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Historical Materialism ConferenceLondon, 9. – 12. November 2017

LENIN’S DIALECTICS

VESA OITTINEN

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI/ALEKSANTERI INSTITUTE

In this paper, I will discuss the question of Lenin’s dialectics both in relation to Hegel and to Marx, especially as as expressed in the Philosophical Notebooks. I attempt to show that Lenin’s interest in Hegel is dictated by two demands: first, by the need to avoid the determinism inherent in the Marxism interpretation of the Second International, and, secondly, by the requirement to ward off the influence of Kantianism (actually, Neo-Kantianism) upon the worker’s movement. As to the dialectics, so Lenin’s idea of it seems to have been rather simple: it is more or less identical with a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation”. In Lenin’s writings there are no Hegelian triads or such deductions of core concepts in dialectical form as, for example, in Marx’s Capital.

Aleksandr Deborin, the most important marxist philosopher in the early Soviet Union and the head of the current of the so-called “Dialecticians”, initially was of the opinion that Plekhanov was the more important theoretician of Russian Marxism and Lenin merely a “great practician”. However, already in 1926 Ivan Luppol, another philosopher of the “dialectician” current, published a book Lenin i filosofija,1 where he attempted to demonstrate that Lenin was a novatory thinker in theoretical matters, too. Luppol showed that in many articles which seemingly dealt with “practical” questions only, Lenin actually applied philosophical argumentation. Only some years afterwards Luppol himself became victim of Stalin’s terror, but his reading of Lenin was incorporated in the official Soviet doctrine.2 This official doctrine underlined the continuity of Lenin’s philosophical thought from the earliest publications on, a continuity which in the interpretation of Party officials assumed an altogether monolithic character. For them, Lenin had put forth his Marxist ideas in the final form and an iron-cast consequency already in the writings of his youth, starting from the pamphlet What the “Friends of People” Are (1894) which was directed against the theories of the Narodniks. During the entire Soviet epoch, it was risky to try to contest this official interpretation.

ONE OR TWO LENINS, OR MAYBE MORE?

1 German translation: I. Luppol, Lenin und die Philosophie, Wien: Verlag für Literatur und Politik 1929

2 For details of the discussions of the 1920’s, which ended abruptly by an intervention of Stalin himself in 1929/1930, see e.g. Yehoshua Yakhot, The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR (the 1920s and 1930s), Oak Park (Michigan): Mehring Books 2012.

LENIN’S DIALECTICS 1

Despite of this, the received Soviet interpretation of Lenin had a strangely dualistic character. Since the publication of the Philosophical Notebooks,3 which Lenin jotted down reading Hegel in the Canton Library of Bern in 1914—1915, one cannot have avoided to pick up the formidable difference between these notes and the earlier work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism of 1909. Actually, the differences are so big that they might not be taken as works of the same person. The standard Soviet answer to this discrepancy was that in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin defended on a general level the materialist approach in scientific inquiry and political analyses, whilst in the Philosophical Notebooks (which as such were not intended for publication) he focused on the question of dialectics. This is not per se a bad argument and might explain a great deal of the differences between the two texts. But the duality, nevertheless, prevails. It has affected the whole subsequent Soviet philosophy: on the one side, there were the adherents of a “scientific-technical” outlook, who emphasized the connection between (natural) sciences and philosophy and, in fact, represented views very similar to those of the Scientific Realism in the West. This current had Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as an important point of reference. On the other side, there were “humanists” or “Hegelians”, who thought that the task of socialism was to create the presuppositions for all-round, culturally rich personalities, and from this standpoint criticised the vision of the socialist society as a mere engineer’s task. Adherents of this current found many arguments for their sake in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. It is impossible to understand the activity of such prominent Soviet philosophers as Evald Ilyenkov, himself one of the main “Hegelians”, if one does not bear in mind this situation, which in many respects reminded that of the “two cultures” in the West, described by C. P. Snow.

But whilst the Soviet philosophers nevertheless insisted on the unity of Lenin’s philosophy, in spite of the different interpretations they made of his heritage, there emerged in the West another sort of reading Lenin. According to this interpretation, most prominently represented by Raya Dunayevskaya and later especially by Kevin Anderson, there is a rupture between the earlier Lenin representing a kind of dogmatic materialism and vulgar “theory of reflexion”, on the one side, and the cunning “Hegelizing” dialectician of the Philosophical Notebooks, on the other. In other words, there was, so Anderson, a turning point in Lenin’s intellectual development which echoes the famous rupture épistemologique which Althusser believed he had detected in Marx’s intellectual development.

In Anderson’s reading, Lenin, who immediately after the outbreak of the First World War had retired to the Canton Library of Bern in order to study Hegel’s Science of Logic more thoroughly than he hitherto had had time to do, had already in jotting down the first notes of Hegel’s introductory chapter, “begun to break with the simplistic categories of idealism versus materialism that had been the philosophical foundation of the Marxism of the Second International, including his own before

3 A part of the Notebooks was, made accessible already in 1925 in Pod znamenem marksizma (issue 1-2/1925). The final edition of the Notebooks, published in Vol. 38 of Lenin’s Collected Works (Sochinenija, 4th edition), contains much more material than only the notebooks on Hegel which Lenin wrote in 1914 and 1915 – the earliest text in the volume is a conspectus of Marx’s and Engel’s The Holy Family already from 1895, and it contains further Lenin’s marginal notes in different books on philosophy from a long period. So one might speak of Philosophical Notebooks sensu lato and sensu stricto. In this paper, I refer to them in the latter sense, i.e. containing the excerpts from Hegel’s works.


1914”.4 Indeed, the first-hand acquaintance with Hegel leads Lenin, so Anderson, to an abandonment of his earlier views:

Only six years erlier, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin had developed a crude reflexion theory, wherein ideas were seen as photocopies of matter. Now he writes that there is profundity in Hegel’s concept of a move from the ideal to the real, which, unlike the reflection theory, gives a sort of ontological autonomy to ideas.5

For Anderson, absorbing and digesting Hegel’s dialectical method helped Lenin to accomplish the theoretical breakthroughs which characterized him as the Marxist thinker he was:

After 1914 Lenin’s work on Hegel helped to shape some of his innovative political and economic concepts around issues such as imperialism, mational liberation, the state, and revolution […] We have seen the continuing influence of Lenin’s Hegel studies in his subsequent use of categories such as transformation into opposite, subjectivity, self-movement, and self-consciousness, as well as Hegel’s concept of a dialectical interrelationship between the universal and the particular, all of which […] form an important part of the grounding for Lenin’s dialectical theory of imperialism.6

This is, at a first sight, a convincing interpretation. No wonder that it has found support, and to speak of “two Lenins” has indeed been en vogue in some circles. But a closer reading of Lenin’s texts soon reveals that the matters are not so simple. Above all, Lenin does not seem to denounce the ideas of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism even after 1914. When the book was issued again in 1920, Lenin did not change anything in it, save correcting some printing mistakes. Moreover, he stressed in the foreword to the second edition that the ideas expressed in the book have a general validity for Marxist theory, independently of the dispute with Russian Machists: the book, he hoped, “will prove useful as an aid to an acquaintance with the philosophy of Marxism, dialectical materialism, as well as with the philosophical conclusions from the recent discoveries in natural science.“7 And when he in the well-known article of 1922, On the Significance of Militant Materialism, in which he drafted the tasks of the newly founded journal Pod znamenem marksizma, spoke about the necessity for Marxists to study systematically Hegel’s dialectics, he did this quite in accordance with the scope of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, i.e., as a part of a materialist interpretation of the results of natural sciences.8

4 Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, Urbana/Chicago:Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995, p. 34

5 Anderson, op. cit., p. 40


7 Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in: Collected Works, vol. 14, p.

8 Lenin, On the Significance of Militant Materialism, in: CW vol. 33, especially p. : “In my opinion, the editors and contributors of Pod Znamenem Marksizma should be a kind of ‘Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics’. Modern natural scientists (if they know how to seek, and if we learn to help them) will find in the Hegelian dialectics, materialistically interpreted, a series of answers to the philosophical problems which are being raised by the revolution in natural science and which make the intellectual admirers of bourgeois fashion “stumble” into reaction“.


Anderson is, of course, right in insisting that the outbreak of war in the year 1914 signified a palpable break in the political situation of Lenin and, generally, of the Bolsheviks. For Anderson, this led to a “crisis of world Marxism in 1914” and was the reason of “Lenin’s plunge into Hegel”9 leading, ultimately, to that Lenin dissociated himself from the Marxism interpretations of the Second International in general, which were unable to do justice to the changed realities which made a socialist revolution actual. That Lenin had a new interest in Hegel, is indubitable, but how to interpret it, is more difficult. As I already said, this new Hegel interest does not, contrary to Anderson’s claims, seem to have led to a break with Lenin’s previous philosophical views, expressed most fully in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism of 1907. As Lars T. Lih wryly comments, there is no traces of rethinking nor attempts to reject the Marxist orthodoxy in Lenin in 1914. On the contrary: “According to Lenin himself, it was not he who had changed but the others. He insisted that the vision of a world revolution […] was part and parcel of a universal consensus among pre-war revolutionary Marxists”.10

THE QUESTION OF THE “SUBJECTIVE FACTOR”

An answer to the questions of “Lenin’s dialectics” cannot be given, if one does not grasp the role of politics, indeed its primacy, in Lenin’s thought. In the case of Russian politics this means that the revolutionaries, who want to overcome the existing, autocratic and oppressing social system, become confronted with such principal problems as social determinism and the role of the subjective factor in history. This is a discussion which started already in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the currents olf the zapadniki (“Westerners”) and Slavophiles emerged among the Russian intelligentsia as a reply to the one-sided and half-hearted modernisation policy of the Russian autocratism. The Narodniks, the first revolutionary movement in Russian history with a larger support, emerged in the 1870s from the zapadniki by the way of a radicalization, but nevertheless inherited its problematics.11

The main dilemma was well formulated by Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842—1904), who together with Piotr Lavrov (1823—1900) is known as the founder of ther so-called “subjective sociology”. Mikhailovsky is yet today remembered for the critique he presented towards Marx in a famous article published in the journal Otechestvennye Zapisky in 1877. His main target was the determinism of Marx’s wiews of history, which he equated with those of Herbert Spencer. According to Mikhailovsky, Marx depicts for Russia a loomy future, when he asserts that Russia must inevitably go through the same stages of historical development as Western Europe. Referring to the Chapter 24 of Capital, where Marx described the dramatical and bloody history of the so-called primitive accumulation in England, Mikhailovsky asked, whether Russia would really be pre-determined to experience the same horrors. He answered his own question negatively, claiming that there are real developmental alternatives for Russia. According to Mikhailovsky, Russia’s path would be different from that of the

9 Kevin Anderson, op. cit., p. 3, the rubric

10 Lars T. Lih, Lenin, London: Reaktion Books 2011, p. 125

11 Of course, the Narodniks did not constitute a homogeneous movement. A yet today basic and useful study of the Narodniks accessible in English is Franco Venturi’s Roots of Revolution, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1960


West: the country had its peasants communities, the obshchinas, upon which a more or less self-subsistent “peasant socialism” could be constructed and a Western-style industrialization avoided.12

We need not here go into details of the discussion. Marx himself attempted to answer Mikhailovsky’s critique in a letter which, however, never was sent to the redaction of the journal. He partially aknowledged the validity of Mikhailovsky’s critique by admitting, that the description of the primitive accumulation in Capital was based on the materials of above all English history and was not intended as “an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself”.13

But if alternatives exist, then the important question arises, how to realize them. The Soviet scholar Grigori Vodolazov delivered in the 1960’s an acute analysis of the pre-Leninist history of Russian revolutionary movement, where he pointed to the significance of the core idea in the doctrines of the Narodniks. It had remained the same since the non-published dispute between Marx and Mikhailovsky: the perspective of skipping the capitalist phase of development. “The objective possibility of accelerating the development process of certain countries (using the results from more developed countries) made the function of the conscious element more important”, wrote Vodolazov.14 One might call this situation the “paradox of a catch-up development”: periferic countries like Russia may actually profit from their backwardness in the sense that they are more free in choosing suitable development paths than the already advanced countries which have ended up to their present developmental stage without having clearly reflected on their goals.

The possibilities of the “subjective factor”, i. e., of a conscious elite leading the masses in order to reshape the society were thus a more important issue in Russia than in the West. It is precisely this issue which explains the specifics of Lenin’s thought. The social theory of Marxism was a science and, in the peculiar interpretation it got in the epoch of the Second International, preached determinism; but in Russia, it was necessary to “complete” Marxist determinism with an acknowledgement of the subjective factor.

The first Marxist circle was founded in 1883 in Genève by Russian emigrés, and next year Georgi Plekhanov published his pamphlet Nashi raznoglasija (Our Differences), which was directed against the Narodniks and their illusions that the course of history could be changed by individual, or even terrorist acts. Returning in fact to the question of Mikhailovsky, although not mentioning it explicitely, Plekhanov wrote:

All laws of social development which are not understood work with the irresistible force and blind harshness of laws of nature. But to discover this or that law of nature or of social development means, firstly, to be

12 N. K. Mikhailovsky, Karl Marks pered sudom g. Yu. Zhukovskogo, in: Otechestvennye Zapisky No. 10, October 1877

13 Karl Marx, Letter to the Editor of the Otechestvennye Zapisky, November 1877

14 G. G.Vodolazov, Osobennosti razvitiya sotsialisticheskoi mysli v Rossii v otrazhenii russkoi zhurnalistiki 60-70-kh godov XIX v. Avtoreferat dissertatsii, Moskva, MGU, fakultet zhurnalistiki 1967, p. 19. Quoted here according to Paolo Venturi, Studies in Free Russia, Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press1982, p. 274. Later, Vodolazov presented the results of his dissertation in a more popular book: Ot Chenyshevskogo k Plekhanovu, Moskva: MGU 1969


able to avoid clashing with it and, consequently, expending one’s efforts in vain, and, secondly, to be able to regulate its application in such a manner as to draw profit from it. This general idea applies entirely to the particular case we are interested in. We must utilise the social and economic upheaval which is proceeding in Russia for the benefit of the revolution and the working population. The highly important circumstance that the socialist movement in our country began when capitalism was only in the embryo must not be lost on us. This peculiarity of Russian social development was not invented by the Slavophiles or the pro-Slavophile revolutionaries.15

The laws of social development thus define the course of history and social development in a deterministic manner. However – and this is interesting – Plekhanov hints that it is possible to “regulate the application” of these laws when one becomes conscious of them and is “able to avoid clashing with” them. He acknowledges, further, the validity of the Narodnik view of the “pecularities” of Russian development which must be taken in account in drafting a strategy for the revolutionaries. Although Plekhanov here mentions the specificity of Russia only en passant, it is actually a most important comment. The general laws of social development may exert determining influence in the last instance – but “the devil is in the details”, i.e. a detailed analysis of the processes can nevertheless find open spaces for free agency. Plekhanov himself did not always follow his own hint but got often stuck in abstract reasoning, whilst Lenin always attempted at a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation”.

DIALECTICS AS A THEORY OF THE CONCRETE

If we read attentively Lenin’s texts, it soon stands out, that when Lenin mentions the “dialectics”, he actually in most cases means the concrete analysis to which already Plekhanov referred as the requisite for justifying the role of the subjective factor (i.e. the revolutionary action) in a world ruled by objective laws. The idea of a concrete analysis of a concrete situation is a recurrent theme in Lenin’s writings. Examples abound, so it suffices to quote from an important work of of 1904, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back:

[G]enuine dialectics does not justify errors of the individuals, but studies the inevitable turns, proving that they were inevitable by a detailed study of the process of development in all its concreteness. One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete.16

The idea of a concrete, all-sided analysis of the phenomena is a hallmark of Lenin’s special genius. It was just this trait which allowed him to see hidden possilibities in political processes; possibilities which other politicians did not see, as they looked at the world through the eyeglasses of a dogmatic theory. We see this creative trait in Lenin, when he seizes the revolutionary opportunity in October 1917, against the warnings of such “orthodox” Marxists as Kautsky or Plekhanov. In this sense, Lenin

15 G. V. Plekhanov, Our Differences, in: Selected Philosophical Works Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1974, p. 274

16 Lenin, One step forward, two steps back, in: Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 409LENIN’S DIALECTICS 6

was never a prisoner of the theory: the concrete situation and the possibilities it offered was always more important for him than abstract theoretical schemes.

But from where has Lenin got the idea of dialectics as a “concrete analysis” ? Surprisingly, Lenin did not take it from Marx nor from Hegel. The idea comes from the very Narodniks, who rebelled against the dogmatic interpretation of a predefined succession of socio-economic formations presented by the Marxists, which seemed to deny all alternative perspectives for Russia. It was the Narodnik theoretician Chernyshevsky who formulated the principle in 1855—56, in an essay, which dealt with Russian literature:

The essence of this method [the dialectical method – V.O. ] lies in that the thinker must not rest content with any positive deduction, but must find out whether the object he is thinking about contains qualities and forces the opposite of those which the object had presented to him at first sight. Thus the thinker was obliged to examine the object from all sides […] Gradually […] the former one-sided conceptions of an object were supplanted by a full and all-sided investigation […] In reality […], everything depends upon circumstances […] Every object, every phenomen […] must be judged according to the circumstances, the environment, in which it exists. This rule was expressed by the formula: ‘There is no abstract truth; truth is concrete’, i.e., a definite judgement can be pronounced only […] after examining all the circumstances on which it depends.17

Thus, for Chernyshevsky, Hegel’s dialectics consists above all of a concrete analysis of all the sides of the phenomen in case. Chernyshevsky does not give in his essay a more specified presentation of Hegel’s method. He does not speak about the mediation of subject and substance, nor of subjectivity as an absolute, self-referential negativity, nor of the triadic movement of categories – all of which are, in fact, essential traits of Hegel’s dialectical method. It is only the “concreteness” of analytical approach which counts.

So one could say that the interpretation of dialectics as a theory of “concreteness” was a Chernyshevskian, not a Marxist trait in Lenin’s thought. It is an indication that elements of Narodnism were continuously present in Lenin’s theoretical horizon and that he remained conscious of the problematics of the previous, pre-Marxist generation of Russian revolutionaries. In fact, the stress on the importance of “concrete analysis” when doing research on Russia’s social reality is essentially a concession to the “subjective sociology” of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky; it is an attempt to find antidotes for the abstract – indeed, semi-positivistic – determinism of the Marxism of the Second International. “Concrete analysis” is for Lenin the same as the scientific analysis. The scientific research, which takes in account all sides and details of the phenomen, allows to find ways out from the abstract determinism. In this sense, Lenin’s theory of the party was thought as the solution leading out from the Scylla of Narodnik subjectivism and Charybdis of the determinism preached by theoreticians of the II International. The task of the party is to implement a scientific world outlook on the masses, because “socialism, since it has become a science, demands that it be pursued as a science, i.e. that it be studied”.18

17 N. G. Chernyshevsky, Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury, quoted here according to G. V. Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View of History, in: Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works vol. I, p. 547


LENIN’S AND HEGEL’S DIFFERENT IDEAS OF THE CONCRETE

But, one might now object, is the stress on the concreteness not typical for Hegel, too? Is not Hegel’s entire philosophy, especially those of its parts which are called Realphilosophie, i.e. philosophies of history, art, religion, politics etc., just seeking for a concrete truth, drawing incessantly upon empirical facts? I think this question might be answered most plausibly by analysing the concepts of truth in Hegel and Lenin.

On the basis of the above-mentioned, nothing seems more natural than to equate Lenin’s and Hegel’s concepts of truth. The famous German playwright Bertolt Brecht did so. He loved to repeat the expression “Truth is always concrete” which, according to him, was the idée-maîtresse of Hegel’s dialectics; he even painted these words on the rafter of the house he lived during his exile in Denmark in the 1930s, in order to keep them constantly in his mind. The expression indeed sounds Hegelian. But actually, one seeks it in vain in Hegel.19 Brecht seems to have taken it from Lenin and interpreted it as a Hegelian trait in Lenin’s thought. This is not so simple.

First, Lenin and Hegel had quite opposite concepts of truth. For Lenin, truth was essentially, in accordance with the “theory of reflection” he supported, the good old Aristotelian correspondence relation: x is true, if x “corresponds” to the fact y outside the mind. The question of what a “correspondence” means is of course problematic. But the main idea is that facts have the priority and the subjective thoughts are secondary, i. e. dependent of the facts, if they are assumed to be true. For Hegel, on the contrary, the Aristotelian interpretation of truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus is insufficient. For him, a more deep definition of truth is to say that it is a ”correspondence of a content with itself” (Übereinstimmung eines Inhalts mit sich selbst, in: Enzyklopädie, § 24 Zusatz 2), which is “a quite different meaning of the truth as the first-mentioned” [i.e. the Aristotelian – V.O.]. It is thus clear that Lenin’s and Hegel’s views on truth are not identical.

When Hegel says that “truth is the whole” (das Wahre ist das Ganze; Enzyklopädie, ibidem), he means with the whole a totality where the distinction between the subjective and the objective, or the subject and the substance, has in the last resort became sublated. This sublating is a process in which the substance becomes more and more mediated with the subject, until they finally obtain a synthesis in the Absolute Idea. For Hegel, the whole reality of the universe consists of this process, and so he can claim that the “execution” (implementation, Ausführung) of the process is at least as important as its final result. Thus, although Lenin’s and Hegel’s views on the necessity of a concrete approach to the reality seem at first glance to be similar, there is actually a deep difference between them. Lenin’s “concrete analysis of a concrete situation” is factual; it consists of an empirical inquiry – Hegel, for his part, discarded the empirist approach, which according to him, “instead of seeking the

18 Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, in: Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 372

19 The formulation which comes most close to that of Brecht, may be found in Hegel’s Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: “Ist das Wahre abstrakt, so ist es unwahr. Die gesunde Menschenvernunft geht auf das Konkrete; erst die Reflexion des verstandes ist abstrakte Theorie, unwahr, nur im Kopfe richtig, auch unter anderem nicht praktisch; die Philosophie ist dem Abstrakten am feindlichsten und führt zum Konkreten zurück”.


truth in the thought itself”, falsely tries to obtain it “from the experience” (Enzyklopädie, § 37).

Hence, when Lenin says that “the ABC of dialectics […] tells us that there is no such thing as abstract truth, the truth is always concrete”,20 he is saying something quite different from Hegel’s intentions. He is not construing a totality in which all the details would form moments submitted to the teleological movement of the Whole. For Lenin, the idea of the concreteness of the truth is the way which makes it possible to escape the grip of abstract and dogmatic determinism. To my mind, it is important to see that although both Hegel and Lenin criticised abstract theories, their incentives were quite different: for Hegel, the goal was to construct an organic, richly detailed totality, while for Lenin there was no such “totalist” ambitions; what he aimed at, was to find by a detailled analysis the fissures in the seemingly monolithic façade of such a determinist theory of history, as Marxism was interpreted by the protagonists of the Second International. In one sense it might be spoken of similarities between Hegel and Lenin: in his political analyses, Lenin started from a given situation which had emerged as a result of a certain constellation of forces and objective presuppositions. In this sense, the “situation” can be regarded as a totality en miniature. But even here, the difference to Hegel is clearly discernible. The situations do not have any teleological component in themselves, as Hegel’s totality has: a political situation may always be resolved in different ways, and it depends on the action of the (political and social) agents, which direction will be taken. In other words, in a situation there are always alternatives, they are not self-sufficient, closed totalities.

PROBLEMS WITH LENIN’S ANTI-KANTIANISM

Why Lenin decided to delve into Hegel’s Science of Logic, the maybe most difficult and abstruse work the history of philosophy has to present, just in 1914, after the break of war? Some researchers claim that the date was accidental only; so for example James White thinks that Lenin had already for a long time planned to make acquaintance with Hegel’s philosophy, but it was not before Autumn 1914 than he had free time to realise the plan.21 Others, like Anderson, link Lenin’s new interest on Hegel to the outbreak of war in 1914 and with the new political situation. To my mind, this is a more plausible explanation. But there are aspects to which earlier research has not paid enough attention.

The outbreak of war in 1914 was made possible by the consent of social democratic parties, especially thanks to the German Social Democrats, who voted in the parlament for support to their government – contrary to the anti-militarist resolutions tha party had earlier made. The treachery of the leaders of the Second International

20 Lenin, One Step Forward…, CW vol. 7, p. 482

21 According to White, it was actually not the outbreak of war but a slightly earlier event, namely ther publication of Marx’s and Engels’s correspondence in four volumes by the Dietz Verlag in 1913, which finally reverted Lenin’s interest into the theory of dialectics. Lenin planned to write a review of it on which he worked in the end of the year 1913, but did not get the article ready; the sketch of it was published much later, in 1920 in Pravda (see James D. White, Lenin and Philosophy: The Historical Context, in: Europe-Asia Studies vol. 67:1, 2015, pp. 123—142).


shocked Lenin. It was only natural to conclude that it must have had its roots in some kind of theoretical deficiency. The main protagonists of German Social Democracy, such as Kautsky and Bernstein, were not able to make a concrete analysis of the concrete situation, but were caged in their abstractions. It was only natural to see the theoretical causes of this abstractness in Kant’s philosophy, which was expressly embraced by the “revisionists” in German social democracy such as Bernstein, or at least tolerated, as by Kautsky. Plekhanov, as one of the most important theoreticians of the Left in the Second International, had already in the 1890’s reproached the growing influence of Kantian “ethical socialism” in the workers’s movement.

For both Plekhanov and Lenin (who do not seem never have studied Kant himself more in detail) the Königsberg thinker in fact was an arch-abstractionist and a formalist, the philosophical source of revisionism. So it was only natural to invoke Hegel in order to drive the spectre of revisionism out from the revolutionary movement. This is, it seems to me, one of the main reasons for Lenin to take up a Hegel lecture just in 1914. The intention to use Hegel as an antidote to the Kantian revisionism in the workers’s movement must be seen as one if the main incentives in Lenin’s turn to Hegel.

The “anti-Kantian” motive is easily discernible in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. Already in the beginning he quotes from Hegel’s preface to the first edition of Science of Logic: “In Kant, the ‘empty abstraction’ of the Thing-in-itself instead of living Gang, Bewegung, deeper and deeper, of our knowledge about things“.22 In the Notebooks, Lenin identifies Kant with Machists and “other agnostics”,23 against which he fought in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, thus indicating that his motives in reading Hegel do not conflict with his earlier critique of the idealist theory of cognition of Bogdanov and Machism. As to Plekhanov’s earlier critique of Kantianism, Lenin acknowledges it but adds that it did not go as far as needed:

Plekhanov criticises Kantianism (and agnosticism in general) more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialistic standpoint, insofar as he merely rejects their views a limine, but does not correct them (as Hegel corrected Kant), deepening, generalising and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept.24

Here, too, we see that Lenin interprets Hegel above all as “the thinker of the concrete”, not taking note of the subtleties of the dialectical logic.

Disawoving the significance of Kant’s heritage has grave consequences for Marxist philosophy, which Lenin seems not to have foreseen. To be precise, it is not the critique and its arguments which have gone wrong, but its target: Lenin repudiates Kant, but means in fact the Neo-Kantians and their subjectivistic interpretation of Critical philosophy. In other words, Lenin equals in an inappropriate manner the

22 V. I. Lenin, Philosophical notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p.

23 V. I. Lenin, Philosophical notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p. Actually, he had done the same identification in a letter to Gorky from 1908: “Our empirio-critics, empirio-monists, and empirio-symbolists” have confused “in the most disgraceful manner materialism with Kantianism” (CW vol. 13, p. ).

24 V. I. Lenin, Philosophical notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p.LENIN’S DIALECTICS 10

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/h.htm#thing

ideas of German “ethical socialists” and revisionists with the genuine philosophy of Kant.

In doing this Lenin does not differ from the other writers of the left wing of the II International, such as Mehring and Plekhanov, which in the same manner attacked Kant, although they should have attacked the Neo-Kantians. The latter provided an interpretation of Kant’s philosophy which was far more subjectivistic and idealistic than the original doctrine of the Königsberg thinker. Kant was an opponent of subjective idealism of the Berkeleyan kind and even added to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason a special section with the title “Refutation of Idealism” where he defended the reality of the outer world. Above all, Kant’s concept of the things-in-themselves was meant as a guarantee of the objectivity of our sensations: if there were nothing “behind” the appearances which would cause them to emerge, our sensations would indeed be merely subjective. For Kant, the things-in-themselves were, “although unknown to us, nonetheless real” objects (Prolegomena § 13). For Neo-Kantians, on the contrary, the things-in-themselves were an unnecessary hypothesis which would only lead to a cumbersome dualism of subjective and objective components in our knowledge. Consequently, they recommended its abolishment. The Empirio-Criticism of Mach had a similar position, as it held that the difference between an outer object and the sense-impression it creates in us was an unnecessary duplication.

Lenin’s rebuff of Kant is indeed one of the most problematic points in his theoretical heritage. It prevented him to see, that Kant was in many questions more close to the world view of Marxian materialism. Many passages in the Philosophical Notebooks indicate that he was blind to the fact, that Hegel’s critique of Kant, which he fully embraced, was inseparable from the objective-idealist assumptions of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s critique of Kant’s “things-in-themselves” bases on the claim that, introducing this concept, Kant creates a gap between the cognising subject and the object. In order to fill that gap, both the subject and the object of knowledge must, according to Hegel, be seen as moments of the Spirit. Lenin quotes the relevant passages from Hegel and adds now and there an approving marginal note. 25 It is indeed striking that Lenin, in his eagerness to employ Hegel’s arguments against Kant as a weapon against the revisionists in the workers’s movement, does not take account of the fact that the critique against Kant in the form Hegel attempts it, is possible only by accepting the objective-idealist premises of the latter. The thing-in-itself, this materialist “stumbling-block” contained in Kant’s doctrine, can be removed only if the duality of the substance (to which the thing belongs) and the subject (the Ego) is sublated in a higher unity. Now Lenin, despite of all his materialism, suddendly embraces Hegel’s objective-idealist methodology!

The reason for this “blindness” of Lenin was, of course, that the “pure” philosophical motive became intermingled with the political motive of anti-revisionist struggle. Lenin notes, quite consistently with his own materialist starting-point, that “Hegel’s logic cannot be applied in its given form, it cannot be taken as given. One must

25 In the Philosophical Notebooks, there are many references to Kant, of which some most important concerning the subject-object divide are on CW vol. 38, pp. 91, 92, 132, 168 sqq., 206. When Hegel writes that the thing-in-itself is “altogether an empty, lifeless abstraction”, Lenin comments in the margin: “Sehr gut!” (op. cit., p. 109); Hegel’s critique of Kant is, according to Lenin, done from the standpoint of a “more consistent idealism” (op. cit., p. 170). For Lenin, Kant’s philosophy is “subjectivism” (p. 207, 259)


separate out from it the logical (epistemological) nuances, after purifying them from Ideenmystik: that is still a big job)“.26 As a methodological rule for developing a theory of materialist philosophy, Lenin recommends: “When one idealist criticises the foundations of idealism of another idealist, materialism is always the gainer thereby. Cf. Aristotle versus Plato, etc., Hegel versus Kant, etc.“27 An excellent thumb rule – however, despite the fact that Lenin elsewhere in his notes en passant acknowledges that there are elements of materialism in Kant, he consistently depicts Kant as an “idealist”, thus accepting the Neo-Kantian and Revisionist interpretation of the philosophy of the Königsberg thinker. And if Kant is an “idealist”, one cannot of course use his ideas for creating a materialist dialectics.

From the retrospective view, one can say that Lenin’s acceptance of Hegel’s critique of the subject-object dualism found in Kant has nourished a problematic tendency in Soviet Marxism. This tendency can best be dubbed as “ontologism”. If Kant famously had insisted, that before trying to say anything definite about Being, about the world around us, we should ask the gnoseological question, the adherents of ontology instead start outright with propositions concerning the Being. As the present-day Russian philosopher and pupil of Ilyenkov, Sergei Mareev ironically comments, this equals to a return to the views of Christian Wolff, the 18th century metaphysician who was first to coin the term ‘ontology’: “In essence, the dogmatism of Diamat secured itself with the help of ‘ontology’ […] [I]n this manner, Wolffianism triumphed over the critical philosophy of Kant. They went backwards from Kant – to Christian Wolff and the French materialists who sought to construct a system”.28 Lenin, of course, is nor an ‘ontologist’ of Wolffian brand, but by disregarding the importance of Kant he has left a back door open for his followers to pursue an ontological version of Marxist philosophy. The ontologising tendency can be found already in the first serious Soviet attempts to describe Lenin’s philosophical views. For example, Ivan Luppol in his aforementioned book underlines, that the dialectical method of Marx and Engels lead, when applied consistently, “to a certain picture of world, to dialectical materialism as an ontology”.29

This all is quite paradoxical already because in Lenin, there actually are clear parallels to Kant’s solutions in favour of the primacy of epistemology in philosophy. A striking one can be found in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, where we find the famous definition of matter, quoted innumerable times in the publications of Soviet philosophers: “….for the concept matter, as we already stated, epistemologically implies nothing but objective reality existing independently of the human mind and reflected by it“.30 If we take this formulation as it is, there does not seem to be any significant difference between Lenin’s concept of matter and Kant’s concept of a thing-in-itself. Both are, pro primo, concepts which try to establish the objectivity of our knowledge of the outer world, and, pro secundo, they are “liminal concepts”

26 V. I. Lenin, Philosophical notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p. 264. The expression Ideenmystik (mysticism of the ideas) comes from Marx’s characterisation of Hegel’s dialectics.

27 V. I. Lenin, Philosophical notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p. 281

28 Interview with Sergei Mareev, in: Alex Levant, Vesa Oittinen (eds.), Dialectics of the Ideal, Leiden: Brill 2014, p. 84 (Historical Materialism book series, vol. 60)

29 I. Luppol, op. cit., p. 114

30 V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, CW vol. 14, p. 261LENIN’S DIALECTICS 12

(Grenzbegriffe), intended not so much to supply us with new knowledge as to define the boundaries of knowledge in general.

LENIN ON “ELEMENTS OF DIALECTICS”

The greatest part of Lenin’s conspect of Hegel’s Logic is a referate only, where Lenin makes either direct quotations from Hegel’s text or retells the content of the relevant passages in his own words. In reading Lenin’s notes on Hegel, one should bear in mind that they were as such not intended for publication, and so they must be interpreted with a certain caution. Kevin Anderson seems now and then to forget this hermeneutic rule, for example when he quotes from Lenin the note: “The idea of the transformation of the ideal into the real is profound! […] Against vulgar materialism. NB. The difference of the ideal from the material is also not unconditional, not boundless”,31 and then comments that this passage is “the turning point”, where “Lenin begins to identify himself fairly openly with Hegel’s idealism”.32 However, even a superficial look at Lenin’s later, published texts on philosophy should have made it clear that Lenin did not retreat a millimeter from his previous materialist positions. So Lenin in the passage quoted by Anderson must either only sum up Hegel’s view, not his own, or then he has quickly again changed his mind on this central question of philosophy almost immediately he had jotted down the sentence in question.

Although it is not always easy to distinguish passages and formulations only resuming up Hegel’s views from those expressing Lenin’s own thoughts, there are some passages in the Hegel conspectus, where Lenin steps aside from rewriting Hegel and formulates some reflections concerning what he just has read. One such passage is at the end of the notes on Science of Logics, with the title Summary of Dialectics; another is a longer fragment, writtten in 1915, On the Question of Dialectics, which, according to the editors of Lenin’s works, “is contained in a notebook between the conspectus of Lassalle’s book on Heraclitus and the conspectus of Aristotle’s Metaphysics“.33 It seems that these fragments give the most “authentic” picture of Lenin’s ideas concerning dialectics and Hegel’s importance for Marxism.

In the first fragment, Summary of Dialectics, Lenin departs from Hegel’s definition of the “dialectical moment” in the judgement, which runs as follows: “This equally synthetic and analytic moment of the Judgment, by which [the moment] the original universality [general concept] determines itself out of itself as other in relation to itself, must be called dialectical.” 34 One almost sees Lenin shaking his head, when he comments: “A determination which is not a clear one!!”. But Lenin tries, nonetheless, to capture the essential features of Hegel’s dialectics. He lists as many as sixteen “elements of dialectics”, among them “the entire totality of the manifold relations of this thing to others”; the idea of development; the thing or phenomen as the sum and unity of opposites; “not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every

31 V. I. Lenin, Philosophical notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p. 114


33 V. I. Lenin, CW vol. 38, p.

34 In the original: “Dieses so sehr synthetische als analytische Moment des Urteils, wodurch das anfängliche Allgemeine aus ihm selbst als das Andere Seiner sich bestimmt, ist das dialektische zu nennen” (Lenin’s quotation from Hegel, CW vol. 38, p. ).


determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other“; “the endless process of the discovery of new sides, relations, etc.“; “the repetition at a higher stage of certain features, properties, etc., of the lower “, and “ the apparent return to the old (negation of the negation)“.35

If one considers more closely all these definitions of the “elements” of dialectics, it becomes soon obvious, that they are mostly nothing else but further specifications of the view on dialectics which Lenin had already long before the assumed “turn” of 1914. Even in the Philosophical Notebooks, dialectics is for Lenin above all a theory of concreteness, a method of taking into account all the details and sides of the phenomen to be analysed.

This impression gets confirmed when we read the second fragment, On the Question of Dialectics, which is apparently written a bit later than the previous one. Here Lenin first mentions “unity of opposites” as a characteristic of dialectics, but continues then: “Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade)—here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with ‘metaphysical’ materialism”.36 He stresses the richness, many-sidedness, concreteness of the dialectical research:

Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism.37

I think it is not necessary to dwell long upon the point that “rectilinearity and one-sidedness”, as well as “petrification” and “subjectivism” all characterise, for Lenin, both the Machian idealism he fought in the Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and the alleged Kantianism (in reality, Neo-Kantianism) of the revisionists in the Second International, against which Lenin sought philosophical weapons in his Notebooks of 1914—1915. In both cases, Lenin’s interests are not purely theoretical, but are mixed with political motives. One should not try to find in Lenin any “unpartial” philosophical inquiry, irrespective of the political and social situation of the day.

Lenin’s attempt to fix the elements of dialectics in a series of points, misses several important characteristics of Hegel’s thought. Above all, Lenin does not take sufficiently into account, that the deepest motive of Hegel, namely his insisting on that the duality or contradiction between substance and subject must be overcome, was a critique of the modern idea of subjectivity. This overcoming presupposes an objective-idealistic approach. According to Hegel, there are already “germs” of

35 V. I. Lenin, CW vol. 38, p.

36 V. I. Lenin, CW vol. 38, p. 360

37 ibid., p.LENIN’S DIALECTICS 14

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/m/a.htm#materialism

ideality in the matter (i.e. the opposition between spirit and matter is relative only), and the task of the dialectical exposition is to show how these germs develop into a full-fledged ideality. The result is a successive series of sublations, which, taken together, constitute what Hegel famously called “Exposition of God as He was before the creation of world and the finite spirit”.38 The dualist thinker whom Hegel above all wanted to overcome, was Immanuel Kant, and one does not go altogether wrong characterising Hegel’s whole Logic as a grandious attempt to refute Kant. It was for Hegel important to remove the Kantian dualism between the (transcendental) Ego and the things-in-themselves, a dualism which according to him generated but pernicious abstractions.

* * *

Lenin may well be right – indeed, I believe he is– when he says that a “living, many-sided knowledge” is one of the hallmarks of the dialectical approach. But this said, we do not find in Lenin any explicite formulation of a dialectical logic – if we understand with “logic” some coherent order of categories. This runs counter to the suggestions of many Soviet philosophers with the reputation of being “Hegelians”, who have claimed that Lenin gives us a materialist interpretation of Hegel’s dialectics. We find in Lenin many interesting and acute comments on Hegel’s philosophy, made from a materialist point of view. But they remain scattered, fragmentary and do not form a coherent whole. If Lenin, as a Marxist, would have turned Hegel upside down (as the saying goes), it would have presupposed that he develops – or at least sketches – a materialist system of categories. But we find nothing like that in Lenin’s published works or in his Nachlass.

In the Philosophical Notebooks, there is an often quoted “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 !!”.39 The note is undoubtley directed against the “unphilosophical” reading of Marx’s economic theory by such II International theoreticians as Kautsky. By the first chapter of Capital, Lenin refers to the dialectical deduction of value-forms, which Marx undertook and which he said was the most difficult part of his work. It is striking, however, that in no work of Lenin himself we do not find any attempts at a similar deduction or “dialectical exposition” of the results of the research. Marx said in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, that his method consist actually of two parts, of “inquiry” (Forschung) and “presentation” or “exposition” (Darstellung): “Of course, the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection”. Only when this is done, the the second paert, that of a presentation, becomes possible.40 This second phase of the method, the “presentation” of the results of analytical research in a dialectical form, is absent in Lenin.

38 G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, I, (Einleitung), in: Hegel, Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1999, p. 34

39 V. I. Lenin, CW, vol. 38, p. 180

40 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, in: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, London: Lawerence & Wishart, vol. 35, p. 19


One might maybe object, that Lenin, like Marx and other genuine Marxist philosophers, intends to take from Hegel only the method, not the system of categories. This argument reflects the old system vs. method dispute among the Marxists, which was initiated by Engels’s comments on the discrepancy between the revolutionary method and conservative system in Hegel. But actually, it seems to me, that with the “system” Engels meant above all Hegels so-called “real philosophy” (Realphilosophie), that is, philosophies of nature, history, art and religion. The method would thus consist of pure logics, which, according to the ambitious words of Hegel, is nothing else but “the exposition of God as He was before the creation of world and the finite spirit”.

However, if we open Hegel’s Grand Logic, we will soon find that logics and the method are not quite identical. Logics consists of categories and rules of judgement and interferences, which can be arranged in a system – in other words, we meet here again the “conservative” system, although now in its most abstract form. The essential core of the method lies deeper. It cannot be catched up in a net of logical categories and rules. Hegel describes it as follows.41 It may seem that the method is nothing else but the way and manner of how we cognise things. But a closer look reveals that the method is a “modality of cognition” determined by the concepts, but so, that the logical moment is but an “external form” to it. Actually, the method does not consist of single moments of the logical chain, but of its “entire course”; it is nothing but “the movement of the concept”. In other words, the method does not consist so much of fixed concepts, but functions as if their vehicle. Here, the means of language begin to fail, and Hegel turns obscure, even mystical. The method, he says now,

must be acknowledged as the general, unlimited [...] and absolutely infinite power, to which no object can resist, no object, which presents itself as something external, alien to the reason and independent from it.42

For everyone who is versed in classical German philosophy, these words sound familiar despite their nebulous character. Hegel describes here as the innermost core of the method nothing else than that which for Kant was the distinguishing feature of subjectivity: the spontaneity. This was a character that Kant did not try to explain in detail, noting only that it is something which constitutes the essence of man and his activity. This is a point where Hegel and Kant, the two old adversaries, finally coincide. And as to Lenin, his “dialectics” proves in the last instance to be nothing else but just this kind of method: an all-penetrating analysing gaze, “…a gaze by which ‘kein Object durchdrungen werden könnte’, to express it in Hegel’s words”..

T A N T U M

41 G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, Bd. II, in: Hegel, Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden, Bd. 4, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1999, p. 237 sqq. (last chapter of the work, ”Die absolute idee”).

42 op. cit., p. 238. In original: ” als die ohne Einschränkung allgemeine, […] und als die schlechthin unendliche Kraft anzuerkennen, welcher kein Object, insofern er sich als ein Aeusserliches, der Vernunft ferne und von ihr unabhängiges präsentirt, Widerstand leisten, […] und von ihr nicht durchdrungen werden konnte”.


Vesa OittinenProfessor, Ph. D., Docent

Aleksanteri InstituteP.O.Box 42 (Unioninkatu 33)

FIN - 00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKIFinland

[email protected]://www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/


http://www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/

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