Council Aestheticism? Pannekoek, the Avant-Garde and Contemporary Art

Focusing on the Marxist theorist Anton Pannekoek, this article left communist impulses in 20th and 21st century aesthetic practice. The point of departure is Pannekoek’s theory of revolutionary mass action – centred around the general strike – and its aesthetic as well as political implications and repercussions. The text then proceeds to discuss the workers’ council as the nucleus of socialist self-organization and the avant-garde’s use and indeed fetishization of that concepts, and ends with a more speculative section on the potential contemporary relevance of Pannekoek’s writings on epistemology, the history of science, and evolution.