Deviations, Part 1: The Castoriadis-Pannekoek Exchange

By Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi

Introduction | Letter 1 | Letter 2 | Letter 3
In early 1953 Cajo Brendel, a Dutch council communist affiliated with a group known as
Spartacus, visited the members of Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) in
Paris. As members of a militant organization harshly marginalized by the most blistering
winters of the cold war, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and their comrades
understandably hoped to make contact with other communist tendencies critical of the
official currents. Delighted to discover that Anton Pannekoek, that veteran communist
whose dissenting tracts had drawn the ire of none other than Lenin himself, was quite close
to Spartacus, the group decided to supply Brendel with a copy of every issue of the journal,
eleven in all, to pass along to the revered theorist. Pannekoek, who read them with
excitement, wrote later to Brendel the French group showed much promise despite its
questionable position on the party question. On November 8, 1953, he wrote a letter to
Castoriadis, which was later published, along with a response, in number 14 (April-June
1954) of the journal.
Spanning an entire generation, a linguistic divide, and a geographical shift, the epistolary
encounter between Pannekoek and Castoriadis in many ways marks the internal
transformation of the ultra-left. But the ultra-left, far from a historical relic, is making
headlines again. The appearance of a mysterious little book called The Coming Insurrection
on bookshelves across the country in 2009 piqued an already growing interest. Not only did
Michael Moore name the leftist call-to-arms manifesto as his most recent read in an
interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the tract even climbed to the top of Amazon
bestseller list after Glenn Beck told Fox News viewers it was the most evil book Ive read
in a long, long time. But this pamphlet was only, if we may lapse into pop sociology, the
tipping point for a resurgence of forgotten tendencies, obscure journals, and previously
unheard of milieus, which are suddenly being discussed everywhere from academic
conferences to national broadcasting channels. Its likely that the Invisible Committee
that wrote The Coming Insurrection grew out of Tiqqun, a French group that officially
disbanded in 2001 after releasing two issues of its eponymous journal. Tiqqun itself has
been rediscovered after the infamous Tarnac affair in 2008, when former members of the
group were arrested for sabotaging train lines.
The appearance of new works and translations by groups like Tiqqun, including Troploin,
Thorie Communiste, Aufheben, and Echanges et Mouvement, reflect the close
engagement of the ultra-left with the tendencies and sensibilities of contemporary activist
movements. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education traced the intellectual roots
of Occupy Wall Street to the anarchist David Graeber, who invoked the language of the
ultra-left in his description of the political importance of the general assembly: One of the
things that revolutionaries have learned over the course of the 20th century is that the idea
of the ends justifying the means is deeply problematic You cant create a just society
through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You cant establish a big
state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same.1

But this paradigm, though it is thoroughly grounded in the present, nevertheless has deep
roots in the past. All of the journals circulating today would deny such a strong link to their
own ancestors; they admit the influence of the ultra-left, but none describe themselves as
ultra-leftists. Most believe they have made a clean break with this history, and usually only
employ the term as an epithet for those still thought to be trapped in antiquated politics.
They are on poor terms with each other, and almost certainly would not consider
themselves to be part of the same constellation of theories.
Although they have their disagreements, this dissension only conceals a shared unity that
unsurprisingly originates from the common heritage they all seem intent on repressing.
Many of the defining principles of the historical ultra-left persist, and their peculiar
combination of blindness and insight bears the marks of their progenitors. Their shared
emphasis on proletarian self-activity, their willingness to deliberately conflate means and
ends, their tendency to elide the moment of strategy, their demand for the abolition of a
transition period, and their tendency towards fatalism, are all age-old historical debates.
And just as before, the ultra-left tendencies of contemporary movements have provoked a
backlash from those who call for a return to the fundamentals of political organization,
usually represented by the figure of the party.
What is now commonly called the ultra-left emerged as an oppositional tendency within the
international communist movement in the early nineteen-twenties. Though critical of the
right, personified by Eduard Bernstein, the center, represented by Karl Kautsky, and even
the left, dominated by Lenin, its members never organized themselves into a coherent
current: its theorists were spread across several countries, disagreed sharply with one
another, and were only grouped together when Lenin criticized them all in his infamous
pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Some, like Amadeo Bordiga,
fetishized the vanguard party; others, like Otto Rhle, saw workers councils as the only
organ of the revolutionary process; still others like Paul Mattick turned to crisis theory. But
whatever their differences, their shared refusal to participate in parliamentary elections,
work with trade unions, or make any compromises with any kind of reformism,
unexpectedly brought them all together. It was this underlying stubbornness that allowed
Lenin to transform them into a single tendency.
It should be remembered, however, that the ultra-left, despite what it would later become,
was actually not a minority tendency in its heyday. Its spokesmen were all major figures in
the history of European communism: Bordiga was the first general secretary of the Italian
Communist Party (PCI), Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the most respected communists in
England, and Pannekoek was cautiously praised in Lenins State and Revolution as a
bulwark against reformism. Even more importantly, the ultra-leftists had such a significant
following in the early twenties that they could rightfully claim to be the dominant
communist tendency of the time. When the PCI was finally formed in January 1921, it was
Bordiga who commanded the majority. And when the German Communist Party (KPD)
split in 1920, the vast majority followed the ultra-leftists in forming the Communist
Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). The Communist Party, initially led by Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, had itself broken from reformist groups like the Social
Democratic Party (SPD) at the end of December 1918. But the KPD, despite its
revolutionary stance, was pulled in several directions. Disagreements over the unions,

parliament, and compromise in general, ultimately led to another break. Its been suggested,
however, that the new party, the KAPD, embraced almost the entire membership of the
former KPD.2 The marginalization of the ultra-left Bordiga, for example, officially lost
control of his party to Gramsci in 1926 only set in after the defeat of the revolutions to
which they were almost organically connected.
With their revolutions crushed, and now harassed by capital on the one side and Comintern
on the other, the tendency itself began to eat itself apart from within as ultra-leftists fought
each other over the most trivial matters, and by the thirties this once vibrant milieu was
reduced to a jumble of sequestered groups. The onset of the Cold War proved to be an
especially decisive time for the ultra-left: marginalized more than ever, journals lost much
of their already limited readership, organizations disintegrated, and isolated groups ossified
into myopic sects. It was in this inhospitable context that two of the most prominent
theorists of the tendency made contact.
Castoriadis Meets Pannekoek
The intersection of two lives represents the collision of two worlds. First and foremost,
there is the generational divide: Anton Pannekoek was born in 1873, after the defeat of the
Paris Commune, and Cornelius Castoriadis in 1922, just as the German Revolution, in
which Pannekoek had played a part, was painfully coming to accept its own defeat. Then
there is the implicit geographic shift: Pannekoek, born in the Netherlands, played a
constitutive role in the development of central European communism, while Castoriadis,
Greek by birth, made perhaps the most significant contribution to the emerging French
scene that was made famous in May 1968. Their exchange shows the center of gravity of
the communist movement moving from Germany back to France, while French theory
made increasing reference to German history.
And last, the peculiar convergence of two distinct forms of ultra-leftism: one that defined
itself against Lenin and another that actually made a constitutive detour through him.
Though always aware of his great achievements, most of the historical ultra-left, from
Sylvia Pankhurst to Herman Gorter, eventually grew quite critical of the Bolshevik leaders
theoretical doctrines. Pannekoek stands as perhaps the greatest example of a tendency that
criticized all that Lenin represented, from his philosophical positions to his political
practice. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, Pannekoek devoted much of his writing to
refuting the universal applicability of Bolshevik tactics. His famous book Workers
Councils sought to definitively discredit the theory of the vanguard party by demonstrating
the historical significance of the councils as the only real form of proletarian emancipation.
Against both reformists and Leninists, he claimed that the new orientation of socialism is
self-direction of production, self-direction of the class-struggle, by means of workers
councils.3
Castoriadis, in contrast to Pannekoek, had fought in the Greek resistance as a Communist,
later joining the Trotskyists in France. Beyond the many positive references to Lenin in his
writings of the time, its quite clear from his theoretical works and his practical positions
that Lenin had left an indelible stamp on him. His ultra-leftism is an unusual case: he
entered it through Trotskyism, but broke with that tradition when he argued that the

content of socialism went beyond the abolition of private property to workers

management of society, down to the organization of work on the shop floor a historical
task whose terms were established by the expansion and integration of managerial labor in
postwar capitalism.4 He spent a good decade furiously producing a body of work so
important that it would effectively define the far left in France, leading Daniel CohnBendit, the European Green parliamentarian who was the most visible student revolutionary
of May 1968, to frankly admit in Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative that he
had plagiarized Castoriadiss work. But then Castoriadis turned his pen against Marxism
himself; having already grounded self-management in the critique of alienation in the
young Marx, he concluded that the late Marx of Capital had capitulated completely to
bourgeois scientism, and brazenly declared that the only way to remain revolutionary was
to break from Marxism.
The letters of these figures not only give us a glimpse into the history of the ultra-left, they
also speak to our own time. True, our conjuncture is radically different: we no longer face
the realities of the Cold War, the role of the Soviet Union, the influence of the Communist
Parties, or the uncertainties of decolonization. But there are nevertheless ways in which the
present resembles the conjuncture in which these letters were written. We are beginning to
glimpse the end of a long period of proletarian defeat, just as Castoriadis and Pannekoek
were. They had the courage and insight to discuss the possibilities of revolution, reaffirm
the value of autonomous activity, and emphasize the role of the proletariat at a time when
intellectuals of the left and right were loudly declaring the integration of the working class,
the definitive stabilization of capital, and the impossibility of revolutionary rupture.
But Pannekoek and Castoriadis were vindicated a few years after their exchange. Hungary
and Poland erupted in revolution. Councils dotted the social terrain, autonomous activity
was the order of the day, and suddenly capital did not seem so secure. If their mode of
thought was in alignment with the potential and the limits of these nascent struggles, it
seems that todays ultra-left has a similar alignment with the eruptions of Greece, Spain,
France, and England.
Reading through these letters makes it clear that whatever their agreements and there
were many Pannekoek and Castoriadis differed on the very two questions that had
defined the historical ultra-left from the beginning: the nature of the Russian Revolution
and the party form. Though both clearly parted ways with the official communist
movement, their differences were nevertheless irreconcilable.
Although the exchange circulated around what may appear to be a pedantic rehashing of
these two seemingly irrelevant topics, both were using them to think through the key
concepts of political practice. Beneath Pannekoeks questioning of the Russian Revolution
or Castoriadiss consideration of the possible degeneration of the party lies a shared attempt
to ascertain the content of the communism of their time. With sufficient historical distance
from everything that transpired between the storming of the Winter Palace and the fall of
the Berlin Wall, we have begun to ask how the content of communism can be reimagined
beyond sectarian cliches. For our moment, these letters are remarkably contemporary. To
grasp their relevance, we will have to trace the genealogy of these two major questions.

The Russian Revolution

Every communist current that sought to pose an alternative to the practices, policies, and
programs of the Soviet Union first had to explain what kind of society it really was an
attempt to understand the meaning of communism as well as capitalism. The dominant
explanations in the West for the nature of the USSR were variants of the Trotskyist
analysis. However, Lenin had acknowledged, before Stalins ascent, that the revolutionary
government was not only a proletarian dictatorship, but either a workers and peasants
state or a workers state with bureaucratic distortions.5 During the years of War
Communism, from 1918 to 1921, when requisition of peasant land and nationalization of
industry proceeded alongside the introduction of Taylorism and one-man management in
factories, it was actually Trotsky who had called for extension of militarization to the total
control of trade unions by the state, as an apparatus of industrial management. Lenin
insisted that more independent participation would train workers to ultimately take on the
task of management themselves, arguing against Trotsky that the sum and substance of his
policy is bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions.6
Beginning in 1921 with the New Economic Policy (NEP), Lenin argued for the
replacement of the states surplus-grain appropriation with a moderate tax in kind,
which would permit peasant producers to sell the remainder of their surplus in order to
obtain manufactured goods at a more equitable rate. In spite of the reintroduction of market
relations this represented, it was a transition to regular socialist exchange of products,
and indeed an anti-bureaucratic measure, intended to avoid further development of the state
bureaucracy that had grown in compensation for the atomised and scattered state of the
small producer with his poverty, illiteracy, lack of culture, the absence of roads and
exchange between agriculture and industry. If NEP represented a movement towards the
free market and capitalist relations, this was a necessary step, since it permitted the
peasantry to develop social power instead of subjugating it to the interests of the urban and
industrial proletariat.7
Lenin had already argued as early as 1918, in a polemic against Russian left communists,
that state capitalism would be a step forward, even a sure guarantee that within a year
socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold. Since the transition period contained
elements of different economic categories, the direction of large enterprises by the state
would be a proletarian weapon, since it is not state capitalism that is at war with
socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against both
state capitalism and socialism.8 Now, three years later, he reiterated that the fact that the
proletariat, represented by the party, held power in the state, was the primary defense
against the restoration of capitalism.9 Recalling his earlier intervention on behalf of
independent trade unions, Lenin emphasized that in a socialist transition there would still be
classes, and therefore the class struggle is inevitable the proletariat would have to use
unions to combat bureaucracy and survivals of the old capitalist system in the
government.10 The combination of an anti-bureaucratic attitude and the continued belief in
shared workers and peasants power coexisted with the somewhat contradictory project of
industrializing agriculture, to develop the productive forces to the level of the capitalist
mode of production, and NEP manifested these contradictions.

After Lenins death, the continuation of NEP was advocated by both Joseph Stalin and
Nikolai Bukharin, who were part of a hegemonic bloc within the Communist Party.
Bukharin, in spite of his earlier leftist enthusiasm for immediate nationalization and
industrialization, came to believe in the gradual enrichment of the peasants, which would
lead to their identification with the communist project. This found support in Stalins
insistence on continuing Lenins line on the workers and peasants government,
defending the worker-peasant alliance as a cardinal means of achieving the socialist class
objectives of the proletarian dictatorship in our peasant country.11
However, the enthusiasm for NEP was by no means universal; the Left Opposition, which
included Trotsky and Bukharins former leftist coauthor Yvgeni Preobrazhensky, had
warned that agricultural market relations would permit the development of a nascent
capitalist class in the countryside. Their fears were confirmed in the rise of the kulaks, the
landholding peasants who hired waged laborers and hoarded grain to counteract the drop in
agricultural prices. In the 1927 platform of the left, Trotsky described a growing class
differentiation among the peasants, the slave-like exploitation of farmhands, and a gap
between industrial and agricultural prices that threatened to sever the alliance between
town and country.12
The next year Stalin went to Siberia, to address party members who he accused not only of
cooperating with the kulaks, but also living in their homes. He contrasted socialist
construction in the countryside, in agriculture with the danger of capitalist restoration.13
Later that year, after returning to Moscow, he would rage in party plenums against the
Right deviation which made restoration possible, since in spite of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, the roots of capitalism, of capital and capitalists, were still embedded in
commodity production, in small production in the towns and, especially, the countryside.14
The threat of regenerating capitalism resulted from the contradiction between two
foundations of production in the USSR: the foundation of the most large-scale and united
socialist industry and the foundation of the most scattered and backward, small commodity
economy of the peasants. To succeed, socialist construction would have to place
agriculture on a new technical basis, the basis of large-scale production, and bring it up to
the level of socialist industry.15 With the end of NEP and the elaboration of the first Five
Year Plan, Stalin put into place an economic program based on the collectivization of
peasant land, aiming at the rapid industrialization of the countryside.
Writing in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky stepped into the middle of these zig-zags in
policy by painting a picture of the USSR as a degenerated workers state. The workers
had taken state power, but it had been usurped by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The difficulty
of this view is that the history of the bureaucracy in the USSR could by no means be
limited to Stalin Trotsky had himself contributed to bureaucratization. Furthermore, Lenin
had already described a close relationship between bureaucratization and economic
development. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, Trotsky famously wrote in
a celebration of Russias productive forces, in the language of steel, cement and
electricity; and he made a point of noting that the blame for Stalins terror lies not upon
collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling methods with which it was carried
through.16 But next to Lenins acknowledgement that the reorganization of peasant

agriculture by industrial state capitalism forced a complex bureaucratic structure, the

compatibility of these two positions seems unclear.
An unorthodox Trotskyist shoe salesman named Bruno Rizzi began to circulate an analysis,
culminating in 1939s The Bureaucratization of the World, which claimed that if the
bureaucracy had indeed usurped state power, it was impossible to retain the idea of a
workers state, degenerated or otherwise. The original, somewhat ultra-left concept he
advanced was bureaucratic collectivism, which led Trotsky to conclude that Rizzi had
obviously lost his balance.17 According to this theory, the managerial bureaucracy was a
ruling class that extracted a surplus for its own enrichment, and orchestrated through a
totalitarian state a highly developed monopoly capitalism indistinguishable from fascism
and the New Deal.
Castoriadis may have had Rizzis account in mind when he underscored the primary
importance of the bureaucracy as ruling class, but he rejected the earlier emphasis on
collectivism. After all, far from a term of Marxist theory, collectivism is a quasi-ethical
term of sociological description it says nothing about the political economy of the USSR.
For Castoriadis, capitalism as a system was defined by exploitation the extraction of a
surplus from labor by a non-producing class who dominated the production process and
not by market relations, which were essentially epiphenomena. The fact that the ruling class
of the USSR operated collectively, rather than competitively, was irrelevant the society
could only be described as bureaucratic capitalism.
When Pannekoek first wrote to Castoriadis, he reminded his younger comrade that the
theory of a non-socialist mode of production in the Soviet Union was by no means a
development internal to Trotskyism. In fact, the left communists had made the case,
arguably even before the Russian Revolution, that the policies of Lenin and Trotsky were
not consistent with the struggle for a workers state and its accompanying socialist mode of
production. This was a theory of state capitalism, distinctly different from the later
Trotskyist version made famous by Tony Cliff. It held that the displacement of the soviets
or workers councils that defined the explosions of 1905 and 1917 by the rule of the party
represented the defeat of socialism. In this regard they anticipated the critique of
Socialisme ou Barbarie.
However, there was a primary difference. Convinced of the capitalist nature of the Soviet
Union, Pannekoek went on to denounce root and branch the very revolution that brought it
into being. He called the Russian Revolution the last bourgeois revolution, though carried
out by the working class, in the tradition of the English Revolution of 1647 and the French
Revolution in 1789. By bourgeois revolution, he meant specifically a revolution that
destroys feudalism and opens the way to industrialization. He pointed out that even the
historic bourgeois revolutions had been enabled by the revolt of the artisans, the peasants
and the workers, but since working class was not yet mature enough to govern itself, a
minority of functionaries and politicians emerged as the dominant class. This was
inevitable in Russia, the laboring class being a small minority among the peasant
population.

The paradoxical element of this ultra-left theory, ultimately shared by Rhle and Gorter,
was that it swung back around to the paradigm of reformism. Karl Kautsky vehemently
denounced the Bolsheviks, before Stalins dominance and in opposition to Trotsky, for their
notion that a socialist revolution was possible in a Russia that had not yet passed through
the capitalist stage of history. As early as 1919, Kautsky wrote that the objective conditions
in Russia were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism, and that the immaturity of the
existing relations led the Bolshevik revolution to produce the most oppressive of all
forms of despotism that Russia has ever had.18
Castoriadiss response was twofold. He first called attention to the logical problem behind
Pannekoeks purism: the ultimate fate of the Russian Revolution does not alter the fact that
within it, the proletariat struggled for its own interests, even instituting workers selfmanagement in the factories, rather than subsuming its struggle into the program of the
bourgeoisie. The fact that these independent demands were articulated by workers in Russia
made the Russian Revolution forever a proletarian revolution. His second point was that
the concept of the bourgeois revolution ignored a fundamental development in the mode of
production of the 20th century: it was the bureaucracy, rather than the bourgeoisie, which
ruled in Russia, and it was this same new class that was emerging as a dominating force
throughout the world, including the capitalist world.
Throughout the whole ultra-left, these concepts of bourgeois revolution and the
bourgeois-democratic tasks were never put into question. In spite of Pannekoeks
knowledge that Russia was predominantly peasant, that pre-capitalist conditions altered the
subjective development of the working class, and that his own theory was developed within
the specific conditions of political strikes in urban Europe, he never met the challenge
posed by the Bolsheviks of theorizing communist revolution in a peasant society. And
though Trotsky did accept the Bolshevik challenge in 1917, the approach to industrial
development and permanent revolution that would predominate among Trotskyists took
as its starting premise the subordination of peasant demands to the industrial proletariat.
But it was precisely the peasant problem that was central to the theories of economic
development within the USSR. Just before Pannekoek and Castoriadiss exchange, in 1951,
Stalin wrote a final reflection called Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. There
he preempted the entire discussion of state or bureaucratic capitalism in Russia by frankly
acknowledging, even after the collectivization and industrialization advocated in his earlier
speeches, that the law of value does exist and does operate, alongside commodity
production, in the Russian economy. While the goods produced by state-owned industry
were distributed publicly by the state, agricultural production, even in the form of the
kolkhoz, the collective farm, will not recognize any other economic relation with the town
except the commodity relation exchange through purchase and sale.19
It is overall an unsettling collision of terms, which recalls Lenins argument against the left
communists. The attributes ascribed by the left to state capitalism were simply the
contradictions of the socialist transition, the persistence of elements of different modes of
production within the same economy including the survivals of capitalist relations. These
contradictions within the USSR became clear when, after denouncing Stalin in the 20th
Party Congress and calling for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world, Nikita

Khrushchev organized the sale of the state-owned Machine and Tractor Stations to the
collective farms which, Stalin had warned in Economic Problems, meant that the
agricultural enterprises would privately own their means of production, a step backwards
away from communism.
Only one ultra-leftist seriously engaged with this mode of analysis. Bordiga argued
consistently that the central dynamic of the Soviet economy was the agrarian revolution
the condition of possibility for capitalism. Bordiga had supported the Bolshevik revolution
as proletarian, which he reiterated in a 1926 letter to Korsch, who had taken the state
capitalist line; but the same year he personally butted heads with Stalin when he called for
the Soviet Union to be governed by the international communist parties that made up the
Comintern. While Bordiga supported Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the 1920s, by
1945 he began to argue for an analysis of the Soviet Union that brought him far closer to
Bukharin and the right.
The year before Castoriadis and Pannekoeks exchange, Bordiga wrote a response to
Stalins Economic Problems called Dialogue with Stalin. His assessment of the Soviet
economy was broadly similar, but with an added historical dimension. Not only did the law
of value operate in the USSR, so did all the laws of capitalism, since it was impossible to
develop the productive forces without proletarianizing people. This meant a repetition of
the ferocious process of primitive accumulation that Marx described in Capital:
It is the kolkhozians who find themselves deprived of their cow, the nomadic shepherds of
Asia torn away from the contemplation of the beautiful stars of the Great Bear, or the feudal
serfs of Mongolia, uprooted from their soil of a thousand years. It is certain that the orders
demand more goods for production, more workers, a longer labor time with a greater
intensity of effort, which is to say, an accumulation and expanded reproduction of capital to
the rhythm of hell.20
The agrarian revolution, carried out in the process of primitive accumulation, was the
violent refashioning of peasants into landless proletarians, the same process that occurred in
17th century England. Unsurprisingly, this returns to Preobrazhenskys description of the
coexistence of planning and the law of value in socialist primitive accumulation. While
Preobrazhensky had called for a gentle process of accumulation based in progressive taxes,
he had ultimately supported Stalins leftward turn.
The next step for Bordiga was to describe the economic characteristics of capitalism in
Russia. For him, the accumulation of profit was epiphenomenal. What counted instead was
the existence of enterprises that engaged in accounting on the basis of a general equivalent,
the law of value, and maintained the existence of property. Even though production in
Russia was centrally planned by the state, it was carried out by individual enterprises,
which meant that property was not social and collective, but restricted to private bodies.
The ruling class in Russia were not bureaucrats, but entrepreneurs consistent with a
theory of communism that opposed human community, grounded in the human essence
described by the young Marx, to commerce, rather than proletariat to capital. For this
reason the existence of soviets or councils was essentially irrelevant to Bordiga; if the
workers managed enterprises, they were simply managing the capital relation.

So Stalin and Bordiga differed mainly in definitions. Stalin viewed socialism as a

contradictory process of construction, while Bordiga argued for a total conception of
communism incompatible with survivals from the old regime. But the trick is that Bordigas
historical analysis, while it led him to condemn the capitalist nature of the USSR, also
constrained him to see it as progressive, as he wrote in his Dialogue:
The homage which, in spite of a band of suckers, we render to Great Stalin responds
precisely to this process of initial capitalist accumulation. If this really reaches the
provinces of immense China, mysterious Tibet, and that fabulous Central Asia that the
European stock came from, that will be a revolutionary fact, a fact that will move forward
the wheel of history, but which, far from being socialist, will be on the contrary a capitalist
fact. The elevation of the level of the productive forces in this immense part of the globe is
necessary: but Stalin is right when he says that the credit will not go to him, but to the
economic laws which have imposed this policy upon him. His whole enterprise consists in
a falsification of labels which makes the capitalist commodity pass under the name of
socialism and which is, itself, a classic expedient of the agents of primitive accumulation.
In other words, the whole of the ultra-left returned to Kautsky and his stages, which is why
Bordiga described Russia as undergoing the transition to capitalism. Indeed, with only
entrepreneurs managing production, it had not yet produced a properly capitalist class.
Though Pannekoek and Castoriadis did not directly address these issues, their exchange
offers theoretical advances that put the problem of stages in new contexts. On the one hand,
the skilled industrial working class who could organize councils on Pannekoeks model
were a such a minority in Russia that is very difficult to understand how this model of
organization could lead the nation on a mass scale and it gives no way of determining
how the members of these councils will be fed.
On the other hand, Pannekoeks theory of a bourgeois revolution, though it did not
address Bordigas agrarian question, did step away from Kautskyan commitment to the
fixed progression of stages. While Rhle and Korsch ultimately concluded along with
Kautsky that Russia was too backwards, Pannekoek emphasized the subjective
development of the class, rather than the objective development of the productive forces.
He argued that if state capitalism led to revolution, this would not be the result of
economic crises but of the class struggle a political rather than economic change.21 The
Russian workers, he wrote in the third letter, were not yet capable of taking production
into their own hands; and when the party bureaucracy assumed this role in place of the
proletariat, it became, ipso facto, the bourgeoisie.
But Pannekoeks analysis had no way of determining whether the class was ready,
particularly if it was spread into distinct forms of production. Castoriadiss work had
focused with greater attention on this problem. He had described the situation of the
peasantry as feudal exploitation by the bureaucracy, and disputed the classic Bolshevik
claim that the small producer would serve as the basis of capitalist restoration, instead
arguing that only the bureaucracy could play such a role.22 Though he still assumed peasant
production should be submitted to urban proletarian leadership, he went on to call for a
form of peasant autonomy in rural communes analogous to the workers council.23 But

because in Russia there was no automatic progression towards revolution, and no automatic
way to unify the class, Castoriadis continued to insist on the form of the party our next
theme.
The Party
The historical ultra-left was always somewhat divided about the party form. Some, led by
Bordiga, defended the notion of a disciplined party even more fervently than Lenin himself.
Combining the intransigence of the German left communists with Lenins central focus on
the party led Bordiga to produce a peculiar breed of vanguardist sectarianism. He soon
went from reducing the class to the party to reducing communism itself to little more than
the realization of an allegedly coherent, pure, and forever invariant program that was said to
stretch back unchanged to the founders themselves. Others, like Karl Korsch, remained
ambiguous. Although a member of the KPD, Communist Minister of Justice in the regional
Thuringian government, and even a Riechstag deputy until 1928, he eventually broke
entirely with the official communist movement and drew very close to Pannekoek, Rhle,
and Matticks criticisms of the party, ultimately becoming something of an anarchist.
It was the German and Dutch left communists, however, who were the most
uncompromising critics of the party form. They effectively offered three distinct, though
interrelated, criticisms. The first, which was often shared by the anarchists, was a kind of
moral denunciation of the authoritarian, undemocratic, and hierarchical character of parties
in general. The second argued that the party, especially in its vanguardist configuration, was
largely inapplicable to Western Europe, since its material conditions differed so vastly from
those that engendered it in Russia. The third claimed that the proletariat had to prefigure the
very world it was trying to create by inventing its own forms of struggle, rather than
mirroring those that were firmly entrenched in the old world. Pannekoek summarized this
sentiment in his second letter to Castoriadis, describing the need to oppose the established
communist parties: we cannot beat them by following their methods. That is only possible
by practicing our own methods. In terms of actual practice, this translated to a refusal of
all bourgeois forms, from the trade unions to parliaments. Otto Rhle captured this
sentiment in an essay audaciously titled The Revolution is Not a Party Affair.
Even when they did preserve the party as a form of struggle, the leftists severely restricted
its role. Indeed, Lenin would at one point exclaim that they had essentially reduced the
party of the class to a circle of intellectuals. According to Pannekoek, the party could only
play the ancillary role of clarifying, through discussion, debate, and exchange, what the
proletariat was already doing. As organs of self-clarification, such parties and
Pannekoek always imagined that there would be many would have to content themselves
with doing little more than offering suggestions to the workers, circulating information, and
calmly debating their differing points of view.24 They would serve as the investigative
subcommittees of a council, from which their destiny would ultimately be
indistinguishable.
For both Castoriadis and Pannekoek, there was a primary logical consequence of the
Marxist premise that the emancipation of the proletariat could only be the task of the
proletariat itself: the council would be the principal organ of proletarian emancipation. By

regarding the council as both that which would destroy the old and create the new, both
were echoing a characteristic trait of the ultra-left: the deliberate conflation of means and
ends.
But in contrast to the seasoned councilist, Castoriadis refused to accept that council would
be the only organ of emancipation. He believed that the party could constitute a separate
form of struggle, subordinated to, but ultimately distinct from the council: the party is an
organ whose form and substance are unique.25 Its tasks could not be predetermined, as
Pannekoek implied, but would have to vary depending on the particularities of the struggle
at hand. If the revolution did indeed lead to the emergence of a network of decentralized
councils in which unobstructed discussion could unfold, as Pannekoek suggested in his first
letter, then Castoriadis agreed that the party would limit its role. But, Castoriadis quickly
added, since the councils would likely become the very sites of class struggle rather than
peaceful oases standing outside of it, the party, as something other than the council, could
not limit itself to appearing like the owl of Minerva at nightfall but would have to set the
stage for this struggle:
To be revolutionary signifies both to think that only the masses in struggle can resolve the
problem of socialism and not to fold ones arms for all that; it means to think that the
essential content of the revolution will be given by the masses creative, original, and
unforeseeable activity, and to act oneself, beginning with a rational analysis of the present
with a perspective that anticipates the future.26
Experienced as he was with the dirty politics of workplace struggles in an environment
dominated by Stalinists on the one hand and reformists on the other, Castoriadis poured
some cold water on his friends naive faith in rational discussion. He insisted that the party
would have to actively prevent counter-revolutionaries from co-opting the struggle, and
therefore began to force a disjuncture between means and ends. Unlike the council, the
party would not be an end in itself, but could only be a means. The destruction of the old
world would have to be something related to but ultimately other than the constitution of a
new one. Indeed, sometimes revolutionaries would have to resort to certain unsightly means
in order to bring about certain desired ends. This could even mean a militant, even
undemocratic, intervention on behalf the councils.
Pannekoeks subsequent response was enviably simple: sometimes the class is just not
ready to make a revolution. No amount of party intervention, no matter how militant,
organized, or disciplined can force that class to mature and in fact, such intervention
would actually undermine the struggles of the class, by forcing it into a situation which it
did not itself willingly create. The result, whatever the intentions of the revolutionaries,
would have to be a new form of oppression.
A famous struggle just after these letters serves as an example. From December 1960 to
January 1961 Belgium was rocked by an unexpectedly militant strike wave that ultimately
involved some one million workers. Castoriadis called it the most important event, after the
uprisngs of 1956, of the entire postwar period; Maurice Brinton, the guiding spirit of
Solidarity, took part in them; and Guy Debord arrived the following year as part of a team
sent by Socialisme ou Barbarie to research the aftermath of the strikes. The peculiar thing

about these strikes, however, was that despite their strength they completely failed to
exhibit any autonomous political initiative. Castoriadis put it as follows:
We thus find ourselves faced with a striking contradiction between the combativity of the
working class, its solidarity, its awareness of its opposition as a class to the capitalist class
and to the capitalist State, its distrust of bureaucracy, on the one hand; and, on the other, the
at-present insurmountable difficulty it encounters as it tries to free itself from this
bureaucracys grasp, to take on in a positive way the direction of its own affairs, to create
its own institutions, to formulate explicitly its own objectives.27
Castoriadiss solution was a revolutionary organization. But imagine, Pannekoek seemed to
say, if this organization, which claimed to represent the proletariat, had hastily intervened
by seizing the state, appropriating certain points of production, and dispatching red guards
out into the streets to fight the Belgian police. Even if their intervention had somehow
produced a revolution, the consequences would have been disastrous. Neither the
proletariat, nor those other class formations which it would have to lead down the road of
revolution, were prepared for such a situation. Rather than emancipating themselves, they
would only enter a different kind of class society.
Castoriadis never wrote a direct reply. But he had already elaborated the basic premises of
his position. Just as we can never really know if our actions will turn us into bureaucrats,
we can also never know whether the proletariat is mature or not; there is simply no way to
scientifically measure whether a class is ripe for power. In some cases, as with the Belgian
strikes, there is some clarity. But in others, such as the Russian revolution of 1905, it is
simply impossible to tell. When the first workers went on strike, no one expected the whole
country to explode in insurrection. Even the revolutionaries who had studied the contours
of the class struggle for decades were caught off guard, and had to determine what to do in
this new situation. As it turns out, revolutionaries chose to intervene and the class was
defeated but we can only imagine the outcome if, after a sober assessment of the
situation, the professional revolutionaries had decided not to intervene because the class
was not ripe for power. What would have been the result if the party had chosen to fold its
arms, take a step backward, and sit on the sidelines? Who is to say that it was not the very
intervention of these revolutionaries, their very attempt to escalate a struggle possibly
doomed to defeat, that later prepared the material conditions for victory less than a decade
later?
The messiness of history demonstrates the difficulty of translating Pannekoeks thoughts on
class immaturity into concrete practice. But as we have already seen, this ambiguous
position also contains an original answer to an old question: what are the necessary
objective conditions for a successful revolution? For Pannekoek, immature objective
conditions are not the result of underdeveloped industrial production. In fact, objective
conditions are really nothing other than the general level of the class struggle
itself. Because capital is an antagonistic relationship between two classes, its maturity or
immaturity can only be understood with reference to the conflict between these classes. So
when Pannekoek speaks of unripe objective conditions, he is actually referring to the
underdeveloped subjective conditions of the class struggle itself. Claiming that Russia was

unripe for revolution did not mean it was economically backward, only that the proletariat
was not developed enough to take power on its own.
But here, as Castoriadis intimates, Pannekoek ultimately reveals his failure to understand
the specific class dynamics of Russia on the eve of the revolution. For him, it is enough to
claim that the class was not ready to take power simply because, at the end of the day, the
party had to step in. His logic is consistent only if one assumes that communism will adopt
the same form at all times: the gradual spread of councils over the totality of the social
fabric. If this fails to happen, then the revolution was bourgeois; if it does, which, one
might add, it never has, then it was communist. It is this static conception of communism,
this refusal to accept that communism may appear differently in different historical
conditions, that it may have to be produced by a diversity of means, that led him to misread
the particularities of the Russian struggle.
Now the two questions, the nature of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the role of the
party on the other, intersect dramatically. If Pannekoek had paid serious attention to the
history of class relations in Russia, he would have seen that the characteristics of the
proletariat at that historical moment its technical makeup, its political forms, its
relationship to the other classes made it impossible for the class to take power without
party intervention. Because Russia was so riven by class divisions, a revolution with any
chance of success would have to find some way to forge an alliance between proletarian
vanguards and peasant masses in a way that could transcend these separations. Pannekeok
would have seen that the class was, at that conjuncture, actually quite ready. It just had to
assume a different political form, one distinct from the soviets, in order to make the
revolution.
This gap goes a long way in explaining Pannekoeks somewhat confusing belief that the
party can never actually be a part of the class itself. In his letters, he seems to argue that any
enlarged conception of the party would necessarily transform it into a special forces team,
which would be called in to bash heads when the class runs into trouble. He refused to
entertain the possibility that the party, as was the case in Russia, may itself be a necessary
element of the class. Unlike Castoriadis, who tried to capture the significance of the French
Communist Party by studying its possible social bases, its particular history, and its broader
relationship to the class struggle itself, Pannekoek contented himself with simply arguing
that it was on the side of capital. For Castoriadis, this was not good enough; the task was to
meticulously analyze the peculiar, and rather unprecedented, composition of a reformist
party working in the service of a foreign country, to explain patiently the complete
workings and material roots of Stalinisms betrayal in order to definitively outflank it.28
Pannekoek deliberately ignored these kinds of questions questions, he would say, that
have been posed in an entirely practical way because his vision of revolution, despite
its numerous merits, was still largely informed by a kind of fatalism. Proletarians will
naturally figure everything out based on their immediate experiences, as though they
possess some kind of innate knowledge organically driving them to a specified goal, like an
acorn growing into an oak tree. They will spontaneously become political subjects, like the
logical result of an equation, and make their revolution on their own. If they run into any
setbacks, its only because they still dont have enough experience; if they suffer a defeat,

its only because they werent ready. For the Pannekoek of these letters, there is no gap
between immediate needs and the emancipation of the class through revolution. The two
seamlessly blend into one another in such a way as to entirely cover up the moment of
strategy.
But in order to explore these themes further we have to take a step backward. Though many
of the problems above the conflation of means and ends, the elision of strategy, the
suppression of class heterogeneity, and the reversion to fatalism persist within todays
ultra-left, the best way to understand and eventually supersede them is to go back to their
genesis. This means returning to another famous encounter, that between the ultra-left and
Lenin himself. It was Lenin, after all, who united a set of radically distinct groups under the
umbrella of the ultra-left. Our forthcoming investigation, therefore, will move backwards
to Lenin and his adversaries.
Until then, we present the letters. The first entry in this exchange, from Pannekoek to
Castoriadis, has been available on the internet, and we reproduce that version here.
Pannekoek indicates that he wrote the letter in English, but it was ultimately translated into
French for publication in Socialisme ou Barbarie. It is not clear whether this version is a
translation or the original English text. Castoriadiss response, written under the pen name
Pierre Chaulieu, and a final response by Pannekoek, have only been available in French.
The versions available here are our translations from the originals reprinted at
mondialisme.org.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz. Salar Mohandesi is a graduate

student at UPenn. They are the editors ofViewpoint.

1. Dan Berrett, Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, October 16, 2011.
2. Denis Authier and Jean Barrot (Gilles Dauv), La gauche communiste en Allemagne.
1918-1921 (Paris: Payot, 1976), p. 159; English version at marxists.org.
3. Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003), p. 206.
4. Cornelius Castoriadis, On the Content of Socialism, I in Political and Social Writings,
Volume 1, 1946-1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of
Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 298.
5. VI Lenin, The Party Crisis in Collected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1965), p. 48.
6. Lenin, The Trade Unions and Trotskys Mistakes in Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 42.

7. Lenin, The Tax in Kind in Collected Works, vol. 32, pp. 342, 351.
8. Lenin, Left-Wing Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality in Collected Works,
vol. 27, pp. 335, 349, 336.
9. Lenin,
The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments in
Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 66.
10. Lenin, The Role and Functions of the Trade Unions Under the New Economic Policy
in Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 186-7.
11. JV Stalin, Concerning the Question of a Workers and Peasants Government in
Works, vol. 9 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), p. 189.
12. Leon Trotsky, Platform of the Joint Opposition, chs. 1 and 3, reprinted at marxists.org.
13. Stalin, Grain Procurements and the Prospects for the Development of Agriculture in
Works, vol. 11, p. 8.
14. Stalin, The Right Danger in the CPSU(B) in Works, vol. 11, p. 313.
15. Stalin, Industrialization of the Country and the Right Deviation in the CPSU(B) in
Works, vol. 11, p. 263.
16. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Minneola: Dover Publications, 2004), pp. 7, 31.
17. Trotsky, The USSR in War in In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1995), p. 55.
18. Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, ch. 8, reprinted at marxists.org.
19. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1972), pp. 10, 15.
20. Amadeo Bordiga, Dialogue avec Staline, Deuxime journe, reprinted at sinistra.net.
All quotations are our translations from French.
21. Pannekoek, State Capitalism and Dictatorship, reprinted at marxists.org.
22. Castoriadis, The Peasantry Under Bureaucratic Capitalism in PASW 1, pp. 162.
23. Castoriadis, On the Content of Socialism, II in Political and Social Writings, Volume
2, 1955-1960: From the Workers Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of
Modern Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 134, 149.

24. Pannekoek, Party and Working Class, 1936, reprinted at marxists.org.

25. Castoriadis, Proletarian Leadership in PASW 1, p. 203.
26. Castoriadis, On the Content of Socialism, I in PASW 1, p. 298.
27. Castoriadis, The Signification of the Belgian Strikes in Political and Social Writings,
Volume 3, 1961-1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous
Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 4.
28. Castoriadis, Stalinism in France in PASW 1, p. 65.