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evolution installing a new ruling class in power”. 920 Finally, Lenin’s book contained the fatal seeds of the
stalinist counter-revolution. According to Pannekoek, if one had read Materialism and Empirio-Criticism before
1914 “one would have been able to predict that the Russian revolution would lead in one way or another to a
form of capitalism based on the workers’ struggle”. 921
Behind these assertions lie some astounding silences on Pannekoek’s Weltanschauung. They also express
implicitly a ‘spontaneous’ philosophy of council communism in this period.
a) First of all, Pannekoek remains silent about the politics of the Bolsheviks, who were on the left wing of the
Second International, against war and for revolution. Pannekoek was unaware of the internal struggles within the
RSDLP and the bolshevik party when he asserts that Lenin “makes no allusion to the bourgeoisie’s spiritual
power over the workers”. 922 Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was above all an affirmation that
the struggle of a marxist party took place in all domains, political as well as philosophical, including the fight
against the idealist and even religious conceptions secreted by bourgeois society. Even before 1914, Lenin’s
writings express an incessant combat against democratic, nationalist and imperialist ideologies.
b) Secondly, Pannekoek did ignore the circumstances in which Lenin’s book was written, and what was at stake
in the bolshevik party. It was a question of preserving the party from the penetration of the idealist and religious
conceptions expressed by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. Lenin’s combat was above all a political combat directed
against certain ‘liquidationist’ tendencies in the RSDLP. Nor was the struggle that Lenin undertook against
religion limited to Russia or the bolshevik party. In the more developed countries, it was undertaken by the left
in the big Social Democratic parties which fought against the official view that “religion was a private matter”.
This struggle did not have the same breadth because the proletariat in these countries had a better socialist
education and was less subjected to religion which had begun to go into decline. But there is no doubt that
Pannekoek, who before 1914 considered that “religion will disappear with the beginning of the proletarian
revolution” (p. 40) expressed in his book an underestimation of the ideological struggle that Marxism had to
wage against religion, as against bourgeois ideology in general. 923 This underestimation by Pannekoek also
seems to contradict his statement – in Lenin as Philosopher – that the decline of capitalism is accompanied by a
new upsurge of mysticism. But Pannekoek only sees this influencing the bourgeoisie – the proletariat apparently
being miraculously protected from it.
c) The ‘vulgar materialist’ conceptions he criticised in Lenin were not limited to the latter. They were quite
widely held among the main theoreticians of the Second International, Kautsky and Plekhanov – the latter
having an international audience beyond the borders of Russia. We may recall that up to 1914, on the theoretical
level, Lenin defined himself as a faithful follower of Kautsky. The deformation of Marxism was already an old
phenomenon in the Second International. Even before it was founded, Marx, fearing the deformation of the
historical materialist method, said that he was ‘no Marxist’. Many of the fundamental texts of historical
materialism, which had been left in the care of Bernstein and Kautsky, remained no more than long-forgotten
manuscripts. It was the work of the Russian Riazanov 924 , after the Russian revolution, which first brought
several unpublished texts by Marx to light.’ It is also striking that the Russian revolution was at the origin of
some the most significant Marxist writings of the time: History and Class Consciousness by Lukács, Marxism
and Philosophy by Korsch, etc.
d) Pannekoek also seemed unaware of the heterogeneity and the actual evolution of the political and theoretical
conceptions within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin himself did not represent the whole of
Bolshevism. Militants like Bukharin and Radek – the latter up to 1919 – were very close to the conceptions of
the Dutch Left on the national question. In 1918 Bukharin and Osinski represented a tendency that underlined
920 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 113.
921 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 103.
922 Pannekoek, op. cit., p. 107.
923 For example in Kautsky’s book The Foundations of Christianity, 1908 [Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1955.]
924 Riazanov, ‘Communication sur l’héritage littéraire de Marx et Engels’, in: Karl Marx, homme, penseur et révolutionnaire
(Paris: Anthropos, 1968).
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