Letter to Maximilien Rubel on the 11th of October 1951 by Anton Pannekoek

Preface

Someone asked me online to transcribe this letter by Pannekoek^[1]. There may be some errors with the transcription of a few words, but the transcript should at its core be correct. The original orthographie was generally kept, with the exception of passages where reading of the text was significantly hindered. The footnotes were added by myself to provide further context for the letter and are not contained in the original, there are fewer footnotes in the translation because some of the footnotes relating to language were incorporated into the translation text. If you want to read the original letters one can view it in the Anton Pannekoek Archive, if you want to read this specific letter then you can read it here. The letter was translated by the person who originally commissioned the transcription, they allowed me to publish it on my website, but asked to remain anonymous.

Transcript

In your letter^[3] on September 13th, you raise so many questions and touch upon so many subjects that I am hardly able to address everything and must limit myself to a few points, most of which terminology and nomeclature; while I believe that we are largely in agreement on the matter itself, differences in nomenclature arise each time. You are inclined to describe everything in which people pursue a goal as part of the domain of ethics, whereas I believe that this is not the actual meaning of ethics (I refer to a previous letter in which I mentioned the farmer who sets himself the goal of cultivating his field)^[4]. Ethics (see Kant: you ought to)^[5] is derived in the bourgeois world from a mysterious cause (e.g., God); Marxism explains it as an emanation of society, a social product; it is the "materialistic" method of explaining such spiritual phenomena from the Western world. In doing so, it starts from well-known human dispositions, which it alienates; explaining them is not its task, and it refers to anthropology, linking to biology, which explains their origin in the animal world. You believe you have discovered a hidden ethical standpoint in the little word "must" (muss). You are mistaken. I wrote about the social instincts of animals and said: in order for ethics to arise from them, something else must be added; this is therefore a question of definition, a question of logical language: for a piece of iron to become a hammer, it must have a handle attached to it; otherwise it is not a hammer; is that ethics? The "something" that must be added to the social instinct (of the animal) in order to be called ethics (in humans) is conceptual thinking. This is what is meant (and probably also expressed in my letter?) by the sentence from which you thought you could deduce my "ethical standpoint".

If you want to apply the term idealistic to Marx^[6], then it must be in the common sense used by the bourgeoisie, who calls the tendency toward good food and drink materialistic, and having ideas and ideals idealistic. However, Marx uses these words in a philosophical sense, whereby (his own) materialism means that ideas and ideals do not originate from mysterious sources but from reality, namely society. That human beings make value judgments is something completely self-evident for Marx and any Marxist; according to our materialistic view, these value judgments determine people's actions, and since they (these judgments) are themselves determined by living conditions, mainly economics, they form a connecting thread between needs and the work process, and are therefore an essential element in historical materialism. There is nothing ideological about this.

You write: when I say "class dictatorship", it is merely a postulate^[7]. You know that bourgeois philosophy often works with "postulates", demands where it lacks knowledge. For Marxism, class solidarity is not a postulate, not a demand we make, but a fact we study, an emerging, growing fact that can be explained by the needs of class struggle, the causes of which we examine at that point, and which we expect to increase, especially under special conditions, and to play a major role in the struggle for liberation in the future. You will say: but the workers make it a demand of each other. Certainly; that is why it belongs to the realm of ethics, and as such it is studied by Marxism. But the fact that ethics is so strongly permeated with admonitions, demands, "you ought to" (and thus its theory with postulates) is probably due to the fact that the bourgeois world is deeply burdened by the conflict between action and obligation (inevitable, after all, because it is based on the dual character^[8] of the commodity); and the admonition to workers is an attempt to overcome both their inherited bourgeois individualism and their new insight into their own class needs.

I have read what you presented on p. 315 ff. in the Pages Choisies^[9] without finding anything in it that would contradict my long-held view of historical materialism. Although I do not own or know it, and therefore cannot read Marx's own words, but only the translation, which of course does not reproduce exactly the same thing, I see in his remarks on the relationship of people to each other and to humanity, before and after socialism, exactly what we have always done in this regard, only presented in a much broader, deeper, and richer way, with the fresh enthusiasm of the first explorer in this newly discovered field: What is written there about the exploitation of man by man, unconsciously in the form of commodities, we ourselves have repeatedly presented in lectures, courses, and perhaps also in explanatory articles, naturally in a much more sober manner. What a dry impression of Historical Materialism they must have received that they think this is a different Marx from the one we know from his published works. The "early writings" have the charm of showing us the searching and singing Marx, who roams the entire field of human history with his spirit, now opening all doors with his golden key, or rather, illuminating everything with his light and seeing the world in all its richness.

You seem to want to hold Engels^[10] responsible for a more flattened later conception of Marxism. Undoubtedly, Engels was a much less brilliant philosophical mind; he lacked some of the breadth and depth that we find in Marx. But in the principle of historical materialism, he stands entirely on Marx's position (what Marx wrote in his younger days about the behavior of man and mankind can be found later in Anti-Dühring^[11] in simple, colder language: this concludes the prehistory of mankind; the leap from necessity to freedom). I find the "Dialectics of Nature"^[12] similar to yours: brilliant passages that demonstrate his thorough knowledge, but also many untenable claims where he attempts to make scientific predictions (it always fails when one makes scientific predictions for philosophical reasons; thus Descartes^[13], Hegel^[14], August Comte^[15]) and in his last statements (in the published letters) there are passages that exude a certain German nationalism^[16]. Incidentally, Hegel's "dialectical" methods are of very little help to us in countering modern natural philosophy (Naturphilosophie)^[17]; this was already the case around 1890, and has been even more so since 1900; a completely different kind of knowledge is needed here. Theoretical discussions; what the Russians^[18] are doing with their so-called Marxism is pitiful drivel.

I received your essay on the Marx estate and Rjasanow^[19][20]; thank you very much. I don't see the situation as entirely pessimistic. It is unlikely that Moscow will destroy the assembled archive out of some kind of hatred for Marx. Firstly, the entire education system there is based on lip service to Marxism; moreover, the early writings in particular, in which Marx still appears as a radical bourgeois oppositionist, are especially valuable for Leninism. They will likely be content to simply discontinue publication. It is quite possible that the archive will be found almost intact, just as the Judaica and socialist archive documents stolen from Amsterdam were found almost untouched in Berlin after 1945, despite the active hatred of the National Socialists for both socialism and Judaism.

You ask for a list of my publications. It would take me quite a bit of research to compile a reasonably complete list. There is not much there that would impress a publisher; I have never published any proper books on socialism before the recent Worker's Councils^[21], which appeared in Dutch in 1946 and in English in 1950, so even my philosophical writings are limited to a few magazine articles. Most of them are articles on historical materialism and often bear this title. It is probably not necessary to mention them afterwards, but I will see what I can find. As soon as it seems necessary — that is, if a French edition of the Lenin critique^[22] really does appear — I can take care of that. I can also add some dates as biographical data.