Abstract
The paper deals with the character of Lenin’s ‘dialectics,’ of which there has, until recently, been many erroneous interpretations. I attempt to show that Lenin’s idea of a dialectical method in most cases boils down to the demand of a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” This demand Lenin turned against the un-dialectical and dogmatic interpretations of Marxism of the Second International. Actually, Lenin’s idea of dialectics as, above all, a method of a concrete analysis is not borrowed from Plekhanov or other Marxist theoreticians, but from the Narodnik writer Alexander Herzen. As to the claim that Lenin changed his mind after 1914 when he began to study Hegel’s ‘Logic’, there is no evidence to support the thesis. Lenin did not abandon the positions he had taken earlier, in 1907, in his ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.’ This is obvious from his writings after the October Revolution of 1917; for example, in the notes he criticizes Bukharin’s inability to use dialectics correctly (i.e. to make a concrete analysis).
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Notes
- 1.
A part of the Notebooks was, however, made accessible already in 1925 in Pod znamenem marksizma (issue 1-2/1925). It should be mentioned here that 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 ’s philosophy, which Lenin wrote down in 1914 and 1915. The earliest text in the volume is a conspectus of Marx and Engels’ The Holy Family (1895), and it contains further marginal notes from Lenin in different books on philosophy from over a long period. So one might speak of Philosophical Notebooks in sensu lato and sensu stricto. In this chapter, I refer to them in the latter sense, i.e. containing the excerpts from Hegel ’s works.
- 2.
German translation: I. Luppol , Lenin und die Philosophie, Wien: Verlag für Literatur und Politik, 1929.
- 3.
For details of the discussions of the 1920s, which were 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.
- 4.
Kevin Anderson , Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995, p. 34.
- 5.
Anderson , op. cit., p. 40.
- 6.
Anderson , op. cit., p. 251.
- 7.
V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism , in: Collected Works, vol. 14.
- 8.
V.I. Lenin, On the Significance of Militant Materialism, in: CW vol. 33, especially: “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 that are being raised by the revolution in natural science and which make the intellectual admirers of bourgeois fashion ‘stumble’ into reaction”.
- 9.
Letter to Gorky, 25. 11. 1908, in: CW vol. 13. Actually, in the Russian original, Lenin’s expression is yet stronger: he calls himself a ryadovoi marksist, that is, a “low-ranking soldier” of Marxism.
- 10.
I.K. Pantin, Filosofija politicheskogo deistvija V.I. Lenina, in: Lenin online. 13 professorov o V.I.Uljanove-Lenine, Moskva: URSS, 2010, p. 135.
- 11.
Pantin, op. cit., p. 134.
- 12.
Of course, the Narodniks did not constitute a homogeneous movement. A useful study of the Narodniks available in English is Franco Venturi’s Roots of Revolution, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960.
- 13.
N.K. Mikhailovsky, Karl Marks pered sudom g. Yu. Zhukovskogo, in: Otechestvennye Zapisky No. 10, October 1877.
- 14.
Karl Marx, Letter to the Editor of the Otechestvennye Zapisky, November 1877.
- 15.
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 Press, 1982, p. 274. Later, Vodolazov presented the results of his dissertation in a popular book: Ot Chenyshevskogo k Plekhanovu, Moskva: MGU, 1969.
- 16.
G.V. Plekhanov , Our Differences, in: Selected Philosophical Works Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974, p. 274.
- 17.
V.I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in: CW, vol. 7, p. 409.
- 18.
V.I. Lenin, One Step Forward …, CW vol. 7, p. 482.
- 19.
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.
- 20.
Robert Mayer, “Lenin and the Practice of Dialectical Thinking,” in: Science & Society 63:1 (1999), p. 46.
- 21.
Kevin Anderson , op. cit., p. 3, the rubric.
- 22.
Lars T. Lih, Lenin, London: Reaktion Books, 2011, p. 125.
- 23.
James D. White, “Lenin and Philosophy: The Historical Context,” in: Europe-Asia Studies vol. 67:1, 2015, pp. 123–142.
- 24.
V.I. Lenin, The Marx–Engels Correspondence, in: CW vol. 19.
- 25.
V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in: CW vol. 38.
- 26.
V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in: CW vol. 38. Actually, he had made the same identification in the above-quoted 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).
- 27.
V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p. 179.
- 28.
V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in: CW vol. 38, p. 114.
- 29.
Anderson , op. cit., p. 40.
- 30.
V.I. Lenin, CW vol. 38, p. 580.
- 31.
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. 220).
- 32.
V.I. Lenin, CW vol. 38, pp. 220–221.
- 33.
V.I. Lenin, CW vol. 38, p. 360.
- 34.
ibid.
- 35.
G.W.F. Hegel , Wissenschaft der Logik, I (Einleitung), in: Hegel , Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999, p. 34.
- 36.
V.I. Lenin, CW vol. 36, p. 595.
- 37.
Kevin Anderson , “Lenin, Bukharin and the Marxian Concept of Dialectics and Imperialism: A Study in Contrasts”, in: Journal of Political and Military Sociology 1987, vol. 15 (Fall), pp. 197–212. The date “30. V. 1920” is written by Lenin towards the end of the book (p. 401).
- 38.
Richard B. Day, “Dialectical Method in the Political Writings of Lenin and Bukharin”, in: Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, vol. 9:2 (June 1976), pp. 244–260; available also as electronic version in: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230922.
- 39.
See V.I. Lenin, Zamechanija na knigu N.I. Bukharina: “Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda”. Maj 1920, in: Leninskij sbornik X, Moskva–Leningrad 1929, pp. 345–403.
- 40.
Lenin, Zamechanija, p. 348.
- 41.
op. cit., p. 361. In original: “Диалектич(еск)ий пр(о)ц(е)сс. Именно! А не схоластика à la Богд(ано)в. Автор ставит его рядом (и на 2 месте) с Begriffsscholastik Богданова. Но рядом поставить нельзя: или—или.
- 42.
In his later prison notebooks of 1937, the Philosophical Arabesques, Bukharin included a ponderous and strangely affective verdict against “solipsism.” It seems to me that it is an attempt to get rid of just this accusation here in Lenin’s notes.
- 43.
op. cit. p. 385.
- 44.
op. cit. p. 387.
- 45.
op. cit., pp. 400–401.
- 46.
op. cit., p. 378.
- 47.
op. cit., p. 399.
- 48.
op. cit., p. 402.
- 49.
See, for example, Evald Ilyenkov in his seminal work Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital , published in 1960, in the initial phase of Khrushchev’s “thaw” period. This work introduced again, after the demise of the Deborin school in 1929, a “Hegelian” interpretation of Marxism in the Soviet Union. Ilyenkov declares “the ascent from abstract to the concrete” as the quintessence of both Hegel ’s and Marx’s method and lets the reader know, that Lenin, too, was an adherent of this method: “A ‘logical argument’ of the ‘on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand’ type, an argument more or less accidentally isolating various aspects of the objects and placing them in more or less accidental connection, was rightly ridiculed by Lenin as argument in the spirit of scholastic formal logic […]. If the Party reasoned about trade unions according to this principle, there could be no hope for any principled, scientifically worked-out political line. It would have been tantamount to a complete rejection of a theoretical attitude to things in general” (Evald Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital , Chap. 2; (cited here according to the Internet version, in: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra2.htm).
Literature
Anderson, Kevin, “Lenin, Bukharin and the Marxian Concept of Dialectics and Imperialism: A Study in Contrasts,” in: Journal of Political and Military Sociology 1987, vol. 15 (Fall).
Anderson, Kevin, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995.
Bukharin, Nikolai, Philosophical Arabesques, New York: Monthly Review Press 2005.
Day, Richard B., “Dialectical Method in the Political Writings of Lenin and Bukharin,” in: Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, vol. 9:2 (June 1976), pp. 244–260; available also as electronic version in: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230922.
Hegel, G. W. F., Wissenschaft der Logik, I (Einleitung), in: Hegel, Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1999.
Ilyenkov, Evald, The Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, Internet version, in: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra2.htm.
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Lenin, V. I., Zamechanija na knigu N. I. Bukharina: “Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda.” Maj 1920, in: Leninskij sbornik X, Moskva-Leningrad 1929.
Luppol, I., Lenin und die Philosophie, Wien: Verlag für Literatur und Politik 1929.
Mayer, Robert, “Lenin and the Practice of Dialectical Thinking,” in: Science & Society 63:1 (1999).
Mikhailovskij, N. K., Karl Marks pered sudom g. Yu. Zhukovskogo, in: Otechestvennye Zapisky No. 10, October 1877.
Pantin, I. K., Filosofija politicheskogo deistvija V. I. Lenina, in: Lenin online. 13 professorov o V.I.Uljanove-Lenine, Moskva: URSS 2010.
Plekhanov, G. V., Our Differences, in: Selected Philosophical Works Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1974.
Venturi, Franco, Roots of Revolution, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1960.
Vodolazov, G. G., Osobennosti razvitiya sotsialisticheskoi mysli v Rossii v otrazhenii russkoi zhurnalistiki 60–70-kh godov XIX v. Avtoreferat dissertatsii, Moskva, MGU, fakultet zhurnalistiki 1967.
Vodolazov, G. G., Ot Chenyshevskogo k Plekhanovu, Moskva: MGU 1969.
White, James D., “Lenin and Philosophy: The Historical Context,” in: Europe–Asia Studies vol. 67:1, 2015.
Yakhot, Yehoshua, The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR (the 1920s and 1930s), Oak Park (Michigan): Mehring Books 2012.
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Oittinen, V. (2018). Which Kind of Dialectician Was Lenin?. In: Rockmore, T., Levine, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51650-3_2
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