism that is not Marxist, a communist politics that exceeds the limits of classist practice. The fact that Marx was no inventor when it came to the concept of communism tells us that such a thing is eminently possible. The fact that every twentieth-century revolution had a councilist element—what Alain Badiou has called the “communist invariant”3—tells us quite clearly that the relationship between communism and democracy is not one of mutual exclusion but rather of mutual implication. In spite of the fact that Pannekoek remains within the horizon of biopolitical sovereignty, his book is a timely reminder that the theories of communist revolution and that of totalitarian domination are by no means identical, as current common sense would have it. And is there any more encouraging clue about the direction of thought that can be given to radical philosophy today?
It is unfortunate that, given the importance of this republication of Pannekoek’s book (it last appeared in English in the 1950s), its preparation by Robert Barsky is so uneven. While Barsky provides a gem of a bibliography on every aspect of the reality of councils, his introduction to the text remains far too superficial to palliate for the historical distance that separates us from Pannekoek, who was writing during World War II. Instead, Barsky reproduces the texts of interviews with Noam Chomsky, Ken Coates, Peter Hitchcock, and Paul Mattick (the last of which dates from 1975). But while they reveal something interesting about the interviewees, these texts do not do much to decode the historical or theoretical significance of Pannekoek’s book (with the partial exception of Hitchcock’s). That’s too bad because, as should be clear from this review, it is not enough to say, as Barsky does, that Pannekoek’s book simply “offers a framework for change which, although at times in need of updating, rings true in many places” (v). To this sort of simplistic claim it should be replied that, on the contrary, what is vital about a text like Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils is not so much the insights it can give us directly for the process of political action today, but the opportunity to think beyond its limitations while remaining faithful to its dual call for justice and freedom.
Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., introduction by Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), chapter 30.
2. See Evgeny B. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory, trans. Barbara Einhorn (London: Pluto Press, 1989).
3. Quoted in Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 30, 36.
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[Note: This review first appeared in Radical Philosophy Review, volume 9, number 2 (2006).]