Antonie Pannekoek, born on this day in 1873, was a Dutch astronomer, philosopher, Marxist theorist, and socialist revolutionary.

A respected Marxist theorist, Pannekoek was one of the founders of council communism and a main figure in the radical left in the Netherlands and Germany, active in the Communist Party of the Netherlands, the Communist Workers' Party of the Netherlands and the Communist Workers' Party of Germany.

Pannekoek is perhaps best known for his writing on workers' councils. He regarded these as a new form of organization capable of overcoming the limitations of the old institutions of the labor movement, the trade unions and social democratic parties.

He was a sharp critic of anarchism, social democracy, and Leninism. During the early years of the Russian revolution, Pannekoek gave critical support to the Bolsheviks.

Unlike some other progressive thinkers of his time, Pannekoek was also highly critical of social darwinism, derisively calling it "bourgeois darwinism".

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  • DeathToBritain [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    reviving Adam Smith to explain modern capitalism to him

    "so, you make the magic box do maths, which gives you fractions of special coins- no, you can't use the special coins to pay your rent or buy food. ok, so you get the special coins and then you use those to buy a receipt for a picture of a cartoon ape. and yeah, you just buy and sell those apes and that's the bulk of human productivity in 2021"

    at this point he then shoots himself in the head

    • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I get that NFTs are toys for rich people but if you're going to dump a million dollars into an electronic speculation asset, just buy land and trick out an avatar in second life or something. At least you can interact with that and have "fun". The best you can do with your cartoon ape is look at it and probably feel depressed because it's ugly and cost you a lot of money.

      • DeathToBritain [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        at LEAST with bougie art trading IRL, you actually get a fucking picture to put on a wall. with NFTs you get your name on a page separate to the image nobody looks at. honestly, I think that part of the appeal to cryptobros is that bored apes and the lions and w/e look like shit, I think they think it's some profound declaration about art

      • DeathToBritain [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        in all fairness, his theory on capitalism is actually really good. he came up with the labour theory of value, which Marx based a lot of his work off of, and wrote about a lot of issues with our modern capitalism and was like "boy howdy, I sure hope there's regulatory bodies or people to stop these bad things going out of control". I genuinely think had Adam Smith seem modern capitalism, and not this idealism for what the early capitalism he lived with could become, he would have been anti capitalist

        • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          My impression is that he made a good faith effort to try to understand and explain economics because nobody had any real understanding of what the fuck they were doing. It was only later once people realized that an understanding of economics could be used to radicalize the people who were getting screwed over that economics turned into a field dedicated to propaganda and obscuring the truth. Classical economists weren't generally radical and for sure their perspective was influenced by their position in society, but they weren't that concerned about whether the stuff they were saying could be used to make socialist arguments because socialism didn't really exist yet. Some of the stuff Smith said became taboo once class conflicts heated up and after Marx wrote his stuff.

          Not saying he's good but a lot of people (both left and right) seem to think he's more or less the same as Ayn Rand, which isn't really true.