The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

complete agreement with Marx and Engels, who, after a first brief enthusiasm for Darwin, expressed very clear
reservations on his theories. 176
Like Dietzgen, the Dutch Marxists’ struggle for a new proletarian, socialist ‘ethics’ did not represent an
adherence to neo-Kantian idealism. On the contrary, they saw neo-Kantism as the philosophical basis for
revisionism, which reflected “petty-bourgeois tendencies”, and allied “a bourgeois conception of the world with
anti-capitalist convictions”. 177 Pannekoek vigorously emphasised the impossibility of reconciling idealist and
revisionist “ethics” with historical materialism; the latter provides the foundations for a new, proletarian
morality, but on a materialist basis of capitalist exploitation and the struggle against the domination of the
bourgeoisie. In an article written in 1911, Pannekoek shows how wrong it is to seek to transform Marx into a
moralist, or ‘ethicist’, and so transform the class struggle into a struggle for abstract ‘ideals’: “Marx’s materialist
theory does not deny ethics, any more than it denies the power of ethical feelings. It does deny that these feelings
are rooted in an ‘ethics’ standing somewhere above humanity; it considers ethics as being themselves a product
of material social factors. The virtue which is today growing among the workers, their solidarity and discipline,
their spirit of sacrifice and their devotion for the class community and socialism, are a fundamental precondition
for the suppression of exploitation; without this new morality of the proletariat, socialism cannot be the goal of
the struggle [...] The idea that Marx is an ethicist is doubly wrong. It is not ethics that lies at the foundation of
Marxism. On the contrary, it is Marxism that gives ethics a materialist foundation. And the violent passion of
criticism and struggle that flames in Marx’s writing has little to do with ethics.” 178
In a pamphlet designed as part of the combat against anarchism and revisionism, which saw the struggle against
capitalism as a struggle against ‘injustice’, Pannekoek showed that the Marxist method has nothing in common
with the idealist method of categorical imperatives. Capitalism reveals its unjust nature by becoming obsolete,
and so creating the objective basis for its own disappearance. From the materialist point of view, it is incorrect
“to say that capitalism must be overthrown and replaced by a better social order because it is bad and unjust. On
the contrary, it is because capitalism can be overthrown, and because a better order is possible, that it is unjust
and bad”. From this point of view, socialism’s aim is not “to make men morally better by preaching at them, but
to overthrow the social order”. 179
Pannekoek thus stresses that any new morality arising from the proletarian struggle must be subjected to this
goal. Pannekoek was enormously impressed by the 1903 strike in Holland. With Gorter (in the bitter polemic
against Troelstra) (see Chapter 1), he demonstrated that what was ‘moral’ was “anything that serves the class
struggle”, while the immoral is “anything that damages it”. In the class struggle, ‘proletarian morality’ does not
mean anything that is immediately useful’ and ‘rational’ for its action – like so many others, the 1903 strike
176 On 16 th January, 1861, Marx wrote to Lassalle: “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a natural scientific
basis for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite
all deficiencies, not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to ‘teleology’ in the natural sciences but its rational
meaning is empirically explained.” In 1871 Marx sent to Darwin a copy of the First Book of The Capital. Prudently, Darwin
In 1871 Marx sent Darwin a copy of the First Book of The Capital. Darwin answered he did not take time enough in
studying it, and that the topics on which both were investigating were very different ones and that he did not understand
about political economy. Engels was to correct this opinion later: “The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for life is
simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes’ theory of bellum omnium contra omnes, and of the
bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population. When once this feat has been
accomplished (the unconditional justification for which, especially as regards the Malthusian theory, is still very
questionable), it is very easy to transfer these theories back again from natural history to the history of society, and
altogether too naïve to maintain that thereby these assertions have been proved as eternal natural laws of society.”
[F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 25, p. 584.]
177 Pannekoek, introduction to Dietzgen, op. cit., p. 38.
178 A. Pannekoek, Marx der Ethiker, in: Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 25 Feb. 1911. Pannekoek was to repeat his insistence that
Marx was no ‘ethicist’ at the end of his life, in letters to Maximilien Rubel, for whom Marxism could be reduced to a
‘system of ethics’. See: ‘Lettres d’Anton Pannekoek 1951-1955’, in: Etudes de marxologie, Paris, 1976, pp. 841-932.
179 A. Pannekoek, Ethik und Sozialismus – Umwälzungen im Zukunftsstaat. Zwei Vorträge gehalten für die
sozialdemokratischen Vereine im 12. und 13. sächsischen Reichstagswahlkreis (Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei
Aktiengesellschaft, 1906), pp. 19 and 9.
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