Anton Pannekoek, as leading theorotician of the council communists, failed see in Lenin's Hegel Notebooks (1914-15) any insights on dialectical relation of subject to object or on the importance of Hegel's categories in the 'Logic' to Marx's 'Capital'. The councilists also missed how Lenin's reorganization of thought produced such a 'libertarian' manifesto of insurrection as 'State and Revolution', which also put Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme back on the historical map. Lenin of course, didn't help much by keeping these insights to himself and backtracking (often for 'tactical reasons') on the very principles they helped him to work out.
For pre-1914 social democracy, marxism existed to hold the 'Movement' together by 'explaining' the 'inevitability' of socialism due to the 'inexorable laws' of capitalism, which would lead to 'anarchy' unless without state planning. But 'socialism' was a far off 'future' which no 'subjective factor' could bring to fruition. In the 'meantime', reforms could be won by the Movement, and so, as far as the human will was concerned, "the Movement was everything".
In Germany Eduard Bernstein opened the 'revisionist' attack by pointing out that in Britain a labour movement dominated by Fabianism and Methodism was winning more reforms than the German 'marxists'; so why bother with the waffle about 'dialectics', 'revolution' and 'materialism'? Bernstein's thesis seemed further confirmed when the idea of socialism supposedly grounded in science collapsed into the insanity of social chauvinism in WW1.
George Lichtheim, in his book, 'Lukacs', locates the root of the 1914 collapse in the 'codification of Marx's thought worked out by Engels after the death of his senior partner'. Engels was accused by Lukacs of trying to extract a 'natural dialectic' from Hegel's Logic, whilst regressing into an 'objectivist' pre-Kantian bourgeois materialism, which appealed to "experiment and industry" for validation. The philosophic counterpart to the political practice of neo-Kantianism, which Bernstein represented, was the idea that the mind could impose its own forms and categories on experience - as with the 'value-free models' of Weberian sociology. Thus the huge chasm between 'ought' ("utopian ethical will") and 'is'("empirical reality") was resolved by treating fetishized technical rationality as an inpenetrable "thing-in-itself".
Pannekoek, who clashed with the Bolsheviks over his insistance on the primacy of workers control of production, attempted to work out a new relationship between theory and practice. He posed an alternative to Engels' late position, which gave the green light to vulgar materialism's subsumption of the 'subjective factor' into objective historical 'laws'. Pannekoek however, in complete contrast to Lukacs' attempt to ground revolutionary theory in the Hegelian dialectic, took his own cue from the 'proletarian philosopher', Joseph Dietzgen, whose ideas came under attack from Lenin in 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' (Marx admired Dietzgen for his efforts to get workers interested in philosophy but thought he hadn't properly sussed Hegel).
Dietzgen, in recognising that thinking as well as objects could be the object of thought, argued that "our brains do not grasp the things themselves but only the concepts", which for 'practical living' was quite adequate in laying the basis for socialism. Pannekoek thought Dietzgen had provided the basis for a challenge to Lenin's supposedly 'absolutist' approach, which assumed that the problem of how data is perceived through the senses had been solved for all time. Pannekoek, in 'Lenin and Philosophy', argues:
"The first problem in the science of human knowledge: the origin of ideas, was answered by Marx in the demonstration that they are produced by the surrounding world. The second adjoining problem, how the impressions of the surrounding world are transformed into ideas, was answered by Dietzgen... in the words of Herman Gorter, Marx pointed out what the world does to the mind, Dietzgen pointed out what the mind does itself."
Significantly, as late as 1953, Pannekoek was in dialogue with Cornelius Costoriadis of the French ex-trotskist tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie. The correspondence also involved the US "Johnson-Forrest Tendency" of the Fourth International, then led by CLR James (Johnson), Raya Dunayevskaya (Forrest) and Grace-Lee Boggs. In a letter to Costoriadias (Chaulieu), dated Nov. 1953, Pannekoek noted his differences with S ou B:
"While you limit the activity of these councils to the organization of work in the factories after the seizure of power by the workers, we consider them equally as being the means by which the workers will conquer this power."
Pannekoek suggested that S ou B's holding on to the concept of party - non-vanguardist, but revolutionary - was a "knotty contradiction" in their perspective; and, as it turned out, was one S ou B and its offshoots failed to overcome in the 1960s.
Dunayevskaya, reconsidering the Pannekoek/Costoriadis dialogue four decades later (1987), recognized it as "the ground of all other tendencies, be it various anti-leninist groups like Mattick's or even within Marxist-Humanism... those who act as if the absolute opposites are party/spontaneity rather than party/dialectics of thought, in a word that both party and mass are forms of organization sans philosophy..." As an alternative, Dunayevskaya poses "organization inseparable from philosophy". (RD Collection 10901-4)
Dunayevskaya, who was working on a book on 'Dialectics of Philosophy and Organization' when she died in 1987, observed that Pannekoek, like Rosa Luxemburg, had on the one hand tried to convince the Bolsheviks that workers "at the point of production must retain their power after the revolution". On the other hand, Pannekoek and Luxemburg took it "for granted" that "spontaneity is no substitute for for the wholeness of internationalism and theory", adding: "What only was not taken for granted, but never even approached in any way, unless one calls 'approached' a total rejection, was philosophy". Except of course,Lenin: "but he kept to old and Plekhanov when it came to Russia."
Lenin seems to recognize Practice as Mediation in Hegel's chapter in the Logic on Cognition, whilst 'agreeing' with Hegel that cognition is creative rather than just reflective (and he makes note of Hegel's words on the subject's certainty "of its own actuality and the non-actuality of the world"). Lenin however, doesn't comment on Hegel's distinction between "the actuality [which] appeared merely as an objective world without the subjectivity of the Notion" and its appearance as an objective world whose "inner ground and actual substance is the Notion... the Absolute Idea" and which sees the determination of cognition as its opposite.
This is what Lenin 'didn't get' in 1914: that the Party, as external determination of cognition, could only end up as the opposite of Revolution.