Letter: Anton Pannekoek and the SPGB (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anton Pannekoek and the SPGB

Dear Editors,

I have been reading the Socialist Standard for several years and was surprised to find the following statement in the October 2003 issue of your journal: 

“He [Anton Pannekoek] was optimistic that progress would lead to a great working class movement and political action to create a classless society in which all means of production and resources will be held in common by all people and used solely for needs.”

Despite the fact that Pannekoek was a council communist, there is no mention of any criticisms of his ideas. You will be aware of his statement that: “The so-called political democracy under capitalism was a mock democracy . . . Council organisation is a real democracy, the democracy of labor, making the working people master of their work” (Workers Councils, Part I, Chapter 7).

Anton Pannekoek rejected the use of political parties, and argued that the working class should organise into workers councils for the purpose of capturing power. This is in direct contradiction to the position of Karl Marx and the Socialist Party of Great Britain that the dispossession of the capitalist class can “arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organized in a distinct political party” (Marx, Programme of the French Workers Party, 1879).

Dr Pannekoek argued that the parliamentary action favoured by the SPGB was erroneous, and that through the formation of workers councils and a general political strike, Socialism could be obtained. Through the absence of any criticism of this viewpoint, I can gather that the Socialist Party does not oppose such a viewpoint.

That the SPGB is opposed to council-communism is shown in the following. In Questions of the Day, the SPGB showed 

“how secure is the grip Parliament has upon the armed forces” and how it is “necessary . . . for the workers to obtain control of Parliament before attempting to uproot the existing foundations of society . . . the only way to obtain control is through the legal one of sending delegates to Parliament”. This pamphlet argued against the views held by left-communists and council-communists that “the workers can set up their own machinery of government in opposition to the capitalist state . . . because in practices the capitalist class, controlling the armed forces through the parliamentary majority, will see to it that no hostile armed force comes into being to challenge their supremacy” (Questions Of The Day, SPGB, 1942 edition, pp76-8). 

The view of the SPGB is that if the working class were to set up councils and were to challenge the rule of the employers through these councils, our masters would have no hesitation in sending their armed forces to destroy such a movement.

It is not enough to agree upon the Object, but it is necessary to agree with the method of obtaining this Object. Thus we cannot hold a sympathetic view towards those whom adhere to the Socialist objective, but argue that this object cannot be obtained through political action in Parliament. If this is untrue, then the question is posed as to why Socialists do not unite with left-communists and council-communists.

Whilst I am quite sure you will agree to some extent as to what I have written, I still find it indispensable that we do not view certain opponents of the SPGB favourably, because of their opposition to Leninism in the case of Pannekoek.

R. Cumming, 

Glasgow

Reply: 

Your letter suffers from two glaring logical fallacies. First, because someone endorses something someone else says does not mean that they therefore endorse everything they say. Second, because someone doesn’t mention any disagreement they have with someone’s views does not mean that therefore agree with those views. Nor does it follow that to recognise that there are people outside the SPGB who agree with socialism mean that we should therefore unite with them.

So, no, you can’t gather from the fact that we did not mention (in an introduction to a pamphlet on Darwinism) that we disagree with the author’s advocacy of workers councils as the way to socialism that we therefore advocate this ourselves.

It so happens that an article by Pannekoek published in the same year as the SPGB pamphlet you quote gave us a chance to underline that, although we advocate sending delegates to parliaments as the way for the working class to gain control of political power, we are not a “parliamentary” party in the conventional sense.

As an article that appeared in the May 1942 Socialist Standard summarised Pannekoek’s position at that time (when he wrote the pamphlet on Darwin he held a different view, being a member of the German Social Democratic Party; later he was a member of the Dutch Communist Party until he realised that what was being established in Russia was state capitalism not socialism):

“Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch writer on Marxism, states his position in the bluntest of terms. Writing in an American magazine, Modern Socialism, he says: ‘The belief in parties is the main reason for the impotence of the working-class . . . Because a party is an organisation that aims to lead and control the workers’. Further on, however, he qualifies this statement: ‘If . . . persons with the same fundamental conceptions (regarding Socialism) unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussion and propagandise their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of to-day’. Here Pannekoek himself is not the model of clarity, but he points to a distinction which does exist.”

The article went on to say that it was not parties as such that had failed, but the form all parties (save the SPGB) had taken “as groups of persons seeking power above the worker” and continued:

“Only Socialism can guarantee the conditions of a life worth living for all. Because its establishment depends upon an understanding of the necessary social changes by a majority of the population, these changes cannot be left to parties acting apart from or above the workers. The workers cannot vote for Socialism as they do for reformist parties and then go home or go to work and carry on as usual. To put the matter in this way is to show its absurdity . . . The Socialist Party of Great Britain and its fellow parties therefore reject all comparison with other political parties. We do not ask for power; we help to educate the working-class itself into taking it”.

An article on “left communists”, including Pannekoek, is being prepared for the January 2004 [issue] on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the death of Lenin.—Editors.

Letter: "Does the Socialist Party applaud the Scottish postal workers? . . . (2001)"

Letter to the Editors from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Considering myself a socialist postal worker, I wish to direct your readers’ attention to an aspect of a recent mail strike.

Re-acting to the Post Office’s “slap across the wrist” disciplining of a manager, guilty of sexually harassing a 16-year-old postwoman, the entire Glasgow mail ground to a halt as postal workers came out on wildcat strikes.

Now, what struck me, as a socialist, was the sense of solidarity that has developed, after many years’ experience of industrial action, amongst postal workers. As is the custom, regardless of whether official or unofficial, all mail from Glasgow was blacked, a tactic to foil any Royal Mail attempt to move mail around the country to isolate and defeat a strike-bound office. It is illegal secondary action under the statutes, but the Post Office rarely challenges the refusal to handle blacked mail. On this occasion, however, and no doubt, as a result of their success in forcing through the “way forward” productivity deal, Royal Mail tried to divert letters to Edinburgh who subsequently went out on strike too.

Once again, postal workers have demonstrated the strength of industrial solidarity and expressed a spirit, nobly cited by Anton Pannekoek in Workers’ Councils:

“Direct action means action of the workers themselves without the intermediary of trade union officers…The first and most important task is to propaganda to expand the strike…Capitalists know or feel this quite well and so the only inducement to concessions is the fear that the strike might spread universally…”

Also in his “Ethics And Socialism” article:

“The workers could not be made to understand what wrong they had committed by stopping work for a day in support of a group of workers at war with their employers. The bourgeois journalists argued along these lines:…to go on strike for others through solidarity! (sheer madness, indeed…).”

Does the Socialist Party applaud the Scottish postal workers, as I do?

Alan Johnstone, 

Livingston

Reply: 

Yes, even if we don’t share Pannekoek’s view that unofficial, wildcat strikes are always best. As far as we are concerned, any strike to improve conditions or stop them getting worse, official or unofficial, legal or illegal, is all right as long as it is democratically decided and run by those involved. Full-time trade union officials should be the servants of their members, not their bosses as is so often the case today – Editors.

Nature, production and system change (2021)

From the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

System change not climate change. Yes, but how and why do social systems change? What is behind this?

What do we mean when we say we ‘produce’ something? What are we doing? Basically, we are changing the form of something that originally came from nature (or, rather, the rest of nature, since of course we are part of it ourselves). We are changing nature, with the ultimate aim of surviving better within it. All animals, in fact all living things, do. Nature is not something static. Like everything else, it is changing all the time – not just through physical forces like the weather, volcanic activity, solar activity, but also through the activity of living things, both plants and animals.

All living things work, in the sense of expending energy, to extract from the rest of nature what they need to survive. Humans are no exception. We have to as well.

Although other animals are better at doing many things with their bodies than humans are (better eyesight, hearing, sense of smell, but also other abilities we don’t possess), our particular nature as an animal (symbolic thought, vocalisation, writing, prolonged maturation and passing on knowledge) gives us one advantage over all other animals. We are not dependent just on our own bodies – our hands, arms, legs, etc – to extract what we need from the rest of nature. We can make instruments (from materials found in nature) to help us do this:

‘The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process, and Franklin therefore defines man as ‘a tool-making animal’ (Marx, Capital, Vol 1, ch 7).

Benjamin Franklin’s definition is a good one. We are tool-making animals, i.e, we are animals, but specifically animals which make and use tools. These tools have evolved and developed over time:

‘Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e, the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organisation of society, deserve equal attention?’ (Marx, ch 15, section 1).

It does, because:

‘Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.’

This is the ‘materialist conception of history’. Today, all serious theories of history are ‘materialist’ in the sense that they analyse history in terms of material causes. The idea that history is the working out of some god’s plan or that some god intervenes in history – what might be called ‘the creationist conception of history’ – is as absurd as creationism is in biology.

The ‘matter’ of the materialist conception of history is how humans are organised to meet their material needs, how they are organised to produce these from the rest of nature. The different technologies used by human societies to obtain from nature what they need give rise to different forms of society and as technology changes so does society; in fact as technology develops and progresses so does human society.

But how exactly do changes in technology – changes in the way humans interact with nature to live – lead to a change in the structure of society?

Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 famously opens with: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ How, then, are class struggles related to changes in technology?

‘It is the development of tools, of these technical aids which men direct, which is the main cause, the propelling force of all social development. It is self-understood that the people are ever trying to improve these tools so that their labour be easier and more productive, and the practice they acquire in using these tools, leads their thoughts upon further improvements. Owing to this development, a slow or quick progress of technique takes place, which at the same time changes the social forms of labour. This leads to new class relations, new social institutions and new classes. At the same time social, ie, political struggles arise. Those classes predominating under the old process of production try to preserve artificially their institutions, while the rising classes try to promote the new process of production; and by waging the class struggles against the ruling class and by conquering them they pave the way for the further unhindered development of technique’ (Anton Pannekoek, Marxism and Darwinism, 1909, Chapter II).

The materialist conception of history explains the change from one system of society to another, not just in terms of slow technological changes, but in terms also of a class struggle, with one class championing a new technology against an entrenched class benefiting from institutions relevant to an outdated technology. Such a disconnect exists today, and has done for some 150 years, between already ‘socialised’ methods of production, a vast cooperative effort linking people working in different parts of the world, and property institutions dating from a time when production was still local and individual. Before humanity can organise its current relationship with the rest of nature in a rational and sustainable way this contradiction has to be ended.

Adam Buick

Rear View: We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill (2021)

The Rear View Column from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill

‘Despite the damage coronavirus lockdowns did to the world’s economy, 2020 marked a record high in global military spending, according to a new report. As always, the US was in the lead, accounting for 40.3 percent of the world’s military expenditures at $738 billion. The report, released by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), says total military expenditures added up to $1.83 trillion in 2020, a 3.9 percent increase from 2019 (news.antiwar.com, 25 February). This news comes as no surprise to socialists: we have said for over a century that war is endemic to capitalism. We recall that the Obama–Biden Administration promised to do away with nuclear arms once and for all, but instead committed $1 trillion to building the nuclear stockpile and modernising nuclear production facilities. Commenting on an earlier admininistration, the late Carl Sagan, a visionary and humanitarian scientist, observed: ‘For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock’.

What about life on Earth?

Another (probably) lifeless rock has been invaded by a swarm of robots. Of multiple attempted Mars landings by robotic, unmanned spacecraft, ten have to date been classsed as succesful. Did any science fiction writer envisage a race to Mars? There is, indeed, kudos to all the thousands of workers across the world – these mulitiple landings are collectively an achievement on a par with the launching of Sputnik 1 just forty years after the fall of the Czars. Returning to the present, we are informed: ‘Internet sleuths claim to have decoded a hidden message displayed on the parachute that helped Nasa’s Perseverance Rover land safely on Mars…. They claim that the phrase “Dare mighty things” – used as a motto by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – was encoded on the parachute using a pattern representing letters as binary computer code’ (theguardian.com, 23 February). The phrase is used in an 1899 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which he said: ‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.’ Oscar Wilde described us ‘poor spirits’ more accurately and succiently when he said : ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all’.

War without end?

‘Humanity is waging a “senseless and suicidal” war on nature that is causing human suffering and enormous economic losses while accelerating the destruction of life on Earth, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said. Guterres’s starkest warning to date came at the launch of a UN report setting out the triple emergency the world is in: the climate crisis, the devastation of wildlife and nature, and the pollution that causes many millions of early deaths every year’ (theguardian.com, 18 February). Such news would not have surprised the astronomer and Marxist Antonie Pannekoek. Writing in 1909 he observed: ‘Natural resources are exploited as if reserves were infinite and inexhaustible. The harmful consequences of deforestation for agriculture and the destruction of useful animals and plants expose the finite character of available reserves and the failure of this type of economy. Roosevelt recognises this failure when he wants to call an international conference to review the state of still available natural resources and to take measures to stop them being wasted. Of course the plan itself is humbug. The state could do much to stop the pitiless extermination of rare species. But the capitalist state is in the end a poor representative of the good of humanity. It must halt in face of the essential interests of capital’.

Don’t Panic

Commenting on billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starship project which may someday send humans to Mars, Shannon Stirone, in an article titled ‘Mars Is a Hellhole: Colonising the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity’ (theatlantic.com, 26 February), writes: ‘Legitimate reasons exist to feel concerned for long-term human survival. But I question anyone among the richest people in the world who sells a story of caring so much for human survival that he must send rockets into space.’ Neither misleaders nor multi-millionaires can save us. Sagan says : ‘Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.’ Yet more positively he also stated: ‘Humans have evolved gregariously. We delight in each other’s company; we care for one another. Altruism is built into us. We have brilliantly deciphered some of the patterns of Nature. We have sufficient motivation to work together and the ability to figure out how to do it. If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?’ (Cosmos, Futura, 1987, p. 358). Pannekoek, who died in 1960 just as humanity entered the space age, would concur: ‘It is time for mankind to ensure itself of material abundance by establishing a free, self-managed world-society of productive labor, thereby freeing its mental powers for perfecting its knowledge of nature and the universe’ (A History of Astronomy, 1951).

Anti-Bolsheviks (2021)

Book Review from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Council Communist Reader. Radical Reprint, 2021

The articles in this collection – by Paul Mattick Snr, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, Otto Rühle and Anton Pannekoek – have long been available elsewhere.

They called themselves Communists as they agreed with Lenin’s break with pre-WW1 Social Democracy when he changed the name of his party in 1918 from RSDLP to Communist Party; some initially joined the Communist Party in their country. They had regarded what happened in Russia in November 1917 as what it purported to be – a workers’ revolution in which workers, organised in soviets (the Russian word for ‘council’), had assumed control of society. Within a few years they realised that this had not been the case but continued to call themselves Council Communists as opposed to Bolshevik-sponsored ‘Party’ or ‘State’ Communists.

Their basic position was that workers should abandon the parliamentary Social Democratic parties and trade unions and organise themselves in work-based councils both to wage the day-to-day class struggle and to overthrow capitalism. They became very anti-party and anti-parliament, which made them similar to Syndicalists except that they situated themselves in the Marxist tradition.

They were what Mattick Snr called ‘Anti-Bolshevik Marxists’ (among which we can be included), regarding Russia under the Bolsheviks (Trotsky as well as Stalin) as state capitalism and opposing Lenin’s vanguard party concept. They weren’t always clear on the implications of a post-capitalist, communist society, some of them drawing up elaborate schemes for labour-time accounting and labour-money (not included here).

Annoyingly, Paul Mattick Jnr repeatedly refers in his introduction to the German Social Democrats who took political control in Germany immediately after the end of WW1 as ‘socialists’. He must surely know they weren’t.

Adam Buick

A Man’s Eye View of Evolution (1960)

From the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

The study of the cosmos is a study of physical-chemical relationships.

Astronomy, which arose out of material developments, eventually gave rise to the next smaller great generalization of existence, geology, the science and study of the earth.

Some billions of years ago a hot gaseous mass emerged from the sun. In all the conflicting speculations and educated guesses as to the specific details of the origin of the earth, there is no quarrel that the solar system consists of the various planets revolving around the sun in their respective orbits.

It took a few billion years before the gaseous mass became a vast sea and, later, came the emergence of the geological formations. Evolution in geology can be traced through the strata by the fossils found in them. The evolutionary stages of geology may be summarized as archeozoic (transition to and beginnings of life), proterozoic (earliest life), paleozoic (ancient life), mesozoic (middle life, reptiles) and cenozoic (recent life, mammals).

In the course of a very long time there appeared on earth pre-biological forms which later developed into living matter. Organic life is only a more complex organization of inorganic substances which have acquired the properties of growth and reproduction. In order for life to arise on earth, propitious conditions had to exist. The earth’s average mean temperature had to cool sufficiently to support life, which can only exist within relatively very small limits of temperature. There also had to exist an atmosphere, moisture and other favourable circumstances. [2].

As a rule, charts of the tree of life start with the single-celled animal, as though this were the simplest and earliest form of life. Of course, this is not true. The single-celled animal is already a very complex form of a living being.

Inorganic matter, more especially carbon, with other elements, became joined together into complex molecules which were the building blocks of ultra-microscopic life. Of special significance is it that proteins are inorganic, yet under certain specific conditions function as organic matter. The viruses may be called the first true life forms. The next higher stage is bacteria. Eventually appeared the single-celled plants.

The primary distinction between plants and animals is that plants can subsist on inorganic matter, i.e., they can transform the inorganic into organic substances whereas animals can only subsist on the organic. In order of evolution, single-celled plants preceded single-celled animals.

Starting with the single-celled plant, the evolution of plants were algae, mosses, ferns, non-flowering seed producers and, its highest development, the flowering seed producers.

The evolution of animals was from single-celled animals into spores, fishes, reptiles, mammals and, finally, man. In this man’s eye view of the evolution of existence, we are only considering the main trunk and ignoring the branches of the tree.

Again, we see that evolution is a continuing process. The appearance of homo sapiens on the scene gave rise to sociology. In a very real sense, sociology is but a division of biology; which, in turn, is a division of geology; in its turn, a division of astronomy; which is but a branch of the greatest generalization of all matter.

Man "is the only animal species that, from the very moment he came into existence, has been continuously changing and during a continuing process has become a different thing.” [3] Through the interrelations of his brain and thinking processes, his acquirements of speech and the development of tools man has become a social animal whose evolution can be traced through his social organizations. Only a Marxist, such as Anton Pannekoek in his invaluable “Anthropogenesis,” [3] could have filled in the gap between the primates and the origin of homo sapiens, i.e., tied Darwinism and Marxism into an interrelated whole.

Man, the social animal, evolved from the pre-cave man into primitive tribal society (savagery and barbarism) and, then, into chattel slavery, through feudalism into capitalism and is now on the very dawn of a new society.

This whole development of social evolution arose from changes taking place in the material conditions of existence under which mankind lived. In response to these changes, there evolved changes in his ideas and institutions. Man makes his own history, “not out of the whole cloth” but out of the conditions at hand. This is Marxism, in a nutshell.

Our tribute to Darwin is for emancipating man from biological superstitions by his revolutionary contribution revealing the material forces that brought about the evolution of the species in biology.

Our tribute to Marx is for furnishing the key that unlocked the mystery of mankind’s social evolution and for establishing the understanding that it is now possible and necessary for man to be master of his own form of social organization and, at the same time, the lord over nature.

Isaac Rab

(WSPUS)

(concluded)

[2] All the speculations about life on other planets in the cosmos, more especially our sister planets in the solar system—Mars and Venus, are predicated upon the existence on them of the conditions favourable for the support of life. Though there may be millions of planets in the cosmos (a relatively small number, actually), it is not reasonable to imagine that very many of them have life-forms.

[3] Published by North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, Holland

The Destruction of Nature: by Anton Pannekoek (2019)

Anton Pannekoek, 1908

From the August 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish this translation of a recently uncovered article written by Anton Pannekoek in 1909, not only for its contemporary relevance but also to show that Marx and Engels were not the only socialists to be concerned that capitalism was upsetting the basis of humanity’s participation in the Earth’s ecosystem.

There are numerous complaints in the scientific literature about the increasing destruction of forests. But it is not only the joy that every nature-lover feels for forests that should be taken into account. There are also important material interests, indeed the vital interests of humanity. With the disappearance of abundant forests, countries known in Antiquity for their fertility, which were densely populated and famous as granaries for the great cities, have become stony deserts. Rain seldom falls there except as devastating diluvian downpours that carry away the layers of humus which the rain should fertilise. Where the mountain forests have been destroyed, torrents fed by summer rains cause enormous masses of stones and sand to roll down, which clog up Alpine valleys, clearing away forests and devastating villages whose inhabitants are innocent, ‘due to the fact that personal interest and ignorance have destroyed the forest and headwaters in the high valley’.

The authors strongly insist on personal interest and ignorance in their eloquent description of this miserable situation but they do not look into its causes. They probably think that emphasising the consequences is enough to replace ignorance by a better understanding and to undo the effects. They do not see that this is only a part of the phenomenon, one of numerous similar effects that capitalism, this mode of production which is the highest stage of profit-hunting, has on nature.

Why is France a country poor in forests which has to import every year hundreds of millions of francs worth of wood from abroad and spend much more to repair through reforestation the disastrous consequences of the deforestation of the Alps? Under the Ancien Regime there were many state forests. But the bourgeoisie, who took the helm of the French Revolution, saw in these only an instrument for private enrichment. Speculators cleared 3 million hectares to change wood into gold. They did not think of the future, only of the immediate profit.

For capitalism all natural resources are nothing but gold. The more quickly it exploits them, the more the flow of gold accelerates. The private economy results in each individual trying to make the most profit possible without even thinking for a single moment of the general interest, that of humanity. As a result, every wild animal having a monetary value and every wild plant giving rise to profit is immediately the object of a race to extermination. The elephants of Africa have almost disappeared, victims of systematic hunting for their ivory. It is similar for rubber trees, which are the victim of a predatory economy in which everyone only destroys them without planting new ones. In Siberia, it has been noted that furred animals are becoming rarer due to intensive hunting and that the most valuable species could soon disappear. In Canada, vast virgin forests have been reduced to cinders, not only by settlers who want to cultivate the soil, but also by “prospectors” looking for mineral deposits who transform mountain slopes into bare rock so as to have a better overview of the ground. In New Guinea, a massacre of birds of paradise was organised to satisfy the expensive whim of an American woman billionaire. Fashion craziness, typical of a capitalism wasting surplus value, has already led to the extermination of rare species; sea birds on the east coast of America only owe their survival to the strict intervention of the state. Such examples could be multiplied at will.

But are not plants and animals there to be used by humans for their own purposes? Here, we completely leave aside the question of the preservation of nature as it would be without human intervention. We know that humans are the masters of the Earth and that they completely transform nature to meet their needs. To live, we are completely dependent on the forces of nature and on natural resources; we have to use and consume them. That is not the question here, only the way capitalism makes use of them.

A rational social order will have to use the available natural resources in such a way that what is consumed is replaced at the same time, so that society does not impoverish itself and can become wealthier. A closed economy which consumes part of its seed corn impoverishes itself more and more and must inevitably fail. But that is the way capitalism acts. This is an economy which does not think of the future but lives only in the immediate present. In today’s economic order, nature does not serve humanity, but capital. It is not the clothing, food or cultural needs of humanity that govern production, but capital’s appetite for profit, for gold.

Natural resources are exploited as if reserves were infinite and inexhaustible. The harmful consequences of deforestation for agriculture and the destruction of useful animals and plants expose the finite character of available reserves and the failure of this type of economy. Roosevelt recognises this failure when he wants to call an international conference to review the state of still available natural resources and to take measures to stop them being wasted.

Of course the plan itself is humbug. The state could do much to stop the pitiless extermination of rare species. But the capitalist state is in the end a poor representative of the good of humanity. It must halt in face of the essential interests of capital.

Capitalism is a headless economy which cannot regulate its acts by an understanding of their consequences. But its devastating character does not derive from this fact alone. Over the centuries humans have also exploited nature in a foolish way, without thinking of the future of humanity as a whole. But their power was limited. Nature was so vast and so powerful that with their feeble technical means humans could only exceptionally damage it. Capitalism, by contrast, has replaced local needs with world needs, and created modern techniques for exploiting nature. So it is now a question of enormous masses of matter being subjected to colossal means of destruction and removed by powerful means of transportation. Society under capitalism can be compared to a gigantic unintelligent body; while capitalism develops its power without limit, it is at the same time senselessly devastating more and more the environment from which it lives. Only socialism, which can give this body consciousness and reasoned action, will at the same time replace the devastation of nature by a rational economy.

Zeitungskorrespondenz N° 75, 10 July 1909,

Original German, and a French translation, can be found here:

http://pantopolis.over-blog.com/2019/07/anton-pannekoek-la-destruction-de-la-nature-1909.html

Joseph Dietzgen - The Workers Philosopher (1975)

Josef Dietzgen (1828 – 1888)

From the Spring 1975 issue of Radical Philosophy magazine

"April the 15th 1888 Joseph Dietzgen died . In memory,  I post this article written by Adam Buick for the journal Radical Philosophy 10. Spring 1975 ." (Via Mailstrom blog.)

Josef Dietzgen is indeed a neglected philosopher. How many people know that he was the man Marx introduced to the 1872 Congress of the First International as ‘our philosopher’? Or that it was Dietzgen, not Plekhanov, who first coined the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’? Or that for the first thirty or so years of this century Dietzgen’s Philosophical Essays were to he found on the bookshelves of any working class militant with Marxist pretensions?

Who, then, was Dietzgen? What were his views? And, indeed, why has he been neglected?

Joseph Dietzgen was born in December 1828 near Cologne. His father was a master tanner and it was in this trade that Dietzgen was trained and worked. He was neither a capitalist nor a propertyless worker but an artisan owning and working his own instruments of production. What distinguished him from other pioneer scientific socialists like Marx and Engels was that he never went to university; he was a self-educated man. Dietzgen was involved in the 1848 rising and after its failure left for America returning, however, after a couple of years. He spent another two years in America after 1859 and went there again in 1884, never to return. He died in 1888 and is buried in Chicago.

Dietzgen was not just interested in philosophy, though this was his main interest. He was also a writer on economic and political matters for the German Social Democratic press, especially in the l870s. Marx commented favourably on Dietzgen’s review of Capital in his Afterward to the Second German Edition.1 The two men were personal acquaintances.

Dietzgen wrote in German, but a number of his writings, including the most important, were translated into English in the early years of this century and published as two books 2 by the Charles H. Kerr Co. of Chicago. The book bearing the title The Positive Outcome of Philosophy contains not only this, his last work originally published in 1887, but also his first work, The Nature of Human Brainwork (1869), and also his Letters on Logic. The other book, Philosophical Essays, contains translations of some of the propagandist articles Dietzgen wrote in the 1970s and also his pamphlet Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology. This pamphlet, especially Chapter 3, ‘Materialism versus Materialism’, is perhaps the best outline of Dietzgen’s views in his own words. For, frankly, Dietzgen’s works are not easy to read, partly because of the subject matter, but partly also because Dietzgen tended to express himself somewhat philosophically and to needlessly repeat himself.

In his introduction, written in 1902, to the English edition of The Positive Outcome of Philosophy, the Dutch Marxist, Anton Pannekoek, described Dietzgen’s philosophical writings as ‘an important and indispensable auxiliary for the understanding of the fundamental works of Marx and Engels.’3 Ernst Untermann, another German Social Democrat who had emigrated to America, expressed a similar view: ‘Dietzgen rounded out the work of Marx and Engels by a consistent monist conception of the universe' 4 Are these opinions justified? In this writer's opinion, yes. Marx’s historical materialism is a materialist theory of history and society; it is not, and was not meant to be, a materialist philosophy. Of course, being an atheist, Marx must have had a materialist conception of the universe but he never wrote much about it. Nor was there any reason why he should have. His specialities were history, sociology and economics, not philosophy or epistemology. Engels made an attempt to back up the materialist conception of history with a materialist philosophy but, in many respects failed to do this satisfactorily. It was Dietzgen who succeeded and in this sense can justly be said to have filled a 'gap' in socialist theory.

Dialectical Materialism

Dietzgen was a thoroughgoing empiricist and materialist. For him all knowledge was derived from sense-perception and what human beings perceived had a real existence independent of their perception of it.

The Nature of Human Brainwork (1869) presents an empiricist theory of knowledge derived from a rejection of Kantian dualism. Kant had claimed that Reason (=science, knowledge) could only deal with the world of experience, but the world of experience, according to him, was only a world of appearances or, to use a word derived from Greek meaning the same, a world of ‘phenomena’. Thus science could never come to understand the world as it really was, the world of what Kant called ‘things-in-themselves’ of which he supposed the world of phenomena to be but appearances. For Kant. there were two worlds: a world of phenomena, which was all the human mind could come to understand, and a world of things-in-themselves beyond human experience and understanding.

For Dietzgen, to posit the existence of a second world beyond the world of experience was simply metaphysical nonsense. ‘Phenomena or appearances appear - voilà tout.’5 The world of phenomena was the only world; phenomena were themselves real, the substance of the real world. Phenomena, however, says Dietzgen, do not exist as independent entities; they exist only as parts or the entire single world of phenomena. The world of reality is a single entity embracing all observable phenomena, past, present and future. Reality is thus infinite, having no beginning nor end. It is constantly changing. The universe and all things in it consist of transformations of matter, which take place simultaneously and consecutively in space and time.

The universe is in every place and at any time itself new or present for the first time. It arises and passes away, passes and arises under our very hands. Nothing remains the same, only the infinite change is constant, and even the change varies. Every part of time and space brings new changes.6

The world of reality is a never-ending, everchanging stream of observable phenomena, and it exists only as a whole. That Reality, Existence, the Universe, Nature – call it what you will (and Dietzgen called it many things drawn from philosophy, e.g., the Absolute, the Good, Truth, even God) – is a united whole a single unit, is the basis of Dietzgen’s theories and is endlessly repeated in the Letters on Logic, written over the period 1880-3 to Eugene, one of his sons.

As can be seen, this conception of the universe is both materialist (since it posits the existence of a world of reality independent of men’s perception of it) and dialectical (since it sees the world of reality as a changing, differentiated unity). It was for this reason that Dietzgen called his philosophy ‘dialectical materialism’, a phrase he first used in his 1870s articles in the German Social Democratic press.7 This was some years before Plekhanov, who is generally said to have originated this phrase (which is not to be found in the writings of Marx or Engels), even claimed to be a Marxist. Plekhanov, it should be noted, meant something rather different by it than did Dietzgen; he was the father of the undialectical state philosophy of present-day Russia which also, unfortunately, goes under the name of ‘dialectical materialism’ and with which Dietzgen’s quite different theories are not to be confused.

What is Knowledge?

The human mind The human mind is not the metaphysical mystery that idealist philosophers try to make it. As something that can be observed and studied, it too is part the world of phenomena. Once this is recognised, as Dietzgen insists it should be, then it is possible to give a materialist explanation of the nature of thinking. Dietzgen’s philosophy is in fact essentially such a materialist epistemology. Human brainwork consists, says Dietzgen, in generalising from experience, in constructing abstract general concepts on the basis of perceptions supplied by the senses. The senses perceive a continuous stream of different phenomena; the role of the mind is to make sense of this stream by distinguishing and naming parts of it. The mind, as the organ of human understanding, understands the world by classifying it:

Knowledge, thinking, understanding, explaining, has not, and cannot have, any other function than that of describing the processes of experience by (division or classification.8

Phenomena are classified by the mind into different categories on the basis of common characteristics. But the categories, or concepts, are abstractions from reality, mental constructs. A table, for instance, does not have a separate, independent existence; it is the name given by the human mind to a certain group of recurring phenomena perceived by the senses. A table (and indeed all other things) is an abstraction, a mental construct. In reality all things are interdependent Darts of the whole which is the entire world of phenomena:

The world is not made up of fixed classes, but is a fluid unity, the Absolute incarnate, which develops eternally, and is only classified by the human mind for purposes of forming intelligent conceptions.9

This dialectical view contrasts with the everyday – and undialectical – view that the world consists of a collection of separate, fixed objects. Dietzgen does not challenge the usefulness of this latter view. On the contrary, he recognises that men must form such a view of the world if they are to orient themselves and survive in it. It is this ability to generalise, to, as it were, stop this continuous stream of phenomena (so that parts of it can become subjects for abstract thought), that distinguishes men from other animals and has enables them to intervene in and control the external world. But, says Dietzgen, we ought to know that stopping the stream of phenomena and classifying it into separate, fixed objects is only a mental operation, however vital to the survival of the human species:

The logical household use of rigid conceptions extends, and should and must extend, to all science. The consideration of things as ‘the same’, is indispensable, and yet it is very salutary to know and remember that the things are not only the same and congealed, but at the same time variable and fluid.10

To state that things are mental constructs can give rise to the misunderstanding that you are saying that they are only mental constructs and that you are therefore an idealist who sees the external world as the creation of the mind. Rut Dietzgen was not saying that things were simply mental constructs: things were mental constructs out of the real world of phenomena as perceived by the senses; things were abstractions, yes, but abstractions from an objectively-existing external reality. Although a thing as such, as a separate independent object, did not exist, there was certainly something in the real world of phenomena which corresponded to it that existed. The mind was not so much constructing the external world as reconstructing an image of it.

Science altogether does not want and cannot want to accomplish more than the classification of perceptible things according to species and varieties; its entire desire and ability is confined to the mental reconstruction of the different parts of a differential unity. [emphasis added] It is the substantial force of the Universe, in which they participate, which has brought about the things that are, and all that the human mind can do is to form a picture of its gradual, consistent and rational working.11

These passages make it quite clear that for Dietzgen the external world existed independently of the human mind. Unfortunately, as we shall see, this did not prevent him from being misunderstood on this point.

A further aspect of Dietzgen’s dialectical materialism is that knowledge can never be absolute or complete, all knowledge is relative; our classification or description of the world must always be regarded as a tentative approximation liable to revision in the light of further experience. Dietzgen’s last work, The Positive Outcome of Philosophy (1887), ends with the following rule for scientific investigation which remains valid to this day:

Thou shalt sharply divide and subdivide and farther subdivide to the utmost, the universal concept, the concept of the universe, but thou shalt be backed up by the consciousness that this mental classification is a formality, by which man seeks to register and Systematize his experience; thou shalt furthermore remain conscious of thy human liberty to progressively clarify thy experience, which is constantly enriched in the course of time, through modified classification.12

Mind and Matter

Dietzgen, as we saw, called himself a materialist. There are however various kinds of materialism and Dietzgen was careful to differentiate his dialectical materialism from what he called ‘onesided,’ ‘narrow’ and ‘mechanical’ materialism. This was the view (indeed the traditional materialist view going back to the philosophers of Ancient Greece) that the world is composed of tiny particles of tangible ‘matter’ and that the mind and thinking are simply the effects of the movement of these atoms. Writes Dietzgen:

The distinguishing mark between the mechanical materialists of the 18th century and the Social-Democratic materialists trained in German idealism consists in that that the latter have extended the former’s narrow conception of matter as consisting exclusively of the Tangible to all phenomena that occur in the world.13

Every phenomenon, everything that occurs, exists, as part of the entire world of phenomena. Since non-tangible phenomena, e.g. ideas, thoughts etc., also occur, they are just as real or, if you like, just as ‘material’ as tangible phenomena:

In the endless Universe matter in the sense of old and antiquated materialists, that is, of tangible matter, does not possess the slightest preferential right to be more substantial, i.e. more immediate, more distinct and more certain than any other phenomena of nature.14

Dietzgen had no objection to the classification of the world of phenomena into two general categories, one consisting of tangible phenomena and called ‘matter’ and the other consisting of mental phenomena and called ‘mind.’ He had no objection either to explanations of mental phenomena in terms of tangible phenomena. What he was concerned to point out was that, in this sense, both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ were abstractions, even if very general ones, from the real world of phenomena. The rigid distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ was a mental distinction that did not exist in the world of phenomena which, despite this mental operation, remained an undivided whole:

The mind is a collective name for the mental phenomena, as matter is a collective name for the material phenomena, and the two together figure under the idea and name of the phenomena of Nature.15

This was the basis of Dietzgen’s statement, which, as we shall see, so upset Lenin, that ‘our materialism is distinguished by its special knowledge of the common nature of mind and matter’.16 By this he simply meant that both mind and matter were parts of the world of observable phenomena.

Those Dietzgen called the ‘narrow’ materialists made the mistake of not thinking dialectically, that is, of not realising that the parts of the world of phenomena do not exist independently but only as interconnected parts of that world. In taking one part of the world of phenomena and making it the basis of all the other parts, they were falsely ascribing a real, independent existence to what was in fact only an abstraction:

This materialism is so enamoured of mechanics, that it, as it were, idolizes it, does not regard it as part of the world, but as the sole substance of which the universe is made up.17

This was the same mistake as regarding the objects of everyday use as having an independent, separate existence. ‘Matter’ just as much as ‘table’ was a mental abstraction from the real world of phenomena; in reality tangible phenomena do not exist separately from other phenomena, they exist only as an integral part of the entire single world of all phenomena.

It is worth emphasising again that this equal epistemological status of tangible and mental phenomena does not at all rule out scientific explanations of mental phenomena in terms of tangible phenomena, e.g., in terms of the physiological functioning of the brain and nervous system, or indeed of the explanation of all phenomena in terms of the movement of atoms. The fact that ‘matter’ and ‘atoms’ were metal abstractions from the world of phenomena did not in the least detract from their possible usefulness as concepts for understanding the world. As Dietzgen said of atoms:

Atoms are groups. As smallest parts they exist only in our thoughts and thus give excellent service in chemistry. The consciousness that they are not plastic but only mental things, does not detract from their usefulness, but heightens it still more.18

To understand the world was to divide it into necessarily abstract concepts. It was not Dietzgen’s aim to decide which was the best way to classify, describe and explain the world but to show what we were doing when we did do this. To ascribe reality to any of these mental constructs, even so general a one as (tangible) matter was a confusion, was to think undialectically; the only thing that had a separate, independent existence was the entire world of phenomena itself. Dietzgen’s criticism of one-sided, narrow materialism was a criticism of its confusion on this point, and not at all a criticism of the basic principles of materialism.

Dietzgen was essentially a philosopher of science. We would not want to claim that he always expressed himself clearly or adequately (his ontological proof of the universe and his virtual pantheism will make some readers wince – or smile), but despite his shortcomings he must be given the credit for first formulating a theory of the nature of science – as basically a description of the world for purposes of prediction and control – which is now largely accepted even if it does not call itself ‘dialectical materialism’ or indeed refer to itself as ‘materialist’ at all (mainly for fear of confusion with the narrow, one-sided materialism of the past – and present-day Russia).

Dietzgen’s works, besides being difficult to obtain, make difficult reading. However, his best interpreter, the Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek, expressed himself very clearly. Pannekoek was himself a scientist, a professor of astronomy of world renown in fact, and wrote not only the introduction to the Kerr editions of The Positive Outcome of Philosophy but also, later, two short brilliant books applying Dietzgen’s dialectical materialism: Lenin as Philosopher (1938)19 and Anthropogenesis (1944). Unfortunately these are just as difficult to obtain as the works of Dietzgen himself.

Lenin versus Dietzgen

At about the same time as Dietzgen was writing, two other German-speakers, Ernst Mach in Austria and Richard Avenarius in Switzerland, were working out a theory of science which was in a number of ways similar to Dietzgen’s. One of Avenarius’ followers called this theory ‘empirio-criticism.’ We can’t go into this theory here except to say that it too saw knowledge as essentially the classification of experience. However, while Dietzgen never doubted the independent existence of the world of phenomena or experience, empirio-criticism was ambiguous on this point. It wished to construct the world from ‘experience’ (sense-data, etc.) but since experience is the experience of human beings it came very near to saying, and some of its exponents did say, that the human mind (or minds) was as vital to the existence of the external world as external phenomena themselves.

Empirio-criticism, partly because of its similarity with Dietzgen’s dialectical materialism, enjoyed a certain vogue in Social Democratic circles in the early years of the twentieth century. A number of Social Democrats, including Dietzgen’s son Eugene, misinterpreted Dietzgen in an empirio-criticist direction. Included in the Kerr edition of Dietzgen’s Philosophical Essays is an essay on Max Stirner by Eugene wherein we read that ‘whatever does not partake of the psychophysical nature of the universe, cannot exist for us’ and that ‘phenomena outside of us . . . exist independently of individual man, although they cannot exist for mankind independently of human consciousness.20

Eugene Dietzgen would seem to be suggesting here that the external world is not an objective world but only an inter-subjective world, i.e., a sort of collective creation of all human minds which would not exist in their absence. Similar views were expounded also by a number of members of the Russian Bolshevik Party. Lenin was scandalised by this departure from materialism (as indeed it was) and set out to refute this deviation once and for all. In 1908 was published Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism and in 1909 Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Both contain a denial of the view we quoted earlier that Dietzgen had added something to the work of Marx and Engels. We won’t deal with Plekhanov’s criticism here except to say that he preferred Feuerbach’s materialism to Dietzgen’s dialectical materialism (though he retained the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’).

Lenin devotes a section of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to Dietzgen entitled ‘How could J. Dietzgen Have Found Favour with the Reactionary Philosophers?’ in which he criticises in particular Dietzgen’s view that the real, or material, world includes the intangible (thoughts, etc.) as well as the tangible:

To say that thought is material is to make a false step, a step towards confusing materialism and idealism.

That the conception of ‘matter’ must also include thoughts, as Dietzgen repeats in the Excursions, is a muddle, for if such an inclusion is made, the epistemological contrast between mind and matter, idealism and materialism, a contrast upon which Dietzgen himself insists, loses all meaning.21

Lenin regards this as a ‘deviation’ by Dietzgen from materialism, without seeming to realise that this view is the basis of Dietzgen’s whole materialist epistemology. It is not a question of Dietzgen expressing himself badly but of there being a fundamental difference between Dietzgen’s materialism and Lenin’s. Lenin was clearly one of those Dietzgen described as a narrow, one-sided, mechanical materialist.

Lenin’s claim about the epistemological contrast between idealism and materialism being blurred if thoughts are regarded as part of the world of phenomena (= the material world) is not true. As we have seen, Dietzgen was quite able to make this the basis of his epistemology and to remain a thoroughgoing materialist who never for one moment doubted the objective existence of the external world. Lenin was quite right, on the other hand, to attack people like Eugene Dietzgen who only gave the external world an inter-subjective existence. This was indeed a departure from materialism in the direction of idealism, but Lenin’s criticism of it was made from the point of view of what Pannekoek in his Lenin as Philosopher called ‘bourgeois materialism’ not that of dialectical materialism.

Pannekoek, in this work (which is a reply to Lenin following the publication of German, English and French translations in 1927 and 1928), attempted to give an explanation of why the Russian Bolshevik Party should have adopted ‘bourgeois materialism’ as its theory. By ‘bourgeois’ materialism Pannekoek meant a materialism which seeks to explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. When the bourgeoisie had to fight to achieve and retain power, said Pannekoek, they believed in the power of the physical sciences to change the world, practically by developing modern industry, and theoretically by exposing the religious views of their class opponents as superstitious nonsense. That Lenin and the Bolsheviks 22 should have adopted a similar ideology to that of the rising bourgeoisie of Western Europe at an earlier period was to be explained, said Pannekoek, by the essentially similar task that confronted them: to carry out the equivalent of a bourgeois revolution in Russia which would sweep away the obstacles, institutional and ideological, to the development of modern industry there. Pannekoek saw Leninism as the ideology of a new ruling class whose historical task was to industrialise Russia on the basis of state capitalism, with militant physical-science materialism as its ideology. This materialism, though falsely called ‘dialectical,’ is still the dominant ideology in Russia today.

Dietzgen Today

Whatever the explanation as to why Lenin rejected Dietzgen’s dialectical materialism, the fact that he did contributed in large measure to Dietzgen becoming a neglected philosopher.23 Dietzgen’s ideas had been introduced into Britain before the first World War by the English-language translations of his works published by Kerr of Chicago, and had been propagated here by such organisations as the Labour College movement and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Both of these continued to exist after the War and Russian revolution and both of them proclaimed a Marxism independent of Moscow. A textbook on Dietzgen’s philosophy by an NCLC lecturer, Fred Casey, called Thinking (1922) was widely read in militant working-class circles. Then in 1927 was published the first English translation of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.24 From then on, as in the 1930s, the Communist Party’s false claim to be genuine Marxists came to be widely accepted, Dietzgen receded into the background. In 1936 T.A. Jackson, a professional Communist Party writer, included a vituperative attack, in true Leninist style, on the unfortunate Casey in his book Dialectics; to be a ‘Caseyite,’ i.e., to accept Dietzgen’s philosophy without Lenin’s ‘correction,’ became a heresy in Communist Party circles.

We would not want to claim that the sole reason for Dietzgen becoming neglected was the fact that his materialism differed from that proclaimed by the State philosophers of Russia. Other factors entered into it too, including the difficult reading that his writings make. Also, with the decline of religion as a social force, working class militants have felt less need to arm themselves with a militant materialism such as Dietzgen provided. Nor is it now really necessary to ‘revive’ Dietzgen. For, as we have said, his basic views have been absorbed into modern science which in practice is both dialectical and materialist. For the historical record, though, it is worth paying a tribute to the working tanner and socialist militant who pioneered these views. Dietzgen, radical philosophers of today should be aware, was the man who first formulated the theory of dialectical materialism as an essential complement to Marx’s materialist conception of history.

Adam Buick

Notes

1 Capital, Vol. I, p.16, FLPH, Moscow, 1961.

2 The Positive Outcome of Philosophy, Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, 1906. A second revised edition was published in 1928, from which the quotes for this article are taken. Philosophical Essays, Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, 1906 and 1917.

3 Positive Outcome p.63.

4 Science and Revolution p.161, Kerr, 1905.

5 ‘The Nature of Human Brainwork,’ Positive Outcome, p.102.

6 Ibid, p.101.

7 Essays, pp.139, 159, 208, 216 (231, 293, 294, 306, 307, 361).

8 ‘The Positive Outcome of Philosophy,’ Positive Outcome, p.425.

9 ‘Excursions,’ Essays, p.322.

10 ‘The Positive Outcome of Philosophy,’ Positive Outcome, pp.374-5.

11 ‘Excursions,’ Essays, pp.361-2 and p.310 respectively.

12 ‘The Positive Outcome of Philosophy,’ Positive Outcome, p.428.

13 ‘Excursions,’ Essays p.298.

14 ‘Excursions,’ Essays p.307.

15 ‘Excursions,’ Essays pp.311-12

16 ‘Excursions,’ Essays p.308.

17 ‘The Positive Outcome of Philosophy,’ Positive Outcome, p.368.

18 Ibid, p.418.

19 Lenin as Philosopher, New Essays, New York, 1948. A French translation was recently published by Spartacus, 5 rue Ste-Croix-de-la- Bretonnerie, Paris IVe. See also Pannekoek’s article ‘Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy,’ Science and Society, 1, 4, 1937.

20 ‘The Proletarian Method,’ Essays, p.65 and p.61 respectively.

21 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p.290 and p.292 respectively, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1972.

22 Trotsky too was a mechanical materialist who believed that, in principle, it was possible to explain everything, from the movement of the planets to thinking and consciousness, in terms of the movement and properties of the tangible atomic particles he supposed the world to be made up of. See the extracts from two speeches made in 1925 and 1926, reproduced in The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, edited and introduced by Isaac Deutscher, Dell, New York, 1964, pp.342-55.

23 Dietzgen was not entirely forgotten. See, for instance, ‘Empiricism and Ethics in Dietzgen’ by Loyd D. Easton, Journal of the History of Ideas, January 1958. Also the SPGB, and the World Socialist Party of the United States (from which this writer first learnt of the ideas of Dietzgen and Pannekoek), continued, and continue, to propagate his ideas.

24 There exist two English translations of Lenin’s work. The first, the one published in 1927, evidently had various inaccuracies. For instance, it has a passage ‘all materialists regard Dietzgen as an inconsistent philosopher’ which the second translates ‘materialists . . . regard Dietzgen as a philosopher who is not entirely consistent’!

Lenin . . . Reviewed (1976)

Book Review from the Fall 1976 issue of the Western Socialist

Lenin as Philosopher by Anton Pannekoek, Merlin Press, 11 Fitzroy Square, London, W.l.

The Russian State proclaims as its official ideology “dialectical materialism.” Their views, however, have nothing in common with those of the man who first used the term, Joseph Dietzgen. The basic text of Russian State philosophy is Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a diatribe written in 1908. Thirty years later Anton Pannekoek, a Dutch Marxist and astronomer of world renown, wrote a criticism of Lenin’s work under the title Lenin as Philosopher, his own 1948 English translation of which has now been re-published by Merlin Press.

There are, argues Pannekoek, two types of materialism: middle-class materialism and historical materialism. Middle-class materialism was the view embraced by the rising bourgeoisie when they were fighting the landed aristocracy for control of political power. Religion was an important ideological support for their opponents and the bourgeoisie used the findings of the natural science of the time to undermine religious superstitions. Nineteenth Century natural science had a mechanical materialist view of the world: reality was seen as being composed of tiny particles of physical matter, whose movement was governed by natural laws to discover which was the task of science; consciousness was seen as a purely biological phenomenon, for which a physical-chemical explanation would ultimately be found.

Historical materialism, on the other hand, says Pannekoek, is based on the study of society and social change. Consciousness clearly has a biological aspect, but in origin and content it is a social product. For Marx and Engels, ideas arose from society. Dietzgen dealt with a different aspect: how the experiences of our senses were translated into ideas. Dietzgen's materialism was dialectical: the material world was the ever-changing world of observed phenomena, whether tangible or not, considered as a single whole. Human beings, alone amongst animals, are capable of abstract thought, i.e, of delaying and planning their response to the stimuli of their external environment.

Abstract thought is done with mental concepts, which the mind constructs out of the real world of phenomena as experienced by the senses by distinguishing and naming parts of it. Everything that is the subject of abstract thought is a mental construction, including what we regard as physical objects. This is because reality is ever-changing and exists only as a whole. A table, as the group of phenomena given that name, does not exist separately on its own; it exists only as a part of the whole world of phenomena.

This dialectical view is well explained by Pannekoek.

Of course for our everyday life we need to assume that the things we use have a separate existence, but dialectical materialism teaches that what will do for everyday life will not do as an adequate scientific understanding.

Not only are tables and chairs abstractions from the world of reality, but so are atoms and physical matter. The world of phenomena is not really composed of tiny particles of physical matters; this is just one possible way of describing various physical phenomena experienced by the senses. This does not invalidate materialism at all since “matter” for dialectical materialism is something different:

  "If . . . matter is taken as the name for the philosophical concept denoting objective reality, it embraces far more than physical matter. Then we come to the view repeatedly expressed in former chapters, where the material world was spoken of as the name for the entire observed reality. This is the meaning of the word materia, matter in Historical Materialism, the designation of all that is really existing in the world, ‘including mind and fancies’ as Dietzgen said” (p. 83).

Mach and Avenarius, who Lenin attacked in his book, also held that physical matter was an abstraction, but they regarded this as a refutation of materialism. Their views were shared by a number of German Social Democrat Revisionists and even by some of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. In order to preserve the ideological unity of his party, Lenin set out to refute these ideas, but — and this is the burden of Pannekoek’s criticism of him — from the point of view of bourgeois rather than dialectical materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin defends the view that the world is composed of particles of physical matter and claims that any departure from this position opens the door to religious ideas. In fact, as Pannekoek points out, just like the rising bourgeoisie in its early days Lenin insisted on a militant atheism, even suggesting that the main battle in the field of ideas is between materialism and religion (rather than between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas).

Pannekoek explains that it was no coincidence that Lenin should have been a proponent of bourgeois materialism. For the anti-Tsarist revolutionaries of Russia were faced with the same task as Western bourgeois revolutionaries a century earlier: to overthrow a reactionary landed ruling class, propped up by Church and religion, so as to pave the way for industrialisation. In Russia the bourgeoisie was very weak so that the task of carrying out Russia’s bourgeois revolution fell to another group, the intelligentsia. Organized in a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries and armed with the ideology of militant atheism, a section of the Intelligentsia did seize power in Russia in 1917, eventually evolving into a new ruling class on the basis of state capitalism:

  “The Russian economic system is state capitalism, there called state socialism or even communism, with production directed by a state bureaucracy under the leadership of the Communist Party. The State officials, forming the new ruling class, have the disposal over the product, hence over the surplus value, whereas the workers receive wages only, thus forming an exploited class” (p. 102).

Pannekoek goes further: “The 
alleged Marxism of Lenin and the bolshevlst party,” he writes, “is nothing but a legend.” Leninism, he says further, is “a theory of middle-class revolution, Installing a new ruling class.”

Pannekoek, incidentally, knew of the world socialist movement and was, despite important disagreements, sympathetically disposed towards us. The Western Socialist recounts, in their obituary of him in 1960, how in 1938 when he was in Boston to receive an honorary degree in connection with the tercentenary of Harvard University, Pannekoek found some time to address a party meeting and talk to Socialists. He also contributed two articles to The Western Socialist after the war (“Public Ownership and Common Ownership” in November 1947 and “Strikes” in January 1948). From these it can be seen where his views differed from ours.

Although both Pannekoek and Socialists insist on the need for the working class to organize democratically, without leaders, in order to establish Socialism, Pannekoek was a lifelong anti- parliamentarlst and said the workers should do this through “workers councils.” We, on the other hand, have always urged that the workers should organize democratically into a socialist political party using the vote to gain political power (see Socialist Standard, May 1942 for a criticism of Pannekoek’s views on this).

Pannekoek’s Lenin as Philosopher has a place on the bookshelf of every Socialist, not just for its criticism of Leninism but also for its clear account of dialectical materialism.

Adam Buick

Breakdown theory (2018)

Book Review from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Capitalism’s Contradictions. Studies in economic theory before and after Marx’. By Henryk Grossman (Haymarket Paperbacks. Chicago)

For a long while it was only by reputation that Grossman was known in the English-speaking world as a collapse of capitalism theorist, as his 1929 book The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System was not available in English translation until 1992, though Paul Mattick had publicised his theory in the 1930s. Grossman was an admirer of state capitalist Russia even under Stalin and died in 1950 in East Germany.

This collection of articles lives up to its subtitle, with a useful article on some of those before Marx who put forward the view that societies differed depending on their particular system of production and changed when this changed, and another on post-Marx bourgeois economists and their theories of marginal utility arguing that left free of government interference capitalism tended towards full-employment equilibrium. Strangely there is no mention of Keynes.

Grossman took it as axiomatic that Marx held a breakdown theory of capitalism, writing in a contribution on Marxism for an encyclopaedia, reprinted here, in a matter of fact way about ‘the fundamental idea of Capital of an absolute limit to the development of the capitalist mode of production’ and of ‘Marx’s theory of the final breakdown of the capitalist system of production.’ In fact he was only promoting his own theory of this since no such theory can be found in Marx.

As exposed here at the end of this contribution, ‘it holds that once a nation’s capital exceeds a definite scale, its accumulation finds no further profitable opportunities for investment and consequently either lies idle or has to be exported.’ Grossman based his theory not so much on the falling rate of profit but on the mass of surplus value in relation to the total social capital becoming insufficient to continue capital accumulation:

   ‘…at high levels of accumulation the part of surplus value required for additional accumulation [as constant capital] will be so large that it finally absorbs almost all the surplus value.’

He seems to have thought that this stage had nearly been reached in the developed capitalist countries.

One reason why he (and Rosa Luxemburg too, though her breakdown theory was different) believed that a breakdown theory was essential was that, without it, the case for socialism would be weakened and just become a matter of moral choice, a view associated with the revisionists and reformists within the German and Austrian Social Democratic movement.  One such reformist was Rudolf Hilferding, the author of Finance Capital, who after the war became German Finance Minister on a couple of occasions. Grossman writes of him:

  ‘After the war (1927) Hilferding declared that he had always “repudiated every theory of economic breakdown”. Marx had also considered them to be false. The overthrow of the capitalist system would “not happen because of internal laws of this system” but had to be the conscious will of the working class”.’

Despite his reformism, Hilferding was right here. But it wasn’t just reformists who held this view. Anton Pannekoek, whose anti-reformist credentials are impeccable, wrote a pamphlet in 1934 refuting breakdown theories in general and Grossman’s in detail, expressing a similar point of view. It is also the view expressed in our 1932 pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse and in our articles on this subject ever since.

Adam Buick