Written: 1970
Source: The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (#4516)
Published: originally published in the journal Telos, No. 5, Spring 1970;
Transcribed, proofed: and corrected by Chris Gilligan, 2024.
A version of this article was published as Chapter 3, 'The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin', of Dunayevskaya's Philosophy and Revolution (1973).
Note on transcribing. The copy in the MIA Dunayevskaya Archive has some hand-written corrections, that appear to be made by Dunayevskaya herself. These corrections have been incorporated in the present version. The transcriber has also taken the liberty of correcting some spelling errors that were in the archived version.
The simultaneous outbreak of World War I and the voting of war credits to the Kaiser's government by the German Social Democracy, took from under Lenin the philosophical grounding which up until then he had considered impregnable. By August 4,.1914, all of the concepts previously held in common by the various tendencies within the marxist movement were altogether destroyed. Before that time, all marxists were agreed that the material conditions provided the basis for the creation of a new social order, that the more advanced these conditions were, the better prepared the proletariat would be for stripping the bourgeoisie of their power, and, finally, that the larger the mass party and the more mature its marxist leadership, the more certain the road to revolution. The material foundation provided the real basis for the explanation of the ideal, or consciousness. To believe otherwise was considered philosophical idealism, bourgeois apologetics, and clerical obscurantism.
Now marxist revolutionaries were faced with a shocking new development: the marxist leaders were the ones responsible for the workers being set against each other rather than against their real enemy, world capitalism. Making the situation even worse was the fact that these leaders were recognized as such by the entire International, Bolsheviks included, and were the head of what was then the largest mass party. Moreover, this took place in the most technologically advanced country at that time, the German Social Democracy. Confronted with the inadequacy of all previous conceptions regarding the relationship between the material base and the level of consciousness, the subjective and the objective, the universal and the particular, Lenin was forced to search for a new philosophy. Had Hegel never existed, Lenin would have had to invent him, since the hegelian dialectic was to provide Lenin with the basis for the reconstruction of his philosophical perspective. It was not that Lenin had any doubts concerning his opposition to the imperialist war. Rather, he was adamant in his opposition to any "indiscriminate unity"1 and would not abandon the most extreme and unequivocal of slogans: the defeat of one's own country is the lesser evil; turn the imperialist war into a civil one. (This position was in conflict with that of other revolutionaries of the time, however, who, being so overwhelmed by the collapse of the Second International, they considered it necessary to limit the "struggle for peace" to one which would unite all the tendencies that had not betrayed revolutionary internationalism.) In a word, for Lenin, what was needed was not to pick up the pieces of what once was, but rather, to separate entirely from the Second International, with the creation of a Third. The events of 1914 did not cast doubt on his Bolshevik politics and organization; what was put into question was the old materialism, lacking the principle of the "transformation into its opposite": the dialectic itself. This was what Lenin was to emphasize in the hegelian dialectic.
While other revolutionaries ran around without reorganizing their thinking, Lenin was eagerly looking for a new philosophical perspective. Thus, as soon as he reached Bern-in September 1914, even with the war in full force, Lenin headed for the library to grapple with the works of Hegel, especially his Science Of Logic. For an uncompromising revolutionary such as Lenin to spend his days in the Bern library while the whole world was going to pieces - including the marxist movement - must have indeed presented a strange and incomprehensible sight. Nevertheless, for an entire year Lenin studied Hegel's logic.2 And just as his slogan "turn the imperialist war into a civil war" became the political Great Divide in marxism, so his Abstract of Hegel's Logic became the philosophic foundation for all serious writing that Lenin was to do during the rest of his life: from Imperialism and State and Revolution on the eve of November 1917, through the works written during the Revolution, to his Will.
Cautiously Lenin turned to Hegel, forever reminding himself that he was reading him "materialistically", and, as such, was "consigning God and the philosophic rabble that defends God to the rubbish heap". At the same time, however, he was hit with the shock of recognition that the Hegelian dialectic was revolutionary, and that Hegel's dialectic, in fact, preceded Marx's own "application" of it in the Communist Manifesto. "Who would believe", Lenin exclaimed, "that this [movement and self-movement] is the core of Hegelianism, of abstract and abstruse (difficult, absurd?) Hegelianism?? ... The idea of universal movement and change (1813 Logic) was disclosed before its application to life and society. It was proclaimed in reference to society (1847)* earlier than in relation to man (1859)**."3
To grasp the full impact that this reading of Hegel had upon Lenin, we should keep in mind the fact that Lenin did not know Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. As he read the Science of Logic, Lenin was thinking about Marx's Capital as well as his struggle with "vulgar materialism." Thus, even as he argued with Hegel, designating the section of "Being-for-Self" in the Doctrine of Being as "dark waters", he continued to say: "The idea of the transformation of the ideal into the real is profound. Very important for history. But also in the personal life of man it is evident that there is much truth in this. Against vulgar materialism. NB. The difference of the ideal from the material is also not unconditional, nor uberschwenglich."4
It is this discovery of the relationship between the ideal and the material in Hegel, that led Lenin to see that the revolutionary spirit of the dialectic was not superimposed by Marx on Hegel, but was already present in Hegel's own work. While dealing with the Doctrine of Being, he had already stressed both the identity of, and transformation into, opposites: "Dialectic is the doctrine of the identity of opposites - how they can be and how they become - under which conditions they become identical, transforming one into the other ..."5 While dealing with the Doctrine of Essence, the stress was first and foremost on self-movement. As he indicated with his comments concerning The Law of Contradiction, his stress was not so much on the identity of opposites as it was on "the transition from one to the other and the sharpening of the contradiction. Yet, he had such a comprehensive knowledge of the totality that even causality became but a "moment" of the whole: "Cause and effect, ergo, only moments of every kind of interdependence, connection (of the universal), concatenation of events are only links in the chain of the development of matter." NB. All-sidedness and all-embracing character of world connection are only one-sidedly, desultorily and incompletely expressed by causality".6
In the final section on Essence, Lenin broke with the materialism and empiricism that had overemphasized science and the category of causality in explaining the relationship of mind and matter. "Iron economic laws" and "essence" had constantly been contrasted to "appearance", as if, thereby, the totality of a problem had been exhausted. What now became crucial for Lenin was the hegelian concept of "moments": "The essence is that both the world of appearance and the world which is in itself are essentially moments of the knowledge of nature by man, steps, changes in (or deepening of) knowledge."7
Lenin also kept arguing with himself. At the same time that he mercilessly criticized Hegel's "mysticism and empty pedantry", he also stressed the profundity of the dialectic, the "idea of genius". By the time Lenin reached The Doctrine of the Notion - and it is here that he broke with his own philosophic past - he underscored the materialist elements present in Hegel: "When Hegel tries - sometimes even strains himself and worries to death - to subsume the purposeful activity of men under the categories of logic, saying that this activity is the "syllogism", that the subject plays the role of some sort of 'member' in the logical 'figure' of the syllogism, etc., then this is not only a strain, not only a game. There is here a very deep content, purely materialistic. It is necessary to turn this around: The practical activity of man, repeated billions of times, must lead the consciousness of man to the repetition of the various logical figures in order that these can achieve the significance of an axiom This nota bene."8
Lenin's Abstract of Hegel's Science of Logic reveals a mind in action, arguing with himself as well as with Hegel, advising himself "to return to" Hegel, "to work out" ideas, history, science, Marx's Capital, and current theories, jamming up opposites, and leaping into the Notion which he translated as "NB. Freedom=subjectivity ('or') goal, consciousness, striving NB."9 Precisely because of this, the Abstract is an exciting experience for his readers as well. No sooner had Lenin designated the first section of the Notion by saying that "these parts of the work should be called: a best means of getting a headache", than he also emphasized the following: "NB. Hegel's analysis of the Syllogism (I-P-U, 'individual, particular, universal', P-I-U, etc.) is reminiscent of Marx's imitation of Hegel in Chapter 1."10 Later Lenin pointed out the close relationship between Marx's Capital and Hegel's Logic: "If Marx did not leave a Logic (with a capital letter), he left the logic of capital, and this should be especially utilized on the given question. In Capital, the logic, dialectic and theory of knowledge of materialism (3 words are not necessary: they are one and the same) are applied to one science, taking all that is valuable in Hegel and moving it forward."11 But while dealing with section one of The Doctrine of the Notion, Lenin found it necessary to break not only with Plekhanov, but also with his own views. Three aphorisms quickly follow one after the other: "(1) Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism (and agnosticism in general)" more from the vulgar materialistic than the dialectic materialist point of view ... (2) At the beginning of the 20th century) Marxists criticized the Kantians and Humeans more in a Feuerbachian (and Buchnerian), than in a Hegelian manner. (3) It is impossible to fully grasp Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past half century have understood Marx!!!"12
The epigones who deny that Lenin was also thinking of himself, must explain what Lenin meant by the additional remark alongside the first two aphorisms, i.e., "Concerning the question of the criticism of modern Kantianism, Machism, etc.?" Was it not his own Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which dealt so extensively with "Machism"? The point is not, of course, to simply mention names for their own sake, much less, to investigate whether or not the aphorisms contain exaggerations. No one had written more profoundly than Lenin on Marx's Capital, especially on Volume II, and Lenin certainly did not mean that all students of Capital must first labor through the two volumes of the Science of Logic. What was crucial and what he saw looming before him, was a great philosophic debate directed not so much against Hegel, as against Plekhanov. Here, he sensed a conflict with his philosophic past. In fact, he even began to feel uneasy with his essay, "Karl Marx", which he had just completed for the Encyclopedia Granat.
Calling attention to the fact that Lenin's essay began with a discussion of philosophic materialism and dialectics. Krupskaya commented that "this was not the usual way of presenting Marx's techniques".13 That was certainly true. What Krupskaya did not mention was that this departure from previous analyses had not been sufficiently concrete to satisfy Lenin's new understanding of the dialectic, especially since he had just finished the entire Logic. The essay was written during July-November, 1914. Lenin had begun studying the Logic in September and completed it on December 17, 1914. This,along with the date on a new letter to Granat, January 14, 1916, helps us to determine the point at which Lenin's thought went through a significant change. In any case, with typical precision, Lenin wrote Granat: "By the way, will there not still be time for certain corrections in the section on dialectics? ... I have been studying this question of dialectics for the last month and a half and I think I could add something to it if there was time ...".
Lenin's break with old concepts is nowhere clearer than in his remarks concerning the relationship between theory and practice. Thus, even when Lenin spoke of practice, he stressed that Hegel dealt with practice "in the theory of cognition". And even Lenin himself tended to soar: "Alias: Man's cognition not only reflects the objective world, but also creates it".14
How far we have travelled from the "photocopy" theory of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism! And yet it is not because Lenin had forgotten his materialist roots, or his revolutionary views on class consciousness. Rather, Lenin had gained from Hegel a totally new understanding of the unity of materialism and idealism. It was this new understanding that subsequently permeated Lenin's post-1915 writings in philosophy, politics, economics and organization. Always stressing the concrete, Lenin interpreted Hegel's remark about the "non-actuality of the world" to mean: "The world does not satisfy man, and man decides to change it by his activity".
Lenin had not soared into abstraction in gaining a new appreciation of idealism. It is simply that in his new understanding of Hegel, the notion of the Absolute Idea lost its sinister connotations. This not due either to Lenin's conversion from a revolutionary materialist to a "bourgeois idealist", nor to any acceptance of an hegelian concept of God or some self-unfolding "World Spirit". Rather, Lenin saw that, although Hegel dealt only with thought-entities, the movement of "pure thought" does not just "reflect" reality. The dialectic of both is a process, and the Absolute is "absolute negativity".15 Lenin's grasp of the second negation, which Hegel called "the turning point",16 led Lenin to question Hegel's diversion to the numbers' game, i.e., whether the dialectic is a "triplicity" or "quadruplicity", with the resulting contrasting of "simple" and "absolulte". Lenin commented: "The difference is not clear to me; is not the absolute equivalent to the more concrete?"17 thus interpreting both absolute and relative as developmental "moments".
When Lenin finished reading the Science of Logic, he was no longer disturbed by the notion of the Absolute Idea "going to nature". Instead, he claimed that, in so doing, Hegel "stretches a hand to materialism". He writes: "It is noteworthy that the whole chapter on the 'Absolute Idea' scarcely says a word about God (hardly ever had a 'divine' 'Notion' slipped out accidentally) and apart from that - this NB. - it contains almost nothing that is specifically idealism, but has for its main subject the dialectical method ... And one thing more: in this most idealistic of Hegel's works there is the least idealism and the most materialism. 'Contradictory', but a fact!".18
Lenin did not feel the kind of excitement that he had experienced in reading the Logic when he turned to, Hegel's History of Philosophy. But it is in this stage that he completed the final break with Plekhanov: "NB. Work out: Plekhanov probably wrote nearly 1,000 pages (Beltov + against Bogdanov + against Kantians + basic questions, etc., etc. on philosophy [dialectic]). There is in, them nil about the Larger Logic, its thoughts (i.e., dialectic proper, as a philosophic science) nil!!"19
Furthermore, when he proceeded to summarize in a somewhat orderly fashion the meaning of the dialectic after he had gone through Hegel's major works,^ he even criticized Engels: "The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of it's contradictory parts ... is the essence ... of dialectics ... This aspect of dialectics (e.g., in Plekhanov) usually receives inadequate attention: the identity of opposites is taken as the sum-total of examples 'for example, a seed', 'for example, primitive communism'. The same is true of Engels. But it is 'in the interests of popularization ...".20 So great is Lenin's appreciation of dialectics that even in his references to "clerical obscurantism", a "sterile flower" is expanded to mean "a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge."
The last quotation was from Lenin's only article specifically dealing with the dialectic, as against Lenin's comments on the margin of other work - mainly Hegel's. Though not prepared for publication, this, at least, has never been treated as mere "jottings". It is the last word we have from Lenin's strictly philosophic commentary of the crucial 1914-1915 period. Lenin had not prepared his Philosophic Notebooks for publication. Thus, they remained "private". Since it seemed that Lenin simply continued with his economic studies, political theses, and organizational work, and since factional polemics continued unabatedly, Lenin's heirs were not prepared to face a most confusing, totally contradictory double vision: On the one hand, there was the well-known vulgar materialist Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and on the other; endless references to dialectics - the dialectic of history, the dialectic of revolution, the dialectic of self-determination covering both the national question and world revolution the dialectic relationship of theory, to the self-activity of the masses as well as to itself.
Both Lenin's followers and opponents knew nothing and cared less about any great philosophic divide set up by Hegel's Absolute Method. The dialectic of the development of the "pure movement of thought" and of reality battling its way through contradictions provided so total a unity of subject and object that Lenin, the revolutionary materialist, could copy the philosophical concept of "subjective" from Hegel, the idealist, and lay special stress on the last sentence: "Each new stage of exteriorization (that is, of further determination) is also an interiorization, and greater extension is also higher intensity. The richest consequently is also the must concrete and subjective ...".21
How could anyone imagine that the "philosophic neutralist" who, for a long period, had even accepted "Machists" into the Bolshevik ranks just so long as they accepted ''Bolshevik discipline", could come under the spell of what he called "the dialectic proper", and that this dialectic proper was to become Lenin's underlying philosophy? For his part, Lenin was faced with the fact that he had to fight not only against betrayers and Mensheviks as well as non-Bolshevik internationalists, such as Rosa Luxemburg and "the Dutch",^* but also his own small Bolshevik group abroad. And he had to do so over a subject upon which the Bolsheviks had previously agreed in principle - the self-determination of nations.
Suddenly, Lenin found himself completely alone, and the word "dialectics" kept springing up everywhere. It was no longer limited to "the transformation into opposites", such as the transformation of competition into monopoly, or of a section of labor into a "labor aristocracy". It could also explain "opportunism" and the collapse of the Second International. Dialectics was extended to revolution itself and the theoretical "enemy" was none other than the Bolshevik theoretician, Bukharin. The stark new truth was that Lenin called the Bolshevik opposition to the self-determination of nations nothing short of "imperialist economism". For our purposes, the importance of this debate is not so much in Bukharin's thesis as in his methodology, to which Lenin referred again and again, all the way to his deathbed. Lenin's ire was aroused by Bukharin's statement that "The imperialist epoch is an epoch of the absorption of small states, [that] therefore [it was] impossible to struggle against the enslavement of nations, [except] of course, [in a struggle for socialism, and that] therefore, any deviation from that road, any advancement of 'partial' tasks of the 'liberation of nations' within the realm of capitalist civilization was utopian and reactionary".22
It was the "therefore's" that Lenin most intensely opposed. He insisted that the horrors of the imperialist war had led to "the suppression of human reasoning". How could we otherwise explain the Bolsheviks' "curious errors in logic"? According to Lenin, the very transformation into its opposite of free competitive capitalist economy into monopoly imperialism and the suppression of national democracy would produce resistance. It became clear to him that the impulse to self-movement came precisely out of these contradictions, and became the dialectics of revolution. To think otherwise, Lenin insisted, was to treat the masses as the object instead of the subject of history. If the "therefore's" do not emerge out of living contradictions instead of dead substance, then socialism is nothing but an "ought". The truth is that both the proletariat and the new revolutionary forces - the national minorities - were arising and struggling for the self-determination of nations. As the Irish Easter Rebellion proved, the self-determination of nations was not just a "principle" but a reality. There had never been a "pure" revolution, and national revolts were valid both in themselves and as "baccilli" for proletarian revolutions.
Dialectics, the "algebra of revolution",23 has been on many great adventures since Hegel formulated it on the basis of the activity of the French masses,24 and it has revolutionized metaphysics. What in Hegel had been a revolution in philosophy, became, with Marx, a philosophy of revolution, a totally new theory of liberation - the proletarian revolutions of 1848 culminating in the Paris Commune of 1871. Lenin's rediscovery of dialectics, of self-activity of Subject versus Substance at the very moment of the collapse of the Second International, disclosed, at one and the same time, the appearance of counter-revolution from within the marxist movements, and the new forces of revolution in the national movements. Moreover, these new forces were present not only in Europe, but throughout the world as well. What Lenin's economic study of imperialism revealed was that capitalism had gorged itself on more than one half billion people in Africa and Asia. This was to become a totally new theoretic departure after the Bolshevik conquest of power, expressed as the Thesis on the National and Colonial Question presented to the Third International in 1920.25 Even while the holocaust was most intense and Lenin stood alone, he refused to retreat an inch to abstract internationalism; The outbreak of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, while proletarians were still slaughtering each other, showed the correctness of his position on the self-determination of nations.
In 1914-1915, Lenin turned to the study of Hegel, the 'bourgeois idealist philosopher'. Whatever the reason, it certainly was not in order to discover the driving forces of revolution. Yet, Hegelian dialectics was more useful in making sense out of the action of the masses taking fate into their own hands in lreland in 1916 than the debates on the National Question with his Bolshevik colleague. 26
In 1917, the opposition to national self-determination should have ended. In fact, it only took on a new form. This time Bukharin contended that it was no longer possible to admit the right of self-determination since Russia was now a workers' state, whereas nationalism meant bourgeois and proletariat together, and 'therefore', a step backward. In his admission that in some cases he would be for it, he listed, the "Hottentots, the Bushmen, and the Indians". To which Lenin replied: "Hearing this enumeration I thought, how is it that Comrade Bukharin had forgotten a small trifle, the Bashkirs? There are no Bushmen in Russia, nor have I heard that the Hottentots have laid claim to an autonomous republic, but we have Bashkirs, Kirghiz ... We cannot deny it to a single one of the peoples living within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire."27
Bukharin, for whom all the questions, from the "self-determination of nations" to state-capitalism, were "theoretical questions", may not have suffered from Russian chauvinism. But he created the theoretical premises for Stalin, who did turn the wheels of history straight back to capitalism. At the last moment - too late as it turned out -Lenin broke completely with Stalin, and in his debates with Bukharin he refused to do away with that single word, "dialectics": dialectics of the relationship of theory to practice, dialectics as the relationship of subject and object, dialectic as the movement from abstract to concrete. In place of the mechanistic bifurcation of subject and object, Lenin joined the two in a new concrete universal: "to a man".
Abstract revolutionism was the methodological enemy. Bukharin's theory of state-capitalism, the obverse side of his theory of economic development under a workers' state, is one of continuous development, a straight line leading from "unorganized" competitive capitalism to "organized" state-capitalism. On a world scale, it remains "anarchic" and subject to the "blind laws of the world market". Anarchy is "supplemented by antagonistic classes". Only the proletariat, by seizing political power, can extend "organized production" to the whole world. The fact that Bukharin believed in social revolution did not seem to stop him from dealing with labor', not as subject, but as object.
Despite the fact that Bukharin played no small role in the 1917 Revolution, his concept of revolution is so abstract that all human activity is subsumed under it. Thus, he was inescapably driven to preclude self-movement, which was precisely the reason why labor remained an object. As an object, the highest attribute Bukharin could think of assigning to labor was its becoming an "aggregate". People were referred to as "human machines."28
That a revolutionary intellectual had become so entrapped in the fundamental alienation of philosophers in a class society, identifying men with things, was a phenomenon that laid heavy on Lenin's mind as he wrote his Will. So completely did Lenin disagree with Bukharin's method of presentation that even when he agreed with the specific points, he felt it necessary to criticise them. Thus, there was certainly no disagreement about the major achievement of the Russian Revolution - the destruction of bourgeois productive relations. But when Bukharin tried to make an abstraction of it by trying to subsume productive relations under "technical relations", it became obvious to Lenin that Bukharin simply failed to understand the dialectic. Thus, when he quoted Bukharin's Economics of The Transition Period, to the effect that "once the destruction of capitalist production relations is really given, and once the theoretical impossibility of their restoration is proven ...". Lenin replied with: "'Impossibility' is demonstrable only practically. The author does not pose dialectically the relationship of theory to practice."
The most difficult relationship to work out once state power has been gained is precisely this relationship of theory to practice, for it was not only on the National Question but especially in relation to the working masses that a gulf opened between the Bolsheviks in power and the working people. And the party was surely to degenerate: "to think that we shall not be thrown back is utopian". What Lenin feared most was the sudden "passion for bossing" to take command. Unless they practice the new concrete universal, "to a man", they would be doomed: "Every citizen to a man must act as a judge and participate in the government of the country. And what is important to us is to enlist all the toilers to a man in the government of the state. That is a tremendously difficult task. But socialism cannot be introduced by a minority, a party".29
This is not the place to analyze the actual objective transformation of the workers' state into its opposite, a state-capitalist society,30 or to Stalin's usurpation of power. Of all of Stalin's "theoretical" revisions, what is relevant to our subject is his perverse concept of partiinost (partyness) in philosophy, which he and his heirs attributed to Lenin. Fortunately, there exists a most comprehensive and scholarly work on the relationship of Soviet philosophy to science which explodes the Communist and the Western ideologist myth of "partyness in philosophy" in Lenin: "In order to achieve this interpretation one must also disregard the fact that the original sources, including Materialism and Empirio-criticism itself, never suggest what (Bertram) Wolfe and the Soviet scholars attribute to Lenin. The sources show that he had a political aim in writing the book, but it was not to join the philosophical and political issues that Russian Marxists were arguing about: it was to separate them..."31
There is not a trace of partyness in the Philosophic Notebooks, not even the old concept of "the party of idealism" or the "party of materialism". What we are concerned with is not the monstrous myth of partyness in philosophy, but rather, the duality of the philosophical heritage. Far from publicly proclaiming his philosophic repudiation of Plekhanov, or his break with his own philosophic past, Lenin advised Soviet youth to study "everything Plekhanov wrote on Philosophy ..." and he reprinted his own Materialism and Empirio-criticism. We need not bother here with simplistic explanation of these actions such as the one offered by an ex-Old Bolshevik when he wrote: "And yet Lenin did not have the courage to say openly that he had thrown out, as useless, some very substantial parts of his philosophy of 1908."32 The reason for the "privacy" of his Philosophical Notebooks is at once more simple and more complex, and has nothing to do with an alleged lack of courage. The tragedy lies elsewhere, deep in the recesses of time, revolution, and counter-revolution. Too short were the years between 1914 and 1917, and between 1917 and 1923. Too great was the November Revolution in Russia, and too many the beheaded and missed revolutions elsewhere; too overwhelming the concrete problems of this great historic event, objective and subjective, including what Lenin called cultural backwardness. The pull, therefore, was for "stage-ifying". When to study what? First one read Plckhanov, then Materialism and Empirio-criticism, then ... Lenin himself continued his hegelian reading even at the height of the famine.33 Lenin was so moved by Ilyin's book on Hegel that, though the author was both religious and an enemy of the Soviet state, Lenin intervened to get him out of jail.
The duality in Lenin's philosophical heritage is unmistakable. But how can that excuse the failure to grapple with the Philosophic Notebooks on the ground that they are mere 'jottings', 'had never been intended for publication', and, therefore, it would be no more than 'idle speculation' to conclude that Lenin wished to follow one road rather than another? In any case, no one can explain away the clear public tasks he set for the editors of the newly-established philosophic organ, Pod Znamenem Marxizma (Under the Banner of Marxism),to work out a "solid philosophical ground" which he spelled out as: (1) "The systematic study of Hegelian dialectic from a materialist standpoint, i.e., the dialectic which Marx applied practically in his Capital and in his historical and political works".34 (2) "Taking as our basis Marx's method of applying the Hegelian dialectic materialistically conceived, we can and should treat his dialectic from all sides, print excerpts from Hegel's principal works...".35 "The group of editors and contributors of the magazine Under the Banner of Marxism should, in my opinion, be a kind of 'Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics'".36
This was the year 1922, the year of his most intense intellectual activity, which stretched into the first months of 1923 and the last of his great battles against the top leadership. Most of all, it was against Stalin's brutal, rude, and disloyal acts, mainly against the Georgians, that is to say, once again on the National Question - "scratch a Communist and you will find a Great Russian chauvinist." Not accidentally, Bukharin held the same position on the National Question.
As Lenin lay writhing in agony - not just physical agony, but agony over the early bureaucratization of the workers' state and its tendency to "move backwards to capitalism" - he took the measure of his co-leaders in his Will. What is relevant here is what he says of Bukharin: "Bukharin is not only the most valuable and biggest theoretician of the party, but also may legitimately be considered the favorite of the whole party; but his theoretical views can only with the very greatest doubt be regarded as fully Marxian, for there is something scholastic in him. (He has never learned, and I think never fully understood, the dialectic)".37
Clearly, "understanding the dialectic" had become the pons sini for Lenin. It was not an abstraction when it was used to describe the chief theoretician of the party. Clearly, "not understanding the dialectic" had become crucial. As the head of the first workers' state in history, witnessing the emergence of bureaucratization and national chauvinism, of both Bolshevism and non-Bolshevism being so permeated with an administrative mentality as to call for the statification of the trade unions, and the chief theoretician's views being non-dialectic and therefore not "fully Marxian", Lenin saw all these traits developing and creating problems because, in their totality, they tended to stifle rather than release the creative powers of the masses. Nothing short of sensing this danger would have prompted Lenin to take such sharp measure of those who led the greatest proletarian revolution in history.
It is the nature of truth, said Hegel, to force its way up when its time has come". He should have added, "even if only in a murky form". But then he could not have known how much a state-capitalist age can excrete to make impossible to see the truth even when it surfaces. No conspiracy was needed between "East" and "West" to keep Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks out of the reach of the masses - and then work to make it 'beyond' their understanding. It is in the nature of the administrative mentality of our state-capitalist automated age to consider hegelian philosophy, at one and the same time, the private preserve of those "in the know" and to let it remain "gibberish" to the uninitiated. And although in the "East" they bow before the founder of their state, and in the "West" sneer at Lenin's non-professional status as a philosopher, both poles find it convenient to keep apart what history has joined together - Hegel and Marx, Hegel and Lenin. In this 200th anniversary year of Hegel and the 100th anniversary year of Lenin, it is time to begin listening to the voices from below who are finding out the truth for themselves by attempting to practice the dialectic both of thought and of revolution.
1 The phrase appears in Lenin's letter to Kollontai: "you emphasize that 'we must put forward a slogan that would unite all!' I will tell you frankly that the thing I fear most at the present lime is indiscriminate unity which, I am convinced, is most dangerous and harmful to the proletariat." Quoted in Memories of Lenin, Vol. II, p. l60, by N.K. Krupskaya.
2 Actually, Lenin spent two years - 1914-1916 - in the Library, he completed the Hegel Studies in 1915, and began gathering material for his book on Imperialism.
* The reference is to the Communist Manifesto.
** The reference is to the Origin of Species.
3 The first translation of Lenin's Abstract appeared us "Appendix A" to the first edition of my work Marxism and Freedom, (New York, 1958), hereafter referred to as M&F. This translation will be used throughout but, for the reader's convenience, I will also cite the pagination in the Moscow translation (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38). See M&F, p. 331, and Vol. 38, p, 141.
4 M&F, p. 338: Vol. 38, p. 176.
5 M&F, p. 332: Vol. 38, p. 143.
6 M&F, p. 335: Vol. 38, p. 159.
7 M&F, p. 333: Vol 38, p. 153.
8 M&F, p. 343: Vol. 38, p. 190.
9 M&F, p. 336: Vol 38, p. 164.
10 M&F, p. 339; Vol. J,V, p. 178. "Chapter I" refers, of course, to Capital. It is the same chapter that Stalin, in 1943, ordered Soviet theoreticians not to follow when he decided to break with Marx's Analysis or the Law of Value as typical or Capitalism and only capitalism. See the translation from Pod Znamenem: Marxisma and my commentary on it with debate in the American Economic Review, Sept. 1944 to Sept. 1945. Ever since, it has remained a subject of controversy whenever the question or alienation and the fetishism of commodities is discussed.
11 M&F, p. 353: Vol. 38, p. 349.
12 M&F, p. 340: Vol 38, p. 180.
13 Memories of Lenin, op. cit., p. 155.
14 M&F, p. 347: Vol. 38, p. 212.
15 Ibid., p. 200.
16 Hegel, Science of Logic, Vol. II, p. 471.
17 Vol, 38, p, 231.
18 Vol. 38, p 234.
19 M&F, p. 354; Vol. 38, p. 277.
^ We do not have Lenin's notes on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, but the Notebooks on Imperialism show that he had read it while he was preparing the pamphlet on Imperialism. (The Notebooks are a massive 739 pages as against the short pamphlet that was actually published).
20 Vol. 38, p. 359, 363.
21 Science of Logic, Vol. II, p. 483; Vol. 38, p. 231.
^* Pannekoek, Gorter, Roland-Holst.
22 I will be quoting, Gankin and Fisher, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War because it quotes Bukharin's theses (see esp. pp. 219-223). But the latest and one of the finest books on the battle against national chauvinism during the period after the Bolsheviks gained power is to be found in Moshe Lewin's Lenin's Last Struggle; the most comprehensive on the National Question both before and after Bolshevism triumphed is The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, by Richard Pipes. See also my chapter on Stalin in Marxism and Freedom.
23 Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, p. 521.
24 Jarring as this may sound to the professional philosopher accustomed to tracing the dialectic from the Greeks through Kant to Hegel in the realm of thought alone, the truth of the above statement has, in recent times, been carefully traced in the works of Jean Hyppolite (Genese et Structure de al Phenomenologies de Hegel and Studies on Marx and Hegel), us well as the actual documents of Hegel's early development, Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung.
25 Sec part III, "Economic Reality and the Dialectics of Liberation", where I develop this thesis for the African revolutions in our age, in Philosophy and Revolution.
26 "I do not attribute significance to the desire to hold on to the word, 'Bolshevism'," Lenin wrote in his reply to Bukharin, "for I know some 'old Bolsheviks' from whom may God preserve me". The Bolsheviks and the World War, Gankin and Fisher, eds, p. 235.
27 Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VIII, p, 342. The whole of Part IV, "The Party Program (1918-1919)", is very valuable for the theoretical points in dispute, and have the advantage of being cast more in a theoretical frame that the factional bite of the Trade Union Dispute which can be found in Vol. IX.
28 Draft CI Program, included in Ataka, p. 121, Collection of Theoretical Articles by N. Bukharin (May, 1924, Moscow). Unfortunately, neither Bukharin's Economics of the Transition Period, nor Lenin's Commentary on it is available in English. I have used the Russian text. However, other works by N. Bukharin are available in English. These are: The World Economy and Imperialism, Historical Materialism, and individual essays which are included in other works, Cf. The Bolsheviks and the World War.
29 Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VIII, p. 324.
30 I devoted a good part of Marxism and Freedom to the study of Russian state-capitalism.
31 Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917-1932, by David Joravsky, p. 34. The two sections most relevant to our study are "Lenin and the Partyness of Philosophy", pp, 24-44, and "The Cultural Revolution and Marxist Philosophers", pp. 76-89.
32 Encounters with Lenin, by Nikolay Valentinov, p. 256.
33 The Lenin Institute has records for the year 1920, when Lenin asked for the Russian translations of Hegel's Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Mind, as well as works by Labriola, and llyin's The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and of Man. Deborin, in his "Introduction" to the Notebooks when they were finally published in 1929 (Leninski Sbornik, IX) and Adoratsky in his preface to the 1933 edition (Leninski Sbornik, XII) both refer to the Lenin Institute records, and then, without telling anything about the intrigues in the delay in publication, proceed with platitudinous praise leading to nothing concrete; they are of "great significance", "interesting", contain "leading indications regarding the direction in which further materialist dialectic should be worked out".
In this respect, llyin's works are more revealing because one sees why Hegel's analysis of the concrete influenced Lenin so much: "The first and fundamental thing that one who wishes to adequately understand and master philosophic teaching of Hegel must do is to explain to oneself his relation to the concrete empirical world ... the term, 'concrete' comes from the Latin 'concrescere'. 'Crescere' means 'to grow': 'concrescere', to coalesce, to arise through growth. Accordingly, Hegel's concrete means first of all the growing together ... The concrete empiric is something in the order of being (Sein), something real (Realitat), actuality (Wirklichkeit), something existing (Existenz), something Dasein. In its totality, this reality forms a world, a whole world of things (Dinge, Sachen), existences (Existenz), realities - the 'objective' world a realm of 'objectivity'. This real, objective world is also the concrete world, but only the empiric-concrete."
34 Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. XI, p. 77.
35 Consider the greatly overrated young French Communist philosopher, Louis Althusser, in our epoch proclaiming that "one phantom is more especially crucial than any other today: the shade of Hegel. To drive this phantom back into the night ..." And read especially how studiously he writes of Lenin as if he never had written anything beyond Materialism and Empirio-criticism/ (Lenin and Philosophy). In part II of Marxism and Freedom, (in "Alternatives") I develop the consequences of not building on the foundations left by Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks.
36 Selected Works, Vol. XI, p. 78.
37 Since Khruschev's De-Stalinization speech in 1956, Lenin's Will has finally been published in Russia and appears also in the latest edition (the fifth) of his Collected Works. However, I have the text which was first published by Trotsky, and I am therefore quoting from The Suppressed Testament of Lenin.