The following text is a revised and expanded version of the author’s keynote of the same title delivered on 20 April 2024 as part of the international series of events Leninist days / Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 to May 2024), organized in commemoration of the centenary of the death of Vladimir I. Lenin.

 

Lenin was not a philosopher and never aimed to be one. Even when he refers to dialectics. It is not about ontology, nor is it a ‘theory of knowledge’. It is more a about a new form of militant political intellectuality, a new way to think through the complex, uneven and contradictory character of any process that is traversed by contradictory and antagonistic dynamics, starting with social production and reproduction. So, we can say that in the end, although his way into Marxism was not through philosophy, his interventions on philosophical questions were to play a very important role in subsequent Marxist philosophical debates.

Revisiting Lenin’s philosophical contributions in light of his strategic considerations

 

 

Lenin was not a philosopher and never aimed to be one. Moreover, he was not very fond of philosophy (and philosophers), or at least of a certain kind of philosophizing and did not like the ‘diabolically pretentious abstruse form’[1] of a great number of philosophical texts. However, although his way into Marxism was not through philosophy, his interventions on philosophical questions were to play a very important role in subsequent Marxist philosophical debates.

Already in his earlier texts, Lenin insisted on contrasting a certain metaphysical and subjectivist philosophizing discourse to materialist science. This is obvious in the way he draws lines of demarcation early on in What are the “Friends of the People” and How They Fight the Social-Democrats:

In the same way, of course, neither is Capital the appropriate work for a metaphysician-sociologist who does not realise the sterility of a priori arguments about the nature of society and does not understand that such methods, instead of contributing to a study and elucidation of the problem, only serve to insinuate into the concept “society” either the bourgeois ideas of the British shopkeeper or the petty bourgeois socialist ideals of the Russian democrat—and nothing more. That is why all these theories of the philosophy of history arose and burst like soap-bubbles, being at best a symptom of the social ideas and relations of their time, and not advancing one hair’s breadth man’s understanding of even a few, but real, social relations (and not such as “harmonise with human nature”). The gigantic step forward taken by Marx in this respect consisted precisely in that he discarded all these arguments about society and progress in general and produced a scientific analysis of one society and of one progress—capitalist.[2]

Lenin’s early insistence of a break between science and metaphysical philosophy also includes the rejection of a certain Hegelianism, with Lenin attributing to his opponents ‘the stock method of accusing Marxism of Hegelian dialectics, an accusation that might be thought to have been worn threadbare enough by Marx’s bourgeois critics.’[3] In contrast, for young Lenin,

What Marx and Engels called the dialectical method—as against the metaphysical—is nothing else than the scientific method in sociology, which consists in regarding society as a living organism in a state of constant development (and not as something mechanically concatenated and therefore permitting all sorts of arbitrary combinations of separate social elements), an organism the study of which requires an objective analysis of the production relations that constitute the given social formation and an investigation of its laws of functioning and development.[4]

Indeed, Lenin would insist in this text on the opposition between Marx’s and Hegel’s conceptions of the ‘dialectical method:’

Such is the description of the dialectical method which Marx fished out of the mass of magazine and newspaper comments on Capital, and which he translated into German, because this description of the method, as he himself says, is absolutely correct. The question arises, is so much as even a single word said here about triads, trichotomies, the incontrovertibility of the dialectical process and suchlike nonsense, which Mr. Mikhailovsky battles against so valiantly? Following this description, Marx says plainly that his method is the “direct opposite” of Hegel’s method. According to Hegel the development of the idea, in conformity with the dialectical laws of the triad, determines the development of the real world. And it is only in that case, of course, that one can speak of the importance of the triads, of the incontrovertibility of the dialectical process. “With me, on the contrary,” says Marx, “the ideal is nothing but the reflection of the material.” And the whole matter thus amounts to an “affirmative recognition of the existing state of things and of its inevitable development”; no other role is left for the triads than that of the lid and the shell (“I coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to Hegel,” Marx says in this same Afterword), in which only philistines could be interested.[5]

This kind of emphasis on a ‘scientific approach’ as opposed to a ‘subjectivist philosophy’ is also very obvious in The Development of Capitalism in Russia,[6] itself a tour de force of an attempt to theorize how capitalism can be the dominant mode of production in a basically agrarian society.

Lenin’s theoretical strategy at that stage is not simply to defend a ‘scientific method’ against speculative metaphysics. It is also a defense of a scientific approach, which for him was the way to confront ideological conceptions. Such an approach could induce a kind of ‘epistemological break’ not only with those positions that are unfounded or not able to follow actual historical societal dynamics, but also with the ideological formations that spontaneously arise within the movement.

At stake is the ability to have a version of proletarian politics that not only is it based on actual knowledge of the relation of forces but also represents the radical political and ideology autonomy of proletarian politics.

It is the quest of a certain kind of a ‘political gnoseology’ that is behind Lenin’s insistence on ‘scientific method’ in that period. This points to Lenin having a deeper apprehension of the ‘politics of theory’ and this is very evident in the quest for new non-ideological intellectuality of politics in texts such as What Is To Be Done, the kind of militant intellectuality that could turn organizations into ‘factories of strategy’ to use Toni Negri’s phrasing.[7]

I insist that at the centre of What Is To Be Done? a question of political gnoseology can be found. It relates to the possibility of a revolutionary consciousness as a form of consciousness that transcends the immediacy of the everyday condition of labour and opens up towards an understanding of the overall working of the social system in order to rethink the possibility of a political movement for revolutionary change. Lenin’s position is based not only around the acknowledgement of the influence of dominant ideology upon the spontaneous ideology of the masses, but also around the insistence that any attempt to enable the formation of a revolutionary consciousness should be intensified along with the spontaneous militancy of the masses.

[T]he fundamental error committed by the “new trend” in Russian Social-Democracy is its bowing to spontaneity and its failure to understand that the spontaneity of the masses demands a high degree of consciousness from us Social-Democrats. The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses and the more widespread the movement, the more rapid, incomparably so, the demand for greater consciousness in the theoretical, political, and organizational work of Social-Democracy.^[8]

The next big philosophical battle of Lenin is also a political one: the debate with Bogdanov.[9] Despite the fact that a certain reading of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, under the subsequent canonization of this book as part of Marxist-Leninist ‘Orthodoxy,’ might miss the stakes of the debate, it is still important to revisit this battle.

Alexander Bogdanov was at that point a stellar thinking within the Bolshevik milieu and will continue to be after the October Revolution. After all, he was one of the most creative and original philosophers of that period and in particular one that attempted to actually think of a social epistemology in relation to a social whole conceived as a complex system. Leaving aside the choices of vocabulary, Bogdanov’s position might seem very interesting. As Maria Chehonadskih recently stressed,

Bogdanov thought that the non-hierarchical and horizontal mutualism of organisms, forms and processes not only represented a scientifically correct understanding of biology, physics and materialism but also that this represented a new entry point into the understanding of politics and society. This, albeit translated into contemporary terminology, is the crux of what Empiriomonism had to say.[10]

From the embracing of Taylorism to the idea of the ‘New Human’ to the drive behind Proletcult, to how a certain exaltation of labour led to an ‘anti-peasant’ position, the traces of Bogdanov’s influence can be seen in many aspects of the early Soviet History. Moreover, Bogdanov shared with Lenin the same emphasis on questions of class consciousness, ideology, and culture, although with a different approach.[11]

We also know the political context. Bogdanov belonged to the ‘otzovist’ fraction that called for abstention from the Duma elections. Lenin was in a rather bitter struggle against then inside the Bolshevik current, an intra-party conflict that is reminiscent of other such debates later. It was a complex and heated debate because the Bolsheviks had immediately after the 1905 revolution already used such a tactic.

There is also a broader theoretical and scientific context because in the sciences of nature we are dealing with that period of crisis of a scientific paradigm and the emergence of a new one, one that would challenge almost everything that was taken for granted until now, something evident both in physics but also mathematics and logic.

Therefore, it was a period of scientific and philosophical transition outside of Marxism, especially in relation to questions of epistemology. This was exemplified in the attempts towards new post-Kantian or neo-Kantian syntheses. In certain instances, this took the form of complex philosophical-scientific systems, such as the work of Avenarius or Ernst Mach, which would later be an influence on logical positivism or the unity of science movement. This was also enhanced in the context of a specific scientific conjuncture, which to a large extent had to do with very important scientific breakthroughs that were mostly deduced rather than actually seen, marking a gap between existence according to scientific concepts and calculations and existence of physical entities in a tangible form.

What is important is that this particular current was presented as the scientific philosophy par excellence, or, more precisely, as the philosophy that can really represent and support the new developments in physics. This version of empiricism represented by positions such as those of Mach seemed in particular to make legitimate the claim that instead for searching for “matter” or “things in themselves”, it would be better to remain focused on “observables” as a way out of the impasse and build theories upon them. This is a claim that more recently has been put forward by Carlo Rovelli in his account of the history of quantum mechanics of the ‘Copenhagen School.’[12]

For Lenin this was a problem. The reason is that he believed that empiriocriticism ran the risk of undermining the very notion of science as a process that produces knowledge of material processes that are considered real and independent of the thinking subjects. The reason for this has to do with his position, evident from the 1890s, that a correct political line could only be based on objective knowledge of a social formation and of the relation of forces. Losing this theoretical and analytical grounding could only lead to all forms of voluntarist and opportunistic mistakes. It is not that Lenin underestimated in principle spontaneous proletarian ideological practices, but that he treated them as infused with elements of the dominant ideology. Consequently, a scientific approach could be the element that could change the ideological balance of forces in favour of a revolutionary line.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks were facing important challenges at that particular moment, challenges that had to do with their ability to actually know, analyse and understand the conjuncture they were facing after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, hence the renewed emphasis on scientifically objective knowledge of the relation of forces. Evald Ilyenkov described them in the following manner:

And this was just when the foremost task of every thinking revolutionary Marxist had become the comprehension of all those profound – and largely still unclear, still unfinished – shifts which had occurred and were continuing to occur in the social organism of the land, in the system of contradictory relations between classes and their fractions, between fundamental social forces and the parties representing their interests, as a result of the cataclysm which tragically unfolded from 1905 to 1907. Precisely then, when the entire country was painfully trying to understand: what exactly had happened, why had the long-awaited revolution choked in a sea of blood, for what reasons had it been unable to shatter the rotten foundations of the stupid Romanov-Dubasov monarchy, why had this monarchy proved to be stronger than all the many-millioned democratic forces of a gigantic country? Indeed, before deciding what the party must do next, it was necessary to thoroughly analyse the events which had taken place and their results, to abstract all the lessons from the dramatic experience of the lost battle, to make a clear Marxist diagnosis, to take into account the complexity of the new circumstances and the arrangement of class forces, and to help the revolutionary forces overcome all those political illusions, prejudices and utopian hopes which had caused so much harm and had produced a lack of co-ordination in word and in action.[13]

Moreover, the way that Bogdanov viewed questions of class consciousness, ideology and culture was already viewed as problematic by Lenin, since the latter insisted on some form of objective scientific knowledge being the determining aspect in any attempt towards a transformation of proletarian class consciousness. Lenin viewed Bogdanov’s epistemological positions as the weak link in the latter’s broader theoretical construction and the terrain upon which he could draw lines of demarcation in a more clear and precise way. That is why Lenin prioritizes Bogdanov’s epistemology, as a target of his polemic, rather than his broader social theoretical positions.

This can explain the decision by Lenin to deal with philosophical questions despite his aversion to a certain form of philosophising. The motivation is political from the beginning and urgent, since Lenin was actually trying to control his rage over the positions he was fighting against. It also points to an apprehension of the political stakes even in very specialized philosophical debates that would seem distant from actual political challenges and considerations. Lenin did not try to impose a certain “official philosophical position”, but to suggest that a materialist position was a necessary philosophical ally to any attempt towards a revolutionary politics, because it could help the scientific analysis of the conjuncture that was necessary. Moreover, this pointed to Lenin’s insistence that any transformation of spontaneous proletarian ideology could only be based in it being infused with elements of a scientific perspective, exactly the one offered by historical materialism.

It is in this context that Lenin decides to deal with Bogdanov’s monism, especially since it was presented as a broader philosophy of life:

Philosophy expresses life’s need of monism – the striving to connect, coordinate, and harmoniously unite the heterogeneous, varied, contradiction-ridden content of experience. In our time the disharmoniousness of life is terribly strong and is increasingly growing. The differentiation of social being and social consciousness is proceeding more quickly than ever before. Different interests and desires are interwoven and entangled so peculiarly and conflict with one another so harshly that it has become almost impossible for the human individual to sort them out and to reconcile to any extent the various points of view regarding them. This situation of things is more agonising for the intermediary groups of society in which the opposing tendencies of progressing life and obsolescing life intersect – for that ‘intelligentsia’, which until now has constituted the main part of the ‘public’ for literature. Here the ‘need for monism’ becomes acute to the highest degree but without any hope for it being really satisfied. The ‘passion for philosophy’ blazes up with particular force, but, having encountered overwhelming tasks, it soon degenerates and adopts abnormal forms. Not finding any unifying point of view on the basis of life itself, people begin to seek it outside life, some directly in the hereafter and others in the ‘logical’ world of empty formal abstractions. And, of course, everyone who goes off in that direction is lost to life.[14]

However, instead of following Bogdanov into this kind of ontologizing thinking where there is not distinction between reality, knowledge of reality, nature, society, and human interaction and try to represent a more dialectical version of it, Lenin instead opted for a different approach. He insisted that the problem was the way ‘Machists’ accused materialists of dualism, whereas in reality at stake was the very possibility of actually knowing (and thus transforming) a reality existing independently of our knowledge of it.

The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable—“things-in-themselves”—matter “outside of experience” and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of “experience” and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the “unknown”, nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into “Kantianism” (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of “things-in-themselves”, i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they “double” the world and preach “dualism”, for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an “idol”, an absolute, a source of “metaphysics”, a double of religion (“holy matter”, as Bazarov says).[15]

Why is it so important to defend this kind of materialism? After all, Bogdanov’s monism as a philosophy of movement, change and interconnection seems more conductive to social change and transformation. Why is it so important to stress the independence of reality from thinking? Because in the eyes of Lenin if we limit our ability to think and now only to what we can sensually perceive, then there are dynamics, tensions, and contradictions that we remain unaware. For Lenin self-limiting the scope of what we can know, or even worse, being stuck in varieties of solipsism, ultimately means that we also limit the scope of the change that we can bring by our participation in class struggles.

In contrast, the insistence that there is a reality independent of our thinking, also entails not only that we need to struggle to know and analyse it – and thus avoid tactical and strategic mistakes – but also that there are potentialities (as tendential material dynamics) that we are not yet aware, but which we can approach intellectually by means of research and experimentation.

It is in this sense that Lenin is very much aware of the political stakes of philosophical debates, linking the debates on political revisionism (the ‘famous revisionism’ debate of the turn of the century) to forms of philosophical revisionism, in particular Neo-Kantian currents.

In the sphere of philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of bourgeois professorial “science”. The professors went “back to Kant”—and revisionism dragged along after the neo-Kantians. The professors repeated the platitudes that priests have uttered a thousand times against philosophical materialism—and the revisionists, smiling indulgently, mumbled (word for word alter the latest Handbuch) that materialism had been “refuted” long ago. The professors treated Hegel as a “dead dog”, and while themselves preaching idealism, only an idealism a thousand times more petty and banal than Hegel’s, contemptuously shrugged their shoulders at dialectics—and the revisionists floundered after them into the swamp of philosophical vulgarisation of science, replacing “artful” (and revolutionary) dialectics by “simple” (and tranquil) “evolution”. The professors earned their official salaries by adjusting both their idealist and their “critical” systems to the dominant medieval “philosophy” (i.e., to theology)—and the revisionists drew close to them, trying to make religion a “private affair”, not in relation to the modern state, but in relation to the party of the advanced class.[16]

In terms of the history of philosophy, Lenin is right. The currents he is dealing with are neo-Kantian. They combine the emphasis on sensations being the only source of knowledge, with an emphasis on a critical ‘transcendental’ moment elaboration of these sensations and putting them in context and frame. Now, as all students of philosophy know, this can be treated as an attempt to have the ‘best of both worlds.’ Knowledge is based on sensation but also on mental and conceptual / theoretical elaboration. We can produce knowledge, but we are protected against the chimera of looking for the “thing in itself”. But for Lenin this is empiricism and in the last instance empiricism is a form of agnosticism, namely a philosophical strategy that by denying the independent character of reality, in the end denies the possibility of knowledge. Knowledge was for Lenin the indispensable basis of any successful political strategy. Consequently, the empiriocriticist strategy for Lenin is an idealist strategy, despite empiriocriticists presenting themselves as being scientific and anti-idealist. For Lenin the political stake was about materialism:

Anyone in the least acquainted with philosophical literature must know that scarcely a single contemporary professor of philosophy (or of theology) can be found who is not directly or indirectly engaged in refuting materialism.[17]

Lenin’s polemic is very interesting as strategy. He does not deal so much with Kant, but goes back from Kant to Berkley and Hume. It is an attempt to stress the empiricist dominant in the Kantian ‘synthesis’. It looks like a very “rough” tactic, one that does not follow philosophical ‘protocol’, but it is not ungrounded. It is on this basis that Lenin presented his definition of materialism:

1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our sensations, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.

2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there cannot be any such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume)—all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, fantasy.

3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other sphere of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.[18]

On the face of it seems like just a simple reiteration of the two classical aspects of materialism, the ‘independence thesis’ and the ‘knowability thesis’. However, it is interesting how this is not presented as a ‘philosophical system’, but rather as a philosophical line.[19]

What is also very important here is that for Lenin materialism was not naturalism, it is not some ontology, natural, historical or natural-historical. Materialism is about objectivity of reality and the possibility to have knowledge of this objective reality. Materialism does not offer some kind of ontological grounding or guarantee but just the possibility of an objective analysis and thus of a correct political line.

Moreover, it is obvious that by offering a ‘philosophical line’ instead of a ‘philosophical system’ Lenin also proposed a new way of philosophizing, a new practice of philosophy. We could follow here Althusser and insist that we are dealing here exactly with philosophical positions rather than ‘proofs.’[20] positions without any actual knowledge content: Objectivity of the real in the sense of independence from the knowing subject and independence of the very fact that it is known (or not). Knowability of the world as a negation of any a-priori position on its non-knowability. Relativity of knowledge in the sense that it is a never-ending process of rupture with ignorance.

These are not positions that are suggested as already proved and confirmed but as positions that emerge within actual practice, either in production or in scientific experimentation. They presuppose the possibility of scientific knowledge without offering any proof of guarantees. In this sense, it is not about proving them wrong, but about de-constructing idealist positions.

Lenin was very critical of the position of Bogdanov that negated the possibility of objective truth because of the insistence that knowledge comes out of ‘social experience,’[21] or that we are dealing with verbal constructions, or of convention.

At the same time, Lenin insists that the distinction between absolute and relative truth and this line of demarcation defines the terrain of the actual historicity of knowledge, which for Lenin is also an actual practical refutation of idealist schemes.

Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge develops from ignorance, we shall find millions of examples of it just as simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of observations not only in the history of science and technology but in the everyday life of each and every one of us that illustrate the transformation of “things-in-themselves” into “things-for-us”, the appearance of “phenomena” when our sense-organs experience an impact from external objects, the disappearance of “phenomena” when some obstacle prevents the action upon our sense-organs of an object which we know to exist.[22]

Lenin is well aware that all these have to do with the ‘Crisis in physics’,[23] but also how this was used to justify the position that ‘matter has disappeared’.[24] What Lenin attempts to do is to draw a line of demarcation between an epistemological distinction between materialism and idealism, and scientific conceptualizations: ‘[m]aterialism and idealism differ in their answers to the question of the source of our knowledge and of the relation of knowledge (and of the “mental” in general) to the physical world; while the question of the structure of matter, of atoms and electrons, is a question that concerns only this “physical world”.’[25] In Lenin’s conception there is a difference between scientific concepts and philosophical ‘concepts’ or better positions. ‘Matter’ in philosophy and ‘matter’ in the sciences do not belong to the same conceptual register.

But dialectical materialism insists on the approximate, relative character of every scientific theory of the structure of matter and its properties; it insists on the absence of absolute boundaries in nature, on the transformation of moving matter from one state into another, that from our point of view is apparently irreconcilable with it, and so forth. […] The opinions expressed by Bogdanov in 1899 regarding “the immutable essence of things”, the opinions of Valentinov and Yushkevich regarding “substance”, and so forth— are similar fruits of ignorance of dialectics. From Engels’ point of view, the only immutability is the reflection by the human mind (when there is a human mind) of an external world existing and developing independently of the mind. No other “immutability”, no other “essence”, no other “absolute substance”, in the sense in which these concepts were depicted by the empty professorial philosophy, exist for Marx and Engels. The “essence” of things, or “substance”, is also relative; it expresses only the degree of profundity of man’s knowledge of objects; and while yesterday the profundity of this knowledge did not go beyond the atom, and today does not go beyond the electron and ether, dialectical materialism insists on the temporary, relative, approximate character of all these milestones in the knowledge of nature gained by the progressing science of man. The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite, but it infinitely exists. And it is this sole categorical, this sole unconditional recognition of nature’s existence outside the mind and perception of man that distinguishes dialectical materialism from relativist agnosticism and idealism.[26]

For Lenin the struggle between materialism and idealism, both defined as philosophical positions, in the sense discussed above, is ‘perennial’. And it is on the basis of this that he makes the ‘infamous’ references to partisanship in philosophy:

Marx and Engels were partisans in philosophy from start to finish, they were able to detect the deviations from materialism and concessions to idealism and fideism in every one of the “recent” trends.[27]

In a similar manner, dominant forms of scientific production are riddled with idealism. Hence, we arrive at Lenin’s warning against ‘professors:’

Not a single one of these professors, who are capable of making very valuable contributions in the special fields of chemistry, history or physics, can be trusted one iota when it comes to philosophy. Why? For the same reason that not a single professor of political economy, who may be capable of very valuable contributions in the field of factual and specialised investigations, can be trusted one iota when it comes to the general theory of political economy. For in modern society the latter is as much a partisan science as is epistemology. Taken as a whole, the professors of economics are nothing but learned salesmen of the capitalist class, while the professors of philosophy are learned salesmen of the theologians.[28]

In contrast, for Lenin we can see how forms of spontaneous materialism emerge in scientific practice. This is why he turns to Ernst Haeckel and the scandal his work caused – despite the fact that Haeckel was not a materialist – as an example of this ‘spontaneous materialism:’

This scientist, who undoubtedly expressed the very firmly implanted, although ill-defined opinions, sentiments and tendencies of the overwhelming majority of the scientists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, instantly, easily and simply revealed what professorial philosophy tried to conceal from the public and from itself, namely, the fact that there is a foundation, growing ever wider and firmer, which shatters all the efforts and strivings of the thousand and one little schools of philosophical idealism, positivism, realism, empirio-criticism and other confusionism. This foundation is natural-scientific materialism. The conviction of the “naïve realists” (in other words, of all humanity) that our sensations are images of an objectively real external world is the conviction of the mass of scientists, one that is steadily growing and gaining in strength.[29]

 

This point is again stressed in the conclusion:

[B]ehind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society. Recent philosophy is as partisan as was philosophy two thousand years ago. The contending parties are essentially—although this is concealed by a pseudo-erudite quackery of new terms or by a weak-minded non-partisanship—materialism and idealism. The latter is merely a subtle, refined form of fideism, which stands fully armed, commands vast organisations and steadily continues to exercise influence on the masses, turning the slightest vacillation in philosophical thought to its own advantage. The objective, class role of empirio-criticism consists entirely in rendering faithful service to the fideists in their struggle against materialism in general and historical materialism in particular.[30]

Is this some form of class reductionism? Is it an excessive ‘politicisation’ of philosophy? I strongly disagree. What is Lenin stressing here is that there is an association between materialism and emancipation and idealism and ideology on the other hand.

Wal Suchting has offered a very interesting support of this position:

Very broadly speaking we can distinguish three sorts of such consequences. (1) Idealisms invariably involve complications and mysteries which materialism does not. (2) In particular, every consistent idealism is ultimately either a theism of some sort or a solipsism. (3) These may be regarded as special cases of another consequence, namely, that every idealism generates closures in theory, puts ‘obstacles’ of certain sorts on the path of the development of knowledge[31]

The most important aspect of this reading is exactly a conception of philosophy as a terrain of struggle, a kampfplatz in the Kantian sense. This is something that Althusser would later develop as part of his conceptualization of the notion of the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists.[32]

This is a very complex argument but also one that can point to the actual pertinence of Lenin’s position. In Althusser’s argument, the particular way that scientists experience the contradictions, impasses, open questions that arise at the intersection between science, ideology, and politics, take the form of spontaneous philosophies, materialist and idealist. In such a perspective, it is scientific practice and the confrontation with the object of science that reproduces materialist tendencies and in contrast the constant effectivity of ideology that reproduces idealism. This is how Althusser describes such an emergence of spontaneous ideological elements in his commentary on Materialism and Empiriocriticism:

These are phenomena which we are beginning to understand. When certain sciences undergo important revolutions (at that time Mathematics and Physics), there will always be professional philosophers to proclaim that the ‘crisis in science’, or mathematics, or physics, has begun. These philosophers’ proclamations are, if I may say so, normal: for a whole category of philosophers spend their time predicting, i.e. awaiting, the last gasp of the sciences, in order to administer them the last rites of philosophy, ad majorem gloriam Dei.

But what is more curious is the fact that, at the same time, there will be scientists who talk of a crisis in the sciences, and suddenly discover a surprising philosophical vocation — which they see themselves as suddenly converted into philosophers, although in fact they were always ‘practising’ philosophy — in which they believe they are uttering revelations, although in fact they are merely repeating platitudes and anachronisms which come from what philosophy is obliged to regard as its history.[33]

Pierre Macherey encapsulated this tension in the following manner in his reading of this Leninist thematic:

Idealism is the negation of materialism. It is nothing other than that: the refusal, sometimes explicit, more often than not of the fundamental materialist fact, which itself exists outside thought outside thought, outside philosophy. But materialism is not the negation of idealism: it is the negation of a negation, a resolution of the primary contradiction, a qualitative leap that would lead to what? To what? To a return to the fundamental materialist fact, to its initial position. On the contrary, it must be said that materialism cannot effectively (i.e. concretely, practically) defeat idealism on the field of philosophical struggle only by developing, that is, by transforming itself into consequential materialism, dialectical materialism which suppresses the idealist tendency even in its own point of view. To present this transformation as negation of the negation, the reversal of a reversal, is to make it a mechanical operation.^[34]

All this leads, according to Lenin, to a very militant conception of materialism, a materialism that ‘goes further:’

Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion.[35]

There are also some other points that we need to stress in relation to this text by Lenin.

Lenin has been accused in many instances of offering a very ‘mechanistic’ or even sensualist theory of knowledge in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. In particular, he has received criticism in relation to his reference to knowledge as a theory of reflection’. However, here it is important to revisit Dominique Lecourt’s book on Lenin, Une crise et son enjeu, from 1973,[36] where he stresses that it is a reflection without a mirror. For Lecourt we are dealing here with a double position about the primacy of being over thinking and about the objectivity of knowledge.

For Lecourt Lenin points beyond a simple theory of knowledge, either empiricist –sensualist, where the object imprints its traits on the receiving mind, or rationalist where the object passively receives the imprints of the knowing subject.

In contrast, if the thesis of the objectivity is posed, commanded by the thesis of the primacy of being on thought, the question of objectivity is not posed in the same terms: such a theory of knowledge can no longer be developed since the question is no longer to find a foundation of objectivity, but to pose the problem of the mechanisms for the acquisition of objective knowledges. Therefore, we can say that the thesis of reflection breaks with the theoretical space of the philosophies of reflection.[37]

Both Althusser and Lecourt point to a new practice of philosophy emerging in Lenin’s writings:

• • Philosophy and science are distinguished, exemplified in the distinction between the scientific and the philosophical concept of notion.
  • Reflection’ of reality into thought is presented here in a way that points, as Lecourt stressed, to a ‘reflection without a mirror’.
  • Materialist philosophy is not proposed as being a philosophical system. It is more like an intervention to defend, ‘in a materialist way’, the scientificity of the sciences.
  • Materialism and idealism are presented as the contradiction running through all forms of scientific practice.
  • Materialism is not presented as a typical systematic philosophical position. In contrast whereas traditional philosophy tends to be idealist, materialism is more like a tendency arising out of scientific practice.
  • Materialism is not a system, is more like a line (in the political sense of the world) and there can be no materialist system, only at the cost of ending up idealist.

Althusser described this interventionist conception of philosophy in the following manner:

Lenin thus defines the ultimate essence of philosophical practice as an intervention in the theoretical domain. This intervention takes a double form: it is theoretical in its formulation of definite categories; and practical in the function of these categories. This function consists of ‘drawing a dividing-line’ inside the theoretical domain between ideas declared to be true and ideas declared to be false, between the scientific and the ideological. The effects of this line are of two kinds: positive in that they assist a certain practice — scientific practice — and negative in that they defend this practice against the dangers of certain ideological notions: here those of idealism and dogmatism. Such, at least, are the effects produced by Lenin’s philosophical intervention.[38]

This brings us to the Lenin’s reading of Hegel in the Philosophical Notebooks. And it is crucial to see whether this represents a different conception of philosophical practice. Especially since it has been suggested that in the Philosophical Notebooks we find a ‘different’ Lenin.

 

In a certain sense this is true. The Philosophical Notebooks are indeed the result of a period of Lenin’s theoretical and political work that can only be described as a turning point. It is a period of defeat, after the ‘betrayal of the Second International’ and the new division in the international working-class movement, but also of profound attempt to think new strategies. Moreover, it was a certain moment of solitude of Lenin. This is how Stathis Kouvelakis described this solitude of Lenin:

It was precisely in this context of generalized apocalypse that, attending to the most urgent tasks first (and as is generally the case, this always means for a while recourse to the old remedies, the real innovation being still to come), Lenin withdrew into the calm of a Berne library to plunge into his reading of Hegel. This moment was indeed in a very concrete sense that moment in which Lenin’s political isolation, indeed the isolation of the minority of the workers’ movement that set itself against the imperialist war, was at its greatest. This taking distance, this solitude, which is often to be found at moments of sudden change, not only among thinkers but also among men of action, is an absolutely necessary moment of the process of events itself: the caesura of the initial event (the war) is silently echoed in their taking distance, a silence from which the new initiative, the opening to the new, will resurge. It is only in the light of this novum that the process can retroactively appear as necessary, the self-criticism of thought interacting with the self-criticism of things themselves, which it recognizes as its own, without anything managing to reduce the share of contingency in this encounter, its complete lack of any advance guarantee.[39]

What is also important, as Stathis Kouvelakis again has stressed, is that whereas in 1908 Lenin made a very public intervention in the terrain of philosophy, which also included treating Plekhanov like an authority, here we are dealing with private reading notes on Hegel, that figure that so far Lenin had refused to consider as a reference for materialist philosophy.

This is how Lenin describes his reading:

Nonsense about the absolute (68-69). I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically: Hegel is materialism which has been stood on its head (according to Engels)—that is to say, I cast aside for the most part God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc.[40]

What does Lenin think that he is finding in Hegel? A certain conception of the dialectic. Lenin seeks in Hegel this stressing of the importance and materiality of contradictions but also a way to theorize motion and development as parts of reality.

D i a l e c t i c s is the teaching which shows how O p p o s i t e s can be and how they happen to be (how they become) i d e n t i c a l,—under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another,—why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another. En lisant Hegel…[41]

At the same time, it is an attempt to find materialism in Hegel, a certain conceptualization of the objectivity of the real.

Movement and “self-m o v e m e n t” (this NB! arbitrary (independent), spontaneous, internally-necessary movement), “change,’’ “movement and vitality,” “the principle of all self-movement,” “impulse” (Trieb) to “movement” and to “activity”— the opposite to “d e a d B e i n g”—who would believe that this is the core of “Hegelianism,” of abstract and abstrusen (ponderous, absurd?) Hegelianism?? This core had to be discovered, understood, hinüberretten,* laid bare, refined, which is precisely what Marx and Engels did.[42]

Moreover, here there is an attempt to see dialectics like a theory of interconnection but which also needs to be combined with science and technique.

Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx must consist in the d i a l e c t i c a l elaboration of the history of human thought, science and technique.[43]

At the same time, Lenin thinks that he can find in Hegel a certain negation of agnosticism and subjectivism and a strong critique of Kant, a preoccupation also reminiscent of Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

Essentially, Hegel is completely right as opposed to Kant. Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract— provided it is correct (NB) (and Kant, like all philosophers, speaks of correct thought)—does not get away f r o m the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and c o m p l e t e l y. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice,—such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality. Kant disparages knowledge in order to make way for faith: Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature, consigning God, and the philosophical rabble that defends God, to the rubbish heap.[44]

Does this mean that Lenin is simply taking Hegel for granted? Lenin is thinking on the basis of a materialist position that stresses the ‘self-moving’ and independent character of reality as a possibility for them to be known.

The t o t a l i t y o f all sides of the phenomenon, of reality and their (reciprocal) r e l a t i o n s—that is what truth is composed of. The relations (= transitions = contradictions) of notions = the main content of logic, by which these concepts (and their relations, transitions, contradictions) are shown as reflections of the objective world. The dialectics of t h i n g s produces the dialectics of ideas, and not vice versa.

#This aphorism should be expressed more popularly, without the word dialectics: approximately as follows: In the alternation, reciprocal dependence of a l l notions, in the identity of their opposites, in the transitions of one notion into another, in the eternal change, movement of notions, Hegel brilliantly divined PRECISELY THIS RELATION OF THINGS, OF NATURE.[45]

In this sense, Hegel is more like a philosophical ally or a philosophical interlocutor in Lenin’s quest for a materialist reading of actual historical dynamics, rather than a simple philosophical reference.

Such passages have been read in various ways in the history of Marxism. This points to a tension running through the very notion of the dialectic. On the one hand, there is a conception of the dialectic as a universalizing logical and historical principle (and a dialectic of nature), on the other hand dialectic as the emphasis on the complex and contradictory character of social reality. It is here that the emphasis on the dialectical character of reality meets Lenin’s previous emphasis on anti-empiricism. Any conception of social reality as a set of appearances is by definition antagonistic to any conception of it being complex, multilayered, and contradictory.

This treating of Hegel as an anti-empiricism ally is very evident in the way Lenin stresses Hegel’s critique of Hume and Kant:

Apparently, Hegel perceives scepticism here in the fact that Hume and Kant do not see the appearing Thing-in-itself in “phenomena,” divorce phenomena from objective truth, doubt the objectivity of cognition, remove, weglassen, alles Empirische from the Ding-an-sich….[46]

Moreover, it is obvious that Hegel is not so much interested in a historical-natural ontology but rather on treating history and the conjuncture as a unity of opposites.

In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics, but it requires explanations and development.[47]

And although this passage follows the well know presentation of the ‘elements of dialectics’ which includes ‘transition of quantity into quality and vice versa’ and a rather ambiguous reference to ‘the apparent return to the old (negation of the negation)’ [48] but I think that the emphasis is on the unity of opposites.

In my reading of the ‘elements of the dialectic’ in the Philosophical Notebooks, both the form-content dialectic and the transformation of quantity into quality are not referenced as aspects of a Hegelian-Marxist ontology, but rather as passages from definition to definition but within the basic conceptualization of the unity of opposites.

What kind of unity of opposites? I would suggest the one Louis Althusser described in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ exactly as an example of the overdetermined, complex, and uneven character of any singular conjuncture.

Already, even in defeat, the 1905 Revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia. This weakness was the product of this special feature: the accumulation and exacerbation of all the historical contradictions. then possible in a single State. Contradictions of a regime of feudal exploitation at the dawn of the twentieth century, attempting ever more ferociously amidst mounting threats to rule, with the aid of a deceitful priesthood, over an enormous mass of ‘ignorant’ peasants (circumstances which dictated a singular association of the peasants’ revolt with the workers’ revolution). Contradictions of large-scale capitalist and imperialist exploitation in the major cities and their suburbs, in the mining regions, oil-fields, etc. Contradictions of colonial exploitation and wars imposed on whole peoples. A gigantic contradiction between the stage of development of capitalist methods of production (particularly in respect to proletarian concentration: the largest factory in the world at the time was the Putilov works at Petrograd, with 40,000 workers and auxiliaries) and the medieval state of the countryside. The exacerbation of class struggles throughout the country, not only between exploiter and exploited, but even within the ruling classes themselves (the great feudal proprietors supporting autocratic, militarist police Tsarism; the lesser nobility involved in constant conspiracy; the big bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie opposed to the Tsar; the petty bourgeoisie oscillating between conformism and anarchistic ‘leftism’).[49]

And this can help us understand why Lenin is stressing so much the importance of the unity of opposites. The conjuncture within which Lenin embarks on his reading of Hegel is one of a profound crisis in the international working-class movement. What has been described as the ‘betrayal of the Second International’, namely the capitulation to the dominant nationalist-imperialist bourgeois strategy of some of the bigger socialist movements of that period, the inability to mount a resistance to imperialist war, the realization that the gradual increase of the political and electoral strength of parties such as the SPD did not necessarily lead to an increase of the possibility of revolutionary rupture, only enhance a sense of strategic crisis. Also in crisis was a certain conceptualization of socialist politics that considered a certain trajectory of capitalist development as a condition for socialism, at least by means of a ‘democratic revolution’ that would enable the proletariat to take a leading role. All these were connected also to certain conception of science, one that was supposed to present a certain linear economistic teleology as objective truth. Against this crisis of a whole way of both doing and thinking about politics Lenin attempts to delineate not just a different position but an antagonistic political intellectuality.

It is his way of dealing with the ‘betrayal of the Second International’, by means of attempting a new form of political intellectuality.

This means breaking with a certain evolutionist conception that was dominant in the entire tradition of the Second International. This evolutionist conception was also based on certain, equally evolutionist, conception of the strength of the working-class movement. Both conceptions were shattered when the European Social Democratic Parties and above all SPD opted to align themselves with the imperialist bourgeoisies. The particular form of thinking the conjuncture that was dominant at that moment in the working-class moment did not allow any way to think the possibility of rupture.

It is against this sense of defeat and of an inescapable helplessness that Lenin is struggling, in his attempt to rethink the possibility of revolution in times of defeat.

And this new form of thinking that he elaborates by means of this experimental reading of Hegel is not just another philosophy and it is not a philosophical system. Rather, it’s a new way of political thinking, a new form of political intellectuality, an attempt – to paraphrase Althusser reading Machiavelli – to read under the conjuncture[50] and inside the conjuncture. Instead of a thinking of “strength assessment” or of “correct line vs betrayal”, it is a thinking of indeed the unity of opposites.

The potential for rupture and thus of initiating sequences of social transformation comes not from the linear development of dynamics, nor from the accumulation of organizations, political and ideological resources, but from that particular condensation of contradictions that gives the limit possibility of a subaltern dynamic to become tendentially dominant, provided that there is the ability to think the necessary political intervention that could grasp this moment. It is a conception of revolutionary politics that contrary to all forms of evolutionary thinking points to conception of revolutions appearing always within singular conjunctures.

In this sense, the Philosophical Notebooks are the theoretical terrain upon which Lenin thinks through this particular form of political intellectuality that could enable an entire new way of strategizing, a new political and strategic paradigm, exactly the kind of “surprise” that Lenin’s position represented in April 1917. In this sense the Philosophical Notebooks are not a philosophical diversion but an integral part of Lenin’s strategic-theoretical laboratory.

Of course, what interests us here is less the study of the philosophical content of the Notebooks ‘per se’, than that of their political consequences. It is not difficult to find the red thread that leads from the methodological premises of the Notebooks to Lenin’s theses of 1917: from the category of totality to the theory of the weakest link in the imperialist chain; from the conversion of opposites into each other to the transformation of the democratic revolution into the socialist revolution; from the dialectical conception of causality to the refusal to define the character of the Russian Revolution by Russia’s “backward economic base” alone; from the critique of vulgar evolutionism to the “break in succession” in 1917; etc. But the most important thing is purely and simply that the critical reading, the materialist reading of Hegel freed Lenin from the narrow straitjacket of the pseudo-orthodox Marxism of the Second International, from the theoretical limits it imposed on his thought. The study of Hegelian Logic was the instrument by which Lenin cleared the theoretical road leading to the Finnish station in Petrograd.[51]

From his part Stathis Kouvelakis has encapsulated the experimental character of the Philosophical Notebooks in the following manner:

The hypothesis that I will risk advancing here is that this very improbable construction of the Hegel notebooks, their material texture as an object, is necessarily related to the status explicitly claimed by their author, that of an attempted materialist reading of a canonical text of classical German philosophy. To put it another way, it is their very form, or rather their total absence of pre-established form, their completely experimental dimension, through which the Hegel notebooks are the expression of this paradox that is the emergence of something like “materialism” in philosophy (but, it must undoubtedly be said, in its lacunae, its internal gaps).[52]

Daniel Bensaïd has described in the following manner how Lenin thought of the conjuncture as a very singular condensation of contradictions and dynamics and how this pointed to a different conceptualization of politics, especially in critical moments.

Lenin, in contrast, thought of politics as a time full of struggle, a time of crises and collapses. For him the specificity of politics is expressed in the concept of a revolutionary crisis, which is not the logical continuation of a social movement, but a general crisis of the reciprocal relations between all the classes in society. The crisis is then defined as a national crisis. It acts to lay bare the battle lines, which have been obscured by the mystical phantasmagoria of the commodity. Then alone, and not by virtue of some inevitable historical ripening, can the proletariat be transformed and “become what it is.[53]

And this means that in no sense we are talking here about teleological process, but rather with the possibility of the unexpected rupture, of the ‘leap.’ Here is Bensaïd again:

A few days! A week! On 29 September 1917 Lenin wrote to the hesitating central committee: “The crisis has matured.” Waiting was becoming a crime. On 1 October he urged them to “take power at once,” to “resort to insurrection at once.” Ή A few days later he tried again: “I am writing these lines on 8 October. . .  The success of both the Russian and the world revolution depends on two or three days’ fighting.” He still insisted: “I am writing these lines on the evening of the 24th. The situation is critical in the extreme. In fact it is now absolutely clear that to delay the uprising would be fatal. . .  Everything now hangs by a thread.” So it is necessary to act “this very evening, this very night.” “Breaks in gradualness” noted Lenin in the margins of Hegel’s The Science of Logic at the beginning of the war. And he stressed, “Gradualness explains nothing without leaps. Leaps! Leaps! Leaps![54]

In a similar manner, Stathis Kouvelakis has also stressed the absence of any evolutionist approach:

This self-movement must itself be understood not in the trivial sense of a “flux,” the course of things, and all sorts of hydraulic metaphors dear to orthodoxy, but rather as a unity of opposites, contradictions internal to things themselves, and the unfurling of this contradiction in the strictest immanence. Thus the positing of extremes and the ascent to extremes, the transition from one extreme to the other in the very movement that opposes them, the sudden reversal of situations. The assertion of the creative power of division, the work of the negative, eliminates any evolutionist vision of “transition,” and in particular of “leaps” as an acceleration of “evolution” or of “opposites” as mere complementary terms within a totality.[55]

Is Lenin here embracing simply Hegel and leaving Plekhanov aside? In that case, we would be dealing with indeed a ‘paradigm shift’ and indeed one can find passages that point to that direction:

To be elaborated: Plekhanov wrote on philosophy (dialectics) probably about 1,000 pages (Beltov + against Bogdanov + against the Kantians + fundamental questions, etc., etc.).9 Among them, a b o u t the large Logic, i n c o n n e c t i o n w i t h i t, its thought (i.e., dialectics p r o p e r, as philosophical science) nil!![56]

In that case, Materialism and Empiriocriticism would have been simply a repetition of Plekhanov’s position, something that would underestimate the political conception of philosophy and the highly original definition of materialism we find there. Kevin Anderson has insisted the Philosophical Notebooks represent a sharp break with Materialism and Empiriocriticism in the following manner:

This is obvious in Lenin’s mechanistic book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908). This book had two fundamental limitations from a dialectical perspective. First, it put forth a crude reflection theory in which Marxist materialism was “a copy, an approximate copy, of objective reality” (LCW 14:182). Second, Lenin dismissed all forms of idealism as “nothing but an embellished ghost story” (LCW 14:165).[57]

Moreover, there are the famous references that ‘Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism’,[58] but this has more to do with a thinking of complexity and contradiction, rather with an embracing of Hegelian dialectics.

I would like to insist Lenin in the Philosophical Notebooks moves beyond Plekhanov, but this does not mean a full abandonment of the positions he held in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, exactly because as I have tried to suggest in that work Lenin was not simply repeating Plekhanov.

As Dominique Lecourt suggested in 1973, we have to see the importance that Lenin places upon Hegel’s critique of Kant. Lenin again thinks that in Hegel he can find and important ally against what he defines as Kantian subjectivism, especially in the way that for Hegel there is a superseding o the subject – object dichotomy towards a unity inside the process of knowledge but that in Lenin’s reading of Hegel a reading that also avoids the teleological aspects on could find in Hegel. Consequently a new definition of the dialectic as ‘objective and necessary movement of contradictory determinations in their unity without a subject’.[59] And it is in this sense that Lecourt insists that “there is no contradiction between the positions defended in Materialism and Empiriocriticism and those that will defended later in the Philosophical Notebooks: in particular the position of the reflection (without a mirror) will be retaken there and thought in the category of the process (without a subject).[60]

In a different theoretical perspective Stathis Kouvelakis has also stressed how the category of reflection is rethought in the Philosophical Notebooks as part of this new relational, practical, and dialectical conceptualization of both knowledge and social and political praxis:

The conditions are then fulfilled for a final return to the notion of “reflection”: the processus of knowledge that it denotes can now be understood as an activity of material transformation of the world, in which logical categories “fix” the conceptual matrix: “the human notion ‘definitively’ catches this objective truth of cognition, seizes and masters it, only when the notion becomes ‘being-for-itself’ in the sense of practice. That is, the practice of man and of mankind is the test, the criterion of the objectivity of cognition.” “Is that Hegel’s idea?,” Lenin immediately wonders, sensing the importance of the question, before ending this note with the significant words “it is necessary to return to this.[61]

What about the famous reference to the logic of Marx’s Capital?

If Marx did not leave behind him a “Logic” (with a capital letter), he did leave the logic of Capital, and this ought to be utilised to the full in this question. In Capital, Marx applied to a single science logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge of materialism [three words are not needed: it is one and the same thing] which has taken everything valuable in Hegel and developed it further.[62]

There is a certain tension here. On the one had the idea that we can find the actual science and philosophy of Marx in Capital points to the originality of the work and is a point the Lenin shares with many in the Marxist tradition. One could point to the reading by Althusser and his co-authors in Lire le Capital.[63] On the other hand, Lenin’s consideration of Marx’s actual debt to Hegel remains ambiguous to the least.

But what about the also famous ‘Aphorism’ on Marx, Hegel, and Capital?

Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!![64]

On this question, I still find pertinent Louis Althusser’s commentary:

I can reduce the paradox of this second fact, of this second declaration of Lenin’s straightaway by pointing out that it is preceded (a page earlier in the Notebooks) by another very interesting formula only a few lines before. Lenin declares, in fact, that ‘Hegel’s analysis of syllogisms . . . recalls Marx’s imitation of Hegel in Ch. 1 ‘. This is a re-phrasing of Marx’s own diagnosis: his ‘coquetting’ with Hegel. If the cap fits, wear it. This is not me speaking, but Lenin, following Marx. In fact, one cannot understand Volume One Part I at all without completely removing its Hegelian ‘lid’, without reading as a materialist, as Lenin reads Hegel, the said Volume One Part I, without, if you will forgive the presumption, re-writing it.

This brings us directly to my central thesis on Lenin’s reading of Hegel: i.e. that in his notes on Hegel, Lenin maintains precisely the position he had adopted previously in ‘What the “Friends of the People” Are ‘ and ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism ‘, i.e. at a moment when he had not read Hegel, which leads us to a ‘shocking’ but correct conclusion: basically, Lenin did not need to read Hegel in order to understand him, because he had already understood Hegel, having closely read and understood Marx. Bearing this in mind, I shall hazard a peremptory aphorism of my own: ‘A century and a half later no one has understood Hegel because it is impossible to understand Hegel without having thoroughly studied and understood “Capital “! ‘ [65]

For Althusser Lenin’s reading of Hegel remains critical with Lenin neither simply adopting Hegel nor simply ‘reversing’ Hegel.

In other words, Lenin did not read Hegel in order to set Hegel’s absolute-idealist system back on to its feet in the form of a materialist system. For his reading of Hegel he adopted a new philosophical practice, a practice which followed from the proletarian class viewpoint, i.e. from the dialectical-materialist viewpoint. What interested Lenin in Hegel was above all the effects of this dialectical-materialist reading of Hegel, i.e. the effects produced with respect to a reading of passages from Hegel which deal primarily with what is called the ‘theory of knowledge’ and the dialectic.[66]

On the basis of this Althusser would insist that what Lenin finds in Hegel is the idea of a process without a subject.

Lenin finds in it a confirmation of the fact that it is absolutely essential (as he had learnt simply from a thorough-going reading of Capital) to suppress every origin and every subject, and to say: what is absolute is the process without a subject, both in reality and in scientific knowledge.[67]

This passage, which also marks a turning point in Althusser’s reading of Hegel, is of obvious interest. Yet although one could indeed see the notion of the process in Hegel as something that certainly influenced Marx, the ‘without a subject’ point is of course open to questioning given Hegel’s many references to the notion of the Subject.

At least we can say that in Hegel we do not have the same centrality of the knowing transcendental subject, nor a subject / object dichotomy in the historical process, which brings us again to the question of Lenin finding in Hegel an anti-Kantian ally.

We know Lenin would return to this point in the famous text on militant materialism, where again we find this reference to Hegelian dialectics as a necessary starting point.

In order to attain this aim, the contributors to Pod Znamenem Marksizma must arrange for the systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint, i.e., the dialectics which Marx applied practically in his Capital and in his historical and political works, and applied so successfully that now every day of the awakening to life and struggle of new classes in the East (Japan, India, and China)—i.e., the hundreds of millions of human beings who form the greater part of the world population and whose historical passivity and historical torpor have hitherto conditioned the stagnation and decay of many advanced European countries—every day of the awakening to life of new peoples and new classes serves as a fresh confirmation of Marxism.[68]

However, Lenin still never opted for some form of systematic dialectic. Instead, dialectics is always about concrete analysis of complex and uneven conjunctures something exemplified in the famous passage on dialectics in the 1921 text ‘Once Again On The Trade Unions, The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin.’

Dialectical logic demands that we should go further. Firstly, if we are to have a true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its facets, its connections and “mediacies”. That is something we cannot ever hope to achieve completely, but the rule of comprehensiveness is a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity. Secondly, dialectical logic requires that an object should be taken in development, in change, in “self-movement” (as Hegel sometimes puts it). This is not immediately obvious in respect of such an object as a tumbler, but it, too, is in flux, and this holds especially true for its purpose, use and connection with the surrounding world. Thirdly, a full “definition” of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants. Fourthly, dialectical logic holds that “truth is always concrete, never abstract”, as the late Plekhanov liked to say after Hegel. (Let me add in parenthesis for the benefit of young Party members that you cannot hope to become a real, intelligent Communist without making a study—and I mean study—of all of Plekhanov’s philosophical writings, because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world.*)[69]

So, we can say that in the end, Lenin does not propose a philosophical system, even when he refers to dialectics. It is not about ontology, nor is it a ‘theory of knowledge’. It is more a about a new form of militant political intellectuality, a new way to think through the complex, uneven and contradictory character of any process that is traversed by contradictory and antagonistic dynamics, starting with social production and reproduction. It is materialist, not in the sense of naturalism, but in the sense of insisting on the objectivity of the relations and the process involved, conceived as process without a subject. And it is deeply political. It does not produce knowledge, but enables the analysis of the conjuncture that produces knowledge, analysis, and political strategy. It makes this possible not by offering a pre-constructed, ready-made ‘theory’, but by means of intervening, of ‘bending the stick to the other side’, of changing the balance of conceptual (and in the last instance political) balance of forces. It does so by stressing materiality, contradiction, unevenness, and potential for transformation, and also by being intellectually open to the dynamics coming from mass struggles, the knowledge emerging from the collective ingenuity of the subaltern classes. If rupture and revolutionary change are the subaltern, the non-dominant element of a singular conjuncture, conceived as an experimental process, a process of constant engagement, constant intervention and constant testing of strategic and tactical hypotheses, and also a process always within a terrain traversed by antagonistic ideologies, then this practice of philosophy represents the kind of intellectual / political intervention that help bring to the fore dynamics that seemed to be non-dominant and thus enable historical surprise.

It’s not a ‘use’ of philosophy in any instrumental sense. It’s a practice of philosophy. A philosophy by a non-philosopher, but philosophy nevertheless.

Works cited and references

Althusser, Louis 1965, For Marx, London: Allen Lane / The Penguin Press.

Althusser, Louis et al.  1965, Lire le Capital, Paris: Maspero.

Althusser, Louis 1971, Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Althusser, Louis et al. 1965, Lire le Capital, Paris: Maspero.

Bogdanov, Alexander 2020, Empiriomonism. Essays in Philosophy, Books 1–3, Leiden: Brill.

Chehonadskih, Maria 2023, Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ilyenkov, Ewald 1982, Reflections on Lenin’s book: “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positivism.pdf.

Kouvelakis, Stathis 2009, ‘Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s The Science of Logic’, in Lenin Reloaded. Toward a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek, Durham: Duke University Press.

Lecourt, Dominique 1973, Une crise et son enjeu (Essaie sur la position de Lénine en philosophie), Paris: Maspero.

Lenin, Vladimir 1973, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers (LCW).

Löwy, Michel 1973, Dialectique et révolution. Essai de sociologie et d’histoire du marxisme, http://classiques.uqac.ca/.

Negri, Antonio 2014, Factory of Strategy. 33 Lessons on Lenin, New York: Columbia University Press.

Rovelli, Carlo 2021, Helgoland, London: Penguin.

Sochor, Zenovia 1988, Revolution and Culture. The Bogdanov Lenin controversy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Suchting, W.A. 1986, Marx and Philosophy. Three Studies, London Macmillan.

White, James D. 2018, Red Hamlet. The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov, Leiden: Brill.

Notes

[1] LCW, vol 38, p. 479.

[2] LCW, vol. 1, p. 145.

[3] LCW, vol. 1, p. 163.

[4] LCW, vol. 1, p. 165.

[5] LCW, vol. 1, p. 167.

[6] LCW, vol. 3.

[7] Negri 2014.

[8] LCW, vol. 5, p. 396.

[9] On Bogdanov’s political positions and a reconstruction of his political trajectory see White 2018, on his epistemological positions see Bogdanov 2020.

[10] Chehonadskih 2023, pp. 3-4.

[11] On this, see Sochor 1988.

[12] Rovelli 2021.

[13] Ilyenkov 1982.

[14] Bogdanov 2022, p. 204.

[15] LCW, 14, p. 23.

[16] LCW, vol. 15, p. 33.

[17] LCW, vol 14, p. 22.

[18] LCW, vol 14, p. 103.

[19] Suchting 1986 offers a very important reading.

[20] Althusser 1990.

[21] LCW, vol. 15, p. 125.

[22] LCW, vol 14, p. 103.

[23] LCW, vol 14, p. 252.

[24] LCW, vol 14, p. 258.

[25] LCW, vol 14, p. 259.

[26] LCW, vol 14, p. 262.

[27] LCW, vol. 14, p. 339.

[28] LCW, vol, 14, pp. 342-343.

[29] LCW, vol 14, p. 350.

[30] LCW, vol 14, p. 358.

[31] Suchting 1986, pp. 66-67.

[32] Althusser 1990.

[33] Althusser 1971, pp. 24-25.

[34] Macherey 1997, p. 37.

[35] LCW, vol 15, p. 405.

[36] Lecourt 1973.

[37] Lecourt 1973, p. 37.

[38] Althusser 1971, p. 61

[39] Kouvelakis 2007, p. 167.

[40] LCW, vol 38, p. 104.

[41] LCW, vol 38, p. 109.

[42] LCW, vol 38, p. 141.

[43] LCW, vol 38, p. 147

[44] LCW, vol 38, p. 171.

[45] LCW, vol 38, pp. 196-197.

[46] LCW, vol 38, p. 205.

[47] LCW, vol 38, p. 222.

[48] LCW, vol 38, p. 222.

[49] Althusser1969, pp. 95-96.

[50] Althusser 1999.

[51] Lowy 1973.

[52] Kouvelakis 2007, p. 179.

[53] Bensaïd 2007, p. 150

[54] Bensaïd 2007, p. 159

[55] Kouvelakis 2007, p. 180.

[56] LCW, vol 38, p. 274.

[57] Anderson, 2007, p. 125.

[58] LCW, vol 38, p. 274.

[59] Lecourt 1973, p. 66.

[60] Lecourt 1973, p. 16.

[61] Kouvelakis 2007, p. 191.

[62] LCW, vol 38, p. 317.

[63] Althusser et al., 1965.

[64] LCW, vol 38, p. 180.

[65] Althusser 1971, pp. 111-112.

[66] Althusser 1971, p. 114.

[67] Althusser 1971, p. 123.

[68] LCW, vol 33, p. 233.

[69] LCW, vol 32, p. 94. Ιn 1915 Lenin had criticized Plekhanov exactly for not being dialectical enough: ‘The sophist grabs at one of many “arguments”; it was Hegel who long ago very properly observed that “arguments” can be found to prove anything in the world. Dialectics calls for a many-sided investigation into a given social phenomenon in its development, and for the external and the seeming to be reduced to the fundamental motive forces, to the development of the productive forces and to the class struggle. Plekhanov has plucked out a quotation from the German Social-Democratic press: the Germans themselves, before the war, admitted that Austria and Germany had “started it”, he says, and there you are. He does not mention the fact that the Russian socialists repeatedly exposed the tsarist plans of conquest of Galicia, Armenia, etc. He does not make the slightest attempt to study the economic and diplomatic history of at least the past three decades, which history proves conclusively that the conquest of colonies, the looting of foreign countries, the ousting and ruining of the more successful rivals have been the backbone of the politics of both groups of the now belligerent powers.*’ (LCW, 21, p. 218).

 

Featured image: Lenin sitting on a bench at Gorky, 1922. Public Domaine.

Panagiotis Sotiris