The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

[...] method and result are not independent of each other; a method’s usefulness and vitality can be measured by
the results which flow from it, and without them the method can lay no claim to validity.” 151
This was to emphasise that Marxism needs to be enriched and developed, which in turn depends on the
acceleration of social upheaval. To those tendencies which claimed that Marxism could not be enriched, the
Dutch Left replied that both society and consciousness are being constantly transformed, more or less rapidly. In
1919, in the midst of the revolutionary wave, Pannekoek drew up a kind of balance-sheet of the profound
upheavals provoked within the proletariat by the whole period of the mass strike, and insisted on the acceleration
of history which had modified the results of the Marxist method: “When, day after day, a new reality engraves
itself in the mind, and violently drives new knowledge into heads, then the old ideology succumbs to its own
exhaustion; the spirit must always abandon old opinions and adapt its ideas to new necessities. Often this
happens slowly and hesitantly, with halts on the way, but still works through in the end. For the propagation of a
new ideology constantly draws new strength from the reality of life.” 152
The Marxism of the Dutch Left thus appears as a new result of a method adapting to the demands of a new
historic period of class struggle. The old social-democratic ‘ideology’ had become obsolete, and had to give way
to the new communist ‘ideology’.
This definition of Marxism and socialism as ‘ideologies’ – which the Communist Left completely abandoned
after 1920 – belonged to a whole epoch. In his book The tactical disagreements within the workers’ movement
(1909), Pannekoek declared, like so many others, that “socialism is the ideology of the modern proletariat”. This
conception was ambiguous. On the one hand, this ‘ideology’ was seen as an emanation of the material world, “a
system of ideas, conceptions and aims, which are the spiritual expressions of material living conditions and class
interests”. 153 This, said Pannekoek, could only be an abstraction, hiding the battle of ideas between proletariat
and petty-bourgeoisie within the ‘socialist’ ideology. On the other hand, Dutch Marxism, by taking up Engels’
analysis of ideology 154 , concluded by rejecting the term ideology as antithetical to science and real
consciousness: “... an ideology is an unconscious generalisation, in which consciousness of the corresponding
reality is lost, whereas science is nothing other than a conscious generalisation whose conclusions make it
possible to grasp with precision the reality whence they are drawn. Ideology is thus above all a matter of feeling,
and science of understanding.” 155
b) The influence of Dietzgen
For the Dutch Marxists, socialism thus appeared as a conscious and rational theory, scientifically based on an
understanding of the laws of capitalist society. This rational vision was a world away from the neo-idealist
conceptions spread by the partisans of a ‘return to Kant’, and from the Sorelian adepts of an irrational socialist
mystique. It was equally far removed from all kinds of vulgar materialism, which transformed the proletariat’s
conscious action into a mere reflection of its material conditions.
151 A. Pannekoek, idem, 1901, p. 614.
152 A. Pannekoek, ‘Het historisch materialisme’, in: De Nieuwe Tijd, Amsterdam, 1919 [in German: ‘Der historische
Materialismus’, Rätekorrespondenz, No. 2, July 1934, p. 12].
153 See: S. Bricianer’s anthology, Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers (Paris: EDI, 1969), pp. 96-98. [English translation,
Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils (St Louis: Telos Press, 1978). ]
154 Letter from F. Engels to A. Mehring, 14 th July 1893: “Ideology is the process which the self-styled thinker carries out,
consciously certainly, but with a false consciousness. The real forces which set him in motion remain unknown to him
otherwise this would not be an ideological process”. Marx, Engels, Etudes philosophiques (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1977),
p. 249.
155 See: S. Bricianer’s anthology, op. cit.
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