Wow, I did not expect to see Anton Pannekoek appear on Hacker News frontpage. I had read a booklet from him when I was younger that was, we may say, an epistemological piece of criticism of Lenin and his followers, attempting to demonstrate how they had in the end a very "bourgeois" state of mind/epistemology and I must say rather interesting for its time. He also spent time attacking Mach, a now almost unknown physicist/philosopher that was very famous at the time. I had read an interesting article on HN about him (can't seem to find it right now).
What you should know is that Anton Pannekoek is an heir of the German/Dutch anti-authoritarian Lef, people who were into workers self-organization/councils and not much into Third International "Communism".
He is my hero. Lenin critiqued his approach to Marxism as "infantile leftism" but I still think council communism is the best form of socialism, it allows workers to express themselves politically and contribute to decision making.
Fun fact - Mach is the Mach 3 in razor blades, among other places (obscure things like units of measurement).
what are you reading now if you read Pannekoek when you were younger, I wonder?
Robert Brenner and Robert Sapolsky right now. Still interested about systems, especially in how capitalism works (or does not work depending on where you stand) and how it came about. But also a little bit more interested in how human work (as biological systems). Thanks for asking.
Have you read the Dialectical Biologist by Levins and Lewontin? I’ve been thinking of picking it up (no real biology knowledge personally).
the "doesn't" camp, of course. Brenner in the context of the larger debates or on his own? Have you read Jairus Banaji?
What's particularly interesting in Sapolsky's work for you?
Ah, this isn't the half A-press guy.
Yeah, if the article was about pannenkoek2012, it would first have to talk about Parallel Universes.
Fun fact: The surname Pannekoek (pancake) is correctly spelled without the n you find in the nickname pannenkoek2012 which is also correctly spelled. The Dutch rules of spelling changed: if a word is the concatenation of two words of which the first one can be put in plural form by appending ‘en’ the formerly correct spelling of just an ‘e’ became wrong and needed to be spelled with the extra ‘n’, e.g. ‘sterrestof’ -> ‘sterrenstof’ (stardust). This rule holds except when there is only one instance of the first word: Koninginnedag (Queens Day) or zonnesteek (heat stroke, literally sun sting).
I'm glad that you find that a fun fact. A little esoteric for me, but for those that like it, go nuts. /non-s