The Council Communist Reader

" 'Workers' councils' does not designate a fixed form of organization, elaborated once and for all and for which all that remains is to perfect its details; it concerns a principle, that of workers' self management of the enterprise and of production. The realization of this principle can never occur through a theoretical discussion concerning the best means of execution. It is a question of the practical struggle against the apparatus of capitalist domination." - Anton Pannekoek The Council Communist Reader is a collection of selected writings from a few council communists. Council Communism emerged in Holland and Germany in the 1920's as an alternative to Bolshevik and Marxist-Leninist thought up to the Third International. Council Communist theory was derived from workers' experiences in the German Revolution of 1918, the early years of the Weimar Republic, and the study of the early council movements in Russia in 1905 and 1917. They sought not to impose a kind of organization upon the workers' movement, but instead to uplift the form of "councils" as spontaneous and self-emancipatory for the working class. This was a throughline for the council communists to connect back to Marx's understanding of proletarian revolution in maintaining "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves." Council communism was not to be a new ideology for the working class, but to take a critique of state socialism back to the roots of self-emancipation towards theoretical coherence which can combat all forms that hinder emancipation and move this theoretical coherence into practice. From this, and their understanding revolutionary consciousness develops as a result of crisis, revolution is not a choice but a necessity. The works included in this book have been chosen to reflect the developments of Council Communism over decades; this is not an exhaustive, encyclopedic collection of all councilist texts, but a collection of key texts. This book in the Radical Reprint series from Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to manufacturing cost as possible.

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), the Dutch astronomer and Marxist revolutionary, was a key theoretician of council communism—a Marxist alternative to both Leninism and Social Democracy that instead emphasized working-class self-emancipation through workers’ councils. The first half of this book walks the reader through the fundamentals of council communism and the conditions that led to the development of these ideas. The second half of the book demonstrates the rich depth of Pannekoek’s thinking, with penetrating essays and insightful letters on revolutionary organization, state capitalism, Marxism, the limitations of trade unions and political parties, the potential of wildcat strikes, public vs. common ownership, the necessity of combining organization and freedom, the deceptiveness of parliamentarism, workers’ councils, the vital importance of working-class self-emancipation, and more. With the recent resurgence in the naïve hope that Democratic Socialism and trade unionism can act as radical methods to meaningfully confront or even overthrow capitalism, Pannekoek’s council communist ideas encourage workers to think for themselves rather than submit to the dead-end traditions of the old movement and embrace the collective self-activity that can build a new movement capable of overcoming the struggles we face ahead.

Anton Pannekoek discusses the viability of workers' councils as an effective means of administrating a socialist society, as contrasted to the centralized doctrines of state communism or state capitalism. Conceived as an alternative way to establish and sustain socialism, the workers councils have so far never been successfully established at a national scale. Part of the problem was disagreements among revolutionaries about their size and responsibilities; while Lenin supported the notion during the revolutionary period, the councils were phased out in favor of a centralized state, rather than diffused through the strata of society. Pannekoek draws on history for his ideas, noting the deficiencies of previous revolutions and the major objectives a future revolution should hold. The various tasks a state of worker's councils must accomplish, and the enemies that must be overcome - notably fascists, bourgeois elements and big business - are listed.

Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy is a 1969 book by Paul Mattick which presents a Marxist critique of the Keynesian approach to economic problems. During a time in which the economic orthodoxy was to say that the contradictions of the capitalist system had been overcome, Marx and Keynes goes against the orthodoxy to examine how the solutions which are presented for the market in Keynesianism are only limited and present the same contradictions. Written before the complete turn to Neoliberalism, Mattick not only critiques Keynes' policies, but also points out the same contradictions of the system exist within the state capitalism of the USSR, proclaiming himself an "Anti-Bolshevik Communist." Past being a critique of Keynesianism, Marx and Keynes is also a guide to understanding Marx's economics, from the theory of value to the falling rate of profit, Mattick applies Marx to the current state of economics in the '60s. Paul Mattick, Sr. (March 13, 1904 - February 7, 1981) was a Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions.

Reform and Revolution (otherwise known as Reform or Revolution) is a collection of chapters from Marxism: The Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?, a book by Paul Mattick, Sr. arranged and published posthumously by Paul Mattick, Jr. In Reform and Revolution, Mattick, Sr. relates understanding of reformism, radicalism, and revolutionary action through the lens of historical materialism, as reformism being another maintaining of capitalist form. Through the book, Mattick details that capitalism and the historical process is to be analyzed through the accumulation of capital maintained through social forces of production, rationalizing labor exploitation towards its expansion. "As capital expands, so does the working class." Paul Mattick, Sr. (March 13, 1904 - February 7, 1981) was a Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions.

The Dutch-German Communist Left separated from the Comintern (1921) on questions like electoralism, trade-unionism, united fronts, the one-party state and anti-proletarian violence. The present volume provides the most substantial history to date of this tendency in the twentieth-century Communist movement.

Capital and Community: the results of the immediate process of production and the economic work of Marx is a 1976 book which has been in and out of print for decades. The book sets out to trace the four fronts on which Marx critiques political economy: wage labor as the basis of capitalist society, the commodity as vehicle for introducing the problem of value and its forms, the birth of value, and forms which precede capitalist production for alienation and commodification of man. Upon this foundation, Camatte seeks to add onto the two questions which arrive from Marx's project: "1. the origin of value, its characteristics and forms; 2. the origin of the free worker, the wage-labourer." These questions are a vehicle for analyzing and contributing further to Marx's project of critiquing capital as totality and the surrounding view of the production process and the reality of it. This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to manufacturing cost as possible.

Results of the Direct Production Process(otherwise known as Results of the Immediate Production Process) is part of a third draft of Capital which Marx wrote between the summer of 1863 and the summer of 1864, based on a plan Marx made for the work in December 1862. This manuscript has been lost, apart from a few pages from what would become the first five chapters of Capital, some related footnotes, and what was to become the sixth chapter. The pagination and content of this sixth chapter indicate that it followed on from five previous chapters. By the time Capital was completed however, this chapter had not been not included. The content of the chapter ranges over a variety of subjects, but most particularly deals in greater detail than elsewhere with (i) the "formal" and "real" subsumption of the labour process by capital, and (ii) productive and unproductive labour. Results of the Direct Production Process is to be read with the preceding five books in the Radical Reprints series: Theories of Surplus Value Volumes 1 - 3 by Karl Marx, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value by I.I. Rubin, and Capital and Community by Jacques Camatte, for these, along with Results, add onto the project of realizing and dismantling capital as a totality that Marx was unable to complete with only the three volumes of Capital that were finished and published. It is in this work that Marx's theory is illuminated, piecing together the fragments of Marx's total conception of Capital. As Camatte wrote in Capital and Community, "In a way it provides a key, not to understand Capital which is self-sufficient, but to the entire work surrounding it." This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to only manufacturing cost as possible