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though the latter was a Social Democrat and a bitter adversary of “egalitarian socialism”. 905 In fact, Lenin –
blinded by bourgeois materialism which denies the existence of social classes and proclaims itself the champion
of humanity’s fight against religious obscurantism – abandons the class analysis of ideas in philosophy:
“Nowhere does Lenin mention the fact that ideas are determined by social class; theoretical divergences hover in
the air with no link to social reality... This essential aspect of Marxism seems not to exist for Lenin”. 906
There is no doubt that Pannekoek’s philosophical critique of Lenin accords entirely with the Marxist theory of
materialism. 907 His critique of the bolshevik leader makes no concession to the ‘subjectivism’ of the empiriocriticism
of Mach and Avenarius. Mach expressed above all the ‘spontaneous materialism’ of the scientist, to
some degree disconnected from the idealist prejudices of his period. To criticise his arguments properly meant
showing that the valid elements in his approach were what were close to dialectical materialism. If Mach was
“very close to the method of historical materialism” 908 it was by reason of his affirmation of the principle of “the
economy of thought” as a guide to the scientist in the elaboration of laws and abstractions. If, concretely, Mach’s
principles proved to be “the best guide to overcoming difficulties” of method in the sphere of atomic theory and
relativity, 909 it was in applying this principle. It was a question of seeking which experience could confirm and
refute such and such a scientific assertion. By first recognising the relative validity of this current at the
epistemological level, Marxism could then take up the critique of the theories of Mach and Avenarius. Such a
Marxist critique involved unmasking the social ideology propagated by this current. By developing a subjectivist
theory, close to classical ‘philosophical meditation’, and founded on personal experience, it ended up exalting
the individual and in this sense was still marked by bourgeois materialism. This individualism, “consequence of
the unbridled individualism of bourgeois society” is a bourgeois philosophy opposed to Marxism which sees
“the source of knowledge” in “social labour”. On the other hand, by making the world an immutable essence,
“where the fact that the world is in perpetual evolution is left to one side”, 910 the position of Mach-Avenarius
forges an ideology that ends up ‘refuting’ materialism, the theory of the continuous evolution of social labour.
Connected by a thousand fibres to the bourgeois world, even at the price of concessions to historical materialism,
Mach and Avenarius – like many others – necessarily fell into idealism, “an ambiguity revealing a penchant
towards subjectivism, corresponding to the general tendency towards mysticism in the bourgeois world”. 911
Thus, Pannekoek stressed that in the theoretical struggle, Marxism, in contrast to Lenin and Plekhanov, must
firmly reject the old bourgeois materialism. The latter bases itself on the sciences of nature but defines man, and
thus the proletariat, as a simple object of nature, the highest animal in the zoological ladder, totally determined
by immutable ‘natural laws’. It is thus the negation of the social praxis of the proletariat which overturns and
destroys the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist society. On the other hand, the very evolution of society, marked by the
upsurge of the revolutionary proletarian class, signals the decadence of the old bourgeois materialism, which
becomes more and more imbued with mysticism, expressing the pessimism and scepticism of a decomposing
bourgeois class:
rejected ‘bourgeois materialism’ in Russia but also the whole of contemporary Marxism in advanced countries like
Germany.
905 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 96.
906 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 95.
907 See Engels, op. cit.: “Matter as such is a pure creation of thought, a pure abstraction. Matter as such, as opposed to
definitive, existing material things, has no sensible existence”. Or again: “it is precisely the transformation of nature by
man, and not nature alone as such, which is the most essential and most direct foundation of human thought, and man’s
intelligence has grown to the extent that he has learned to transform nature”. This Marxist vision is further developed by
Pannekoek in his book Anthropogenesis. A study on the origin of the man, written in 1944, published in Dutch in 1945:
Anthropogenese. Een studie over het ontstaan van den mensch, Amsterdam, 70 p., then in English in 1953 (Noord-
Hollandse Uitgeversmaatschappij).
908 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 54.
909 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 63.
910 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 61.
911 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 57.
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