The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

is most necessary. Only knowledge gives us a good organisation, a good trade union movement, and a correct
policy, and thereby political and economic improvements.” 169
Gorter, who has sometimes been described as idealist and a ‘visionary’ 170 took great care always to give the term
‘spiritual’ a militant content, excluding any fatalism: “The social force that drives us is not a dead destiny, and
intractable mass of matter. It is society; it is a living force [...] We do not make history of our own free will.
But... we do make it”. 171 For Pannekoek, by contrast, the spiritual factor finds its expression in the development
of theory. This is both a method of pure’ thought and knowledge, and a practical, rational consciousness, whose
role is to remove the will from the all-powerful, direct influence of the instincts, and subject it to conscious,
rational knowledge. Theoretical ability allows the worker to escape from the influence of immediate and limited
interests, and to align his action on general proletarian class interests, on the long-term interest of socialism. 172
For Pannekoek, the role of the ‘spirit’ lies within that ‘science of the mind’ which is the development of critical
and scientific weapons against bourgeois ideology.
c) The struggle against ideology: Marxism against Darwinism and neo-Kantism; the new ethics of the proletariat
One of the Dutch Left’s main theoretical battles in the period prior to 1914, was fought against any claim to use
Darwin’s theories as a biological basis for the class struggle. While demonstrating that “Marxism and Darwinism
form part of a whole” on the level of materialism, the Dutch Left emphasised the profound differences between
them, since “the one deals with the animal world, the other with that of human society”. 173 Above all, they
showed how “social Darwinism” was a weapon of bourgeois ideology, in its materialist form, against the power
of the church and the aristocracy as much as against the proletariat. In Germany especially, it had served “as a
weapon of the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the aristocracy and the priests, because it replaced divine
intervention with the interplay of natural laws”. 174 These natural laws of the struggle for existence, transposed
from the animal kingdom to human society, were in fact the ‘scientific foundation’ for the inequality of
bourgeois society. Pannekoek showed that language, thought, and consciousness are specific to a humanity,
whose “struggles cannot be fought on the same principles as the animal kingdom”, and emphasised the
difference between bourgeois materialism and socialism, between the defence of inequality and its utter
elimination: “Socialism’s fundamental premise is the natural equality of men, and it aims to bring about their
social equality... This means that the struggle for existence within the human world will come to an end. It will
still be fought, but externally, not as a competition against one’s fellows, as a struggle for survival against
nature.” 175
On the road to the proletariat’s emancipation of humanity, social feelings would become “clearly conscious”,
and so take on “the character of moral feelings”. The struggle for socialism would take expression in a new,
proletarian, morality, which would put an end to “the war of each against all”. In this, Pannekoek was in
169 H. Gorter, Het historisch materialisme voor arbeiders verklaard (Amsterdam: Sociaal-Demokratische Partij, 1909),
p. 111.
170 See: ‘Gorter, Lénine et la Gauche’, Programme communiste, Nos. 53-54, Paris, Oct. 1971-March 1972. This article
describes Gorter as an “illuminist” (‘visionary’), in the sense that he is claimed to be attached to the current of ideas
represented by the Enlightenment of the 18 th century, in the form of ‘Clarification’ (Aufklärung). In fact, the bordigist
current constantly confuses Gorter’s and Pannekoek’s ideas with those of Gramsci, for its own polemical ends.
171 H. Gorter, Der historische Materialismus für Arbeiter erklärt (Stuttgart, 1909), p. 127; with a highly complimentary
foreword by Kautsky, translation from Dutch into German by Anna Pannekoek-Nassau Noordewier (1871-1957), wife of
Anton since 1903, who was teaching Dutch in Leiden.
172 A. Pannekoek, Die taktischen Differenzen in der Arbeiterbewegung (Hamburg: Erdmann Dubber, 1909); translation into
French by Bricianer, op. cit., p. 97.
173 A. Pannekoek, Marxismus und Darwinismus. Ein Vortrag (Leipzig, 1909); 2 nd ed. 1914, p. 24.
174 Pannekoek, idem, pp. 15-18.
175 Pannekoek, idem, pp. 20 and 44.
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