Lenin as Philosopher (2003)

Book Review from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lenin as Philosopher. By Anton Pannekoek. Edited by L. B. Richey. Marquette University, Milwaukee.

This is a republication of Pannekoek's classic 1938 analysis of Leninism as a non-Marxist theory, the ideology of the development of capitalism in Russia in the form of state-capitalism. This edition is for professional philosophers and students of philosophy and has notes and a lengthy introduction (half as long as the work itself).

In his introduction, Richey takes up a pro-Lenin and anti-Pannekoek stance, criticising Pannekoek for adhering to a philosophy of science not that much different from conventional science (that knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is the ordering and description, a symbolic representation, of empirical evidence obtained through the senses). It is true that Pannekoek was a practising scientist--an astronomer in fact who ended his career as professor of astronomy at the University of Leyden in Holland--who did not reject the empirical approach and did not regard science as a "bourgeois ideology".

It is also true that, in the controversy within the Marxist tradition, as to whether dialectics exists in nature or is just a mental construct, Pannekoek, following Dietzgen, took up the latter view. While he regarded the external world of phenomena as an interconnected and ever-changing whole (two "dialectical" features), he did not see contradiction (a third such feature) as a characteristic, let alone the motor of change, of this world. For him, contradiction was a mental phenomenon resulting from the paradox that the human mind, to make sense of this world in order to better survive in it, has to mentally isolate parts of it and treat them as if they were separate entities whereas in fact they remain inseparable parts of the whole.

As this controversy does not have any bearing on everyday arguments for socialism (it doesn't come up much in pub conversations, except amongst socialists) it is not one that the Socialist Party has felt the need to take a position on. But, if we were forced to choose, we would incline to the Pannekoek/Dietzgen view, on the grounds that while it is clear that social development takes place through internal contradiction (the class struggle within class societies) – this is a verified description on the basis of the facts – it has not been confirmed that change in the physical world is driven by internal contradiction. On the contrary, the most adequate theory of biological evolution is that it took place in response to changing external factors.

In any event, whatever criticisms may be made of Pannekoek's approach, to treat Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as a serious contribution to the philosophy of science, as Richey does, is ridiculous. As anyone who has tried to read it knows, it is just a rant against some of Lenin's opponents within the Bolshevik Party in 1908 who he accuses, quite unjustly (but quite typically), of harbouring or condoning religious views just because they rejected his crude and untenable view that the mind merely reflects and photographs (as opposed to mentally reconstructs) the external world. Pannekoek, while of course himself a materialist and a non-believer, interprets the priority Lenin gave to the anti-religious struggle in Russia as evidence that the coming revolution there was to be a bourgeois revolution as in France in 1789 and that Leninism was the ideology of this revolution. Lenin as the Voltaire of Russia's revolution to capitalism.