HOW PANNEKOEK BECAME APOSTATE THREE TIMES

Abstract

The purpose of research was to study Anton Pannekoek's activity and his writings as a source of information on his movement across the history of revolutionary movement and Marxist theory. In this paper, this movement is reduced to three schisms: between revisionism and orthodoxy, between reformism and revolution, and between state communism and council communism. Here, we left out the first schism between anarchism and Marx(ism) because anarchists were the first to be excluded and therefore not discussed thoroughly by Pannekoek. The last schism, that between state communism and council communism, is a missing link of division on Western and Eastern Marxism which originates in conflict on strategy and tactics within the Communist International (1920-1922) when, finally, Lenin's strategic and tactical line established in 'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder against all those who were opposing parliamentary and trade-unionist strategy as the only communist revolutionary engagement. Pannekoek was fighting against this solution throughout his later theoretical and activist life. He reached the highest point of comprehension possible from his point of view in his books Lenin as Philosopher (1938) and Workers Councils (1941-1947). Finally, when he got in touch with Socialism or Barbarity group of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort in 1953, he explained himself to the new generation of revolutionaries and Marxist theoreticians in correspondence with Cornelius Castoriadis. The conflict and its schismatic consequences are far from over yet. In our epoch characterized from different points of view as transition to post-capitalism it emerges again, this time on global scale.