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the danger of state capitalism. The evolution of Lenin himself was characteristic: at first he was a partisan of the
‘democratic revolution’, i.e. a bourgeois revolution led by the workers and peasants, then in 1917 he rallied to
Trotsky’s position on the ‘permanent revolution’, which was in fact Marx’s position in 1852. This meant
rejecting any idea of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in the ‘epoch of wars and revolutions’. The question was in fact
different, namely if the ‘democratic revolution’ would be replaced by a simple party dictatorship in the economic
form of State capitalism.
e) Pannekoek’s claim that Lenin was never a Marxist was unfounded. An analysis of Lenin’s texts on Marx and
Marxism clearly shows that the bolshevik leader had read Marx attentively and had thoroughly assimilated the
method of historical materialism. 925 It was Lenin himself, through studying the texts of Marx, Engels – and
Pannekoek! – who made the best synthesis of the Marxist position on the state, in his book State and Revolution.
This book, which was translated into Dutch by Gorter, was hailed by the Dutch communist left in 1918 as a
“restoration of Marxism”. If Lenin, like many other Marxists of his time, was still marked on the philosophical
level by the old bourgeois materialism, the same was not true at the theoretical and political level. Even in the
field of philosophy, Lenin, who admitted he was no expert in the field, was far from being influenced solely by
18 th century bourgeois materialism. His commentaries on Hegel and Dietzgen 926 – whose contribution he
appreciated, like Pannekoek and unlike Plekhanov – show a certain evolution, a deepening of Marxist
materialism. This is why Pannekoek’s critique of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism on its own is so one-sided.
f) The “philosophical sources” of stalinism which Pannekoek believed he had found in Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism, are more readily found in the works of Lenin’s adversary, Bogdanov, than in those of the
bolshevik leader. First, the supposed contrast between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ sciences, rejected by Lenin
to some degree anticipated the worst excesses of Zhdanovism. Secondly, by reducing all relations of production
to “purely technical relations of the organisation of labour”, Bogdanov prefigured Stalin’s view that “technique
determines everything”. Even the “proletarian culture” (“proletkult”) defended by Bogdanov –most of whose
representatives fell victim to stalinist repression – made some contribution to the edification of stalinist ideology
in the 1930s. But just as Lenin’s philosophical positions cannot be grafted onto his political positions, so
Bogdanov cannot be assimilated with stalinism politically. Bogdanov was one of the founders of the Workers’
Truth (Rabotchaya Pravda) opposition group in 1921, a group which fought vigorously against stalinism and the
‘degeneration of the Russian revolution’. 927
g) Pannekoek undoubtedly made a mechanical link between theoretical assimilation of the bases of Marxism and
revolutionary praxis. His argumentation does not begin to explain why the greatest exponents of Marxism,
confirmed dialecticians like Plekhanov and Kautsky, turned away from the workers’ revolution and fought
against it in 1917 and 1918. And, inversely, why elements influenced by modern idealist philosophy – that of
Bergson for the revolutionary syndicalists and of Croce for Gramsci – could find themselves in the revolutionary
camp after 1917, despite all their ‘philosophical’ confusion and eclecticism. By placing himself outside of any
historical context, Pannekoek failed to understand a major phenomenon of the revolutionary workers’
movement: the constant difficulty of assimilating not only historical materialist theory but also the scientific
925 Lenin, ‘Preface to the Russian translation of Karl Marx’s letters to Dr. Kugelmann’ (1907), in: Collected Works, Vol. 12
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962); ‘Karl Marx: A brief biographical sketch with an exposition of
Marxism’ (1915), in: Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Pub., 1964).
926 See Lenin, ‘Philosophical Notebooks. Conspectus of the Shorter Logic’ (1915), in: Collected Works, Vol. 38 (Moscow,
1972). Unlike Plekhanov and Mehring who rejected Dietzgen’s contribution, Lenin argued that “On the whole Dietzgen
does not merit such a categorical blame. He was nine-tenths a materialist, who never laid claim to originality or a particular
philosophy different from materialism” [Lenin, Collected Works (1908), Vol. 14 (Moscow: 1972]
927 Formed in 1921 by Bogdanov’s partisans, Rabotchaya Pravda (‘Worker’s Truth’) was active up till 1923. It took part in
the wildcat strikes which broke out in Russia in the summer of 1923. Condemning the NEP and the unions as instruments of
“state capital” this group had similarities with councilist theories: definition of the Russian Communist Party as “the party
of the organising intelligentsia”; characterisation of the October revolution as a “phase of capitalist development”.
Rabotchaya Pravda called for the formation of a “new workers’ party”. [See R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the
Revolution, the Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, op. cit.]
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