ANTON PANNEKOEK HAS DIED
In Wageningen, on April 28, Anton Pannekoek died at the age of 87 Though almost forgotten younger generations, for many, years he had been an interknown Marxist theoretician, especially before the First World War.
In 1902 he entered the Dutch Social-Democratic Workers Party (S D A P), and soon (together with Wijnkoop, Gorter, Henriëtte Roland Holst, Frank van der Goes et al) belonged to its Marxist left wing.
In 1906 he was appointed as a teacher at the Central Party School (Zentrale Parteischule) of the German social-democratic party, and later on at the Arbeiter Hochschule (Workers University) of the same party in Bremen. In those years, as a teacher of the working class cadres, he worked under the leadership of Rosa
He contributed to the German Marxist theoretical magazine Die Neue Zeit, and polemiced with Karl Kautsky about the question of the State, a discussion quoted by Lenin in State and Revolution in a way which was favorable to Anton Pannekoek. In this book, Lenin wrote about against Kautsky as a repre"left radical" tendency which counted in its ranks Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Radek and others, and which, as a representative of revolutionary tactics, was united in the conviction that Kautsky was going over to the "Zentrum" and that he was unprincipledly wavering between Marxism and opportunism. The correctness of this opinion was completely confirmed by the war, called Marxist 7 an" yanish, by posed itself in its full horrible misery."
(Translated from the German edition)
During the First World War, Anton Pannekoek remained an internationalist. In 1919 he joined the munist International. He participated in the developed by Gorter, which was criticized by Lenin and Trotsky at the Second World Congress of the
Cert Win tomation, and 192 Pannikock beft one
"Left Wing Communism. Third International, and, in reality, gave up his activity as a militant communist, whilst dedicating himself completely to his scientific work as an astronomer, in which field he also distinguished himself internationally.
He still wrote some ultra-left books: of Horner he attacked "Lenin as a philosopher." In this book he tried to deny the working class character of the
When Sneevliet, in 1936 — during the infamous Moscow Trials — asked Pannekoek to come out in defence of Leon D Trotsky, Pannekoek refused to do so with the argument 'that the revolutionary honour of Trotsky could not be smeared by the Trials. • It was then the well known com munist mathematician Mannoury who, in Holland, was at ma. the head of those revolutionary intellectuals who fought against the Stalinist slanders against Leon Trotsky and the Bolshevik Old Guard.
Anton Pannekoek was a typical representative of the Dutch Marxist school, about which Karl Kautsky, being a revolutionary Marxist, once jokingly said to Henriette Roland Holst, that he had set his hope in the Russian and Dutch Marxists. Having lost its intimate ties with German Marxism, however, in 1914, after the collapse of German social-democracy, the Dutch Marxist school began to develop a series of peculiarities, in which dogmatism began to predominate and which finally led to its desintegration.
Roland Holst, who once belonged to those Marxist intellectuals, tried to explain their fate in poetical words by the contradiction between the broad horizons of their flat country and the narrowness of its frontiers. As long as the problems of Revolution belonged to the domaine of theory, the school, represented by Pannekoek, was able to understand. It had no profound roots, ever, in the world of catastrophes and revolutions, which began with the First World War, and which had only feeble echoes in a country like Holland. At that moment, Kautsky's words appeared to be prophetic as regards Russian Marxism (though Kautsky had become a renegade then), and a joke as regards the Dutch Marxists.
But even in a Joke, there is an element of truth. Before and during the First World War, the Dutch school made international Marxism: the war by its fight against revisionism, during the war by its internationalism and by its solidarity with the
The degeneration of Marxist theory and practice under to the Dutch Marxist school. It was the Russian "school," led by Leon D Trotsky, which profoundly understood the ups and downs of Revolution, and which laid the basis for the victorious revival of revolutionary Marxism on a world scale, as it is embodied now in the programme and practice of the Fourth
This fact does not diminish the duty of the Fourth International to pay a last tribute to the memory of Anton Pannekoek, who dedicated the most fruitful part of his life to the defence of revolutionary Marxism.
----- photo credits and running heads -----
*