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to construct a coherent and ordered system of all physical and mental objects. 895 For them it was not thought (or
the thinking subject) which created the objective world; rather “The actions of the external world on our brains
produce what we call thought”. 896 Contrary to the classical idealists, like Berkeley, or the 18 th century
materialists, empirio-criticism did not make an absolute separation between physical and mental objects, both of
which are objects of knowledge. In fact, as Pannekoek shows, Lenin commits several errors that distance him
from dialectical and historical materialism:
– he confuses observed facts and physical concepts, returning to the old, and naive “common sense”
view of knowledge, which can “very easily oppose the progress of the sciences towards new and better
conceptions”; 897
– he identifies “nature and physical matter”. The word matter for him has the same meaning as
‘objective world’. But for historical materialism ‘matter’ refers to everything which “really exists in the
world, including mind and chimeras” as Dietzgen used to say. 898 It follows that Lenin, like the bourgeois
materialist, reduces any other reality, such as thought or mental phenomena, to simple attributes or
properties of matter;
– he does not understand that ‘matter’ is an ‘abstraction’ formed on the basis of phenomena 899 and never
an ‘absolute’ reality. To affirm that man, in history, is the creator of natural laws does not make “the
human mind the creator of the world” 900 as Lenin thought, seeing this as pure idealism. In fact, laws are
indeed a product of the evolution of human thought. Like human ideas, they “belong to objective reality
as surely as palpable objects; the real world is constituted by mental things as well as the things physics
calls material”; 901
– finally, again in the domain of knowledge, Lenin falls into a ‘materialist’ metaphysic by taking the
historical dimension away from materialism. Any dialectical materialism is necessarily a historical
materialism, even in the realm of knowledge. This is why there can be no “absolute laws” which are a
simple, immutable photograph of reality; 902
– there can be no absolute precision in the description of reality; theory is an “approximate image”
which gets more precise with the evolution of human knowledge. This is explained by the fact that
absolute necessity, as a form of determinism, only applies to the cosmos taken as a whole: “the laws of
nature are imperfect human formulations, restricted to particular spheres, of necessity in nature.
Absolute necessity only has any sense for the universe as a whole”; 903
But for Pannekoek, Lenin’s most serious fault was not his errors in the domain of knowledge – which could be
put down to Russia’s backwardness – but his basic approach. By opposing Reason to religion – “fideism” – and
“free thought” to –obscurantism”, Lenin, like Plekhanov before him, resuscitated pre-marxist bourgeois
materialism. Instead of dealing with the problem of idealism from the standpoint of historical materialism, Lenin
reduced Marxism to a simple ‘war engine’ against religion. Hence his admiration for Ernst Haekel 904 , even
895 The crucial works of Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) are: Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin, 1928) and Logische Syntax
der Sprache (Wien, 1934). Carnap’s scientifical positivism, very much in vogue in the Anglo-Saxon world, was followed by
Pannekoek. But Pannekoek never defined himself as a ‘philosopher’ and never identified himself with ‘neo-positivism’.
896 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 77.
897 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 80.
898 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 91.
899 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 47.
900 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 82.
901 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 91.
902 See Lenin, op. cit.: “materialism consists precisely in admitting that theory is an approximate copy of objective reality”.
903 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 50.
904 Known for his book The Marvels of Life, the neo-Darwinist Ernst Haekel (1834-1919), criticised by Engels in his
Dialectics of Nature, was not only in vogue amongst Russian Marxists – as Pannekoek claims – but also among the German
Marxists, including Mehring, in principle more ‘advanced’ than Lenin. In all logic, Pannekoek should not have simply
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