Century of Revolution, by Christopher Hill

[p037] necessity of revolution. Lenin lays great stress on Hegel’s insistence that Dialectics is not a master-key, a sort of set of magic numbers by which all secrets will be revealed. It is wrong to think of dialectical logic as something that is complete in itself and then ‘applied’ to particular examples. It is not a model of intepretation to be learned, then fitted on to reality from the outside; the task is rather to uncover the law of development of the reality itself. ‘ Logic is usually understood as being the “science of thinking’, the “bare form of cognition”’.’ (p. 95) ‘Dialectics has often been considered an art, as though it rested upon a subjective talent and did not belong to the objectivity of the Notion . . .’ (p. 223) So long as this is the approach then we do not get beyond the limits of formal logic, considered by Hegel to be dead and fixed, rigidly insisting on the separateness of the aspects of phenomena instead of on their transitions into one another. Hegel says logic must be ‘not abstract, dead and immobile, but concrete . > and Lenin: ‘This is characteristic! The spirit and essence of. dialectics!’ (p. 100). Consequently it is absolutely against the spirit of dialectics to artificially impose the ‘triad’ of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis on whatever process one chooses to abstract. Hegel is most explicit: ‘That this unity, as well as the whole form of the method, is a triplicity is wholly, however, the merely superficial and external side of the manner of cognition.’ (p. 230) He goes on to say that this ‘triad ’, *.. . has been rendered tedious and of ill-repute by the shallow misuse and the barrenness of modern so-called philosophic construction, which consists simply in attaching the formal framework without concept and immanent determination to all sorts of matter and employing it for external arrangement.’ It is the logic of processes themselves that must be exposed. Hegel says that dialectics has often been derided as an idle play with clever concepts, whose only aim is to sceptically demon- strate the difficulties and inconsistencies of ‘common sense’. ‘Dialectic is generally regarded as an external and negative procedure, that does not belong to the subject matter itself, that is based on pure vanity, as a subjective craving to shake and break down what is fixed and true, or that at best leads to nothing but the inaneness of the dialectically treated matter.” (pp. 97-8)

[p038] IN THE WORKSHOP OF THE REVOLUTION 35 When Hegel here asks for a method that ‘ belongs to the subject-matter itself’, he is not suggesting that only a description of what appears to the observer at first sight is required. Such descriptions are always couched in definite forms of thought, and are not ‘pure descriptions’. It is possible to record the external characteristics of phenomena, then to arrive at judgments ‘ based’ on these observations which in fact are an imposition on the ‘facts’ of some unexpressed assumption or theory. Dialectics attempts to probe to the essential self-movement of the phenomenon itself; the relations between its different aspects can then be shown as parts of a unified process, not just as separate determinations whose only interrelation is one imposed by the demands of consistency in thought. Hegel says: “ The absolute method (i.e., the method of cognition of objective truth, says Lenin) does not behave as external reflection; it draws the determinate element directly from its object itself, since it is the object’s immanent principle and soul. It was this that Plato demanded of cognition, that it should consider things in and for themselves, and while partly considering them in their universality, it should also hold fast to them, not catching at externals, examples and com- parisons, but contemplating the things alone and bringing before consciousness what is immanent in them.’ (p. 220) This ‘catching at externals, examples and com- parisons’ and ‘generalising’ from them often parades as scientific method, particularly in the study of society and politics. Instead of the law of develop- ment of things being discovered, we get instead a neat or ‘consistent’ arrangement of abstracted characteristics of similar phenémena. Lenin remarks on the sharpness of Hegel’s criticism of this method, extracting, for example, his verdict on ‘That procedure of knowledge reflecting on experi- ence, which first perceives determinations in the phenomenon, next makes them the basis, and assumes for their so-called explanation corres- ponding fundamental materials or forces which are supposed to produce these determinations of the phenomenon .. .” (p. 115) What is advanced as an explanation of a thing turns out to be only ‘Determination deduced from that for which they are meant to be the grounds—hypotheses and figments derived by an uncritical reflection.’ (p. 145) Hegel’s dialectical method is often condemned as an accommodation to the status quo, with its insistence on the ‘identity of thought and the object’. But if the dialectic is properly understood it does not lead to any such conclusion. The following quotations explain clearly the dynamic and critical nature of dialectical knowledge, and incidentally illustrate well the process by which Lenin worked at the materialist reworking of Hegel’s Logic: “The self-identity of the Idea is one with the process; and the thought which frees actuality from the semblance of purposeless changeability and transfigures it into the Idea must not imagine this truth of actuality as a dead repose or bare picture, matt, without impulse or motion, or as a genius, number, or abstract thought. In the Idea the Notion reaches freedom, and because of this the Idea con- tains also the harshest opposition; its repose consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes it, coinciding in it with itself.’ Lenin, reading Hegel materialistically, substitutes: ‘The coincidence of thought with the object is a process: thought (man) must not imagine truth in the form of dead repose, in the form of a bare picture (image), pale (matt), without impulse, without motion, like a genius, like a number, like abstract thought. ; ‘The idea contains also the strongest contradic- tion, repose (for man’s thought) consists in the firmness and certainty with which he eternally creates (this contradiction between thought and object) and eternally overcomes it...’ Finally, Lenin rewrites the passage: ‘Cognition is the eternal, endless approximation of thought to the object. The reflection of nature in man’s thought must be understood not “lifelessly”, not “abstractly”, not devoid of movement, not without contradictions, but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.’ (pp. 194-5) LENIN BEFORE AND AFTER 1914 It is customary in some circles-to claim that only when Lenin read Hegel in 1914-15 did he grasp the dialectic; indeed it is fashionable to take this as proved. In his early writings Lenin is said to have been crude and mechanical; this crudeness is sup- posed to have been most explicit in his Materialism © and Empirio-Criticism (1908), but. the implication is that his attitudes on Party organisation and political questions were rigid and dogmatic. It is important to see that this case is sustained on a very narrow base: instead of an examination of the actual work of Lenin, including Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, we are usually presented with truncated extracts from the latter work, which distort its meaning,? or with a series of short quotations from the Notebooks which are supposed to show that Lenin renounced his philosophical past.3 Raya Dunayevskaya goes so far as to say, ‘It is under the section on “Syllogism”’, where Hegel. destroys the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, that Lenin bursts forth with the aphorisms that reveal how decisive was his break with his own philosophic past.’ (my emphasis, C.S.) 2. Peter Fryer disposed of a recent critic of this type when replying to E. P. Thompson in ‘Lenin as Philo- sopher’ (Labour Review, Vol. 2, No. 5). 3. R. Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom (1958).

[p039] 36 In this passage the reference is to Lenin’s remarks on pp. 179 and 180 of the present edition, primarily the following: “Marxis‘s criticised (at the beginning of the twentieth century) the Kantians and Humanists more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Biichner) than of Hegel...’ and “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! ’ There is no examination of Lenin’s earlier works, only speculation that these passages imply a con- demnation of Lenin’s past philosophical assumptions, i.e., that he includes himself among the ‘ Marxists who did not understand Marx’. Now while there is no doubt that his reading of Hegel at the beginning of the First World War enriched Lenin’s theory, enabled him to penetrate more deeply to the essence of the contradictions of imperialism and of the working-class movement, it is quite wrong to make the rigid demarcation which is now so often made between the ‘pre-Hegelian’ and ‘post-Hegelian’ phases of his political life. Rather there is a really dialectical development in Lenin’s own work. 1914 and his work towards the 1917 Revolution and the construction of a new Communist International mark a new stage in the history of the movement, the stage when Lenin and his followers brought into the consciousness of a section of the working-class vanguard the reality of the new stage of Imperialism and the tasks with which it confronted the working class. Lenin’s study of Hegel is part of this advance, a necessary part of the process by which con- sciousness was advanced. Like every other advance in Marxism, it could only come from a man immersed in the intensive theory and practice of the living movement of society and politics for many years. If Dunayevskaya had only looked at Lenin’s whole work with the same method which he outlines in Philosophical Notebooks, instead of formally com- paring striking phrases in it with parts abstracted from other works written in different circumstances and with deliberately different emphases, then her work might have had some value to Marxism; but in fact she remains bogged down in the very formal method of which she accuses the early Lenin. Lenin could well have been pointing to his own case when he quoted so admiringly the comparison made by Hegel: Lenin writes, “Logic resembles grammar, being one thing for the beginner and another thing for one who knows the language (and languages) and the spirit of language. “It is one thing to him who approaches Logic and the Sciences in general for the first time LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 G. W. F. Hegel He took philosophy ‘to the eve’ of dialectical and historical materialism, said Lenin. and another thing for him who comes back from the sciences to Logic.” “Then logic gives “the essential character of this wealth” (the wealth of the world view), “the inner nature of spirit and of the world...’ (p. 98) Lenin is an experienced and accomplished revolu- tionary returning to Hegelian logic as logic; he brings to the task all the experience of 20 years’ struggle in the construction of a revolutionary party against tendencies reflecting the complex forces of Russian society, struggle accompanied always by a profound study of social reality and all the schools of thought expressing the interests of the classes in that reality. Thus his ‘reading’ of Hegel is full and rich, able to appreciate and expose the many- sidedness and depth of the dialectical method formally presented by Hegel. This new appreciation of the richness of the dialectical concept of know- ledge was an important part of his insistence on theory and principle. on understanding the tasks of the working class and its leadership in those years when, as he himself put it, the thinking of some Marxists was ‘depressed and oppressed’ by the war to such a degree that they departed from the interests of the class they set out to represent, advocating instead theories which tied the proletariat to the ruling class in war.

[p040] IN THE WORKSHOP OF THE REVOLUTION 37 The use of Philosophical Notebooks to discredit Lenin’s earlier work is a cover for a trend towards idealism in some critics.4 It becomes important to condemn Lenin’s exposition of the idea that know- Jedge is the reflection of objective reality, and implicitly or explicitly to condemn his concept of a ‘party of new type’ as a necessity for the socialist revolution. It is therefore necessary to dispose of claims such as Dunayevskaya’s that ‘The keynote of his Philosophical Notebooks is nothing short of a restoration of truth to philosophic idealism against vulgar materialism to which he had given the green light with his work on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.’ Dunayevskaya naturally quotes Lenin’s aphorism: ‘Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent material- ism than stupid materialism’. (He rewrote this to read: ‘Dialectical idealism is closer to intelligent [dialectical] materialism than metaphysical, un- developed, dead, crude, rigid materialism.’ p. 277.) But it is nonsense to suggest that Lenin revised his opinions on the general relationship between materialism and idealism. On page 293 of the Notebooks, he writes, after the notes on Logic, after the quotation so beloved of the idealists, the following: ‘Hegel completely concealed (NB) the main thing: (NB) the existence of things outside the consciousness of man and independent of it.’ (p. 293) It was to hammer home precisely that this was ‘the main thing’ that Materialism and Empirio- Criticism. was written, in answer to a group of “ God-seekers’ in the Russian Party, in 1908. In his notes on Hegel, Lenin’s concern is, rather, explicitly to sift out the rational kernel of the method of this greatest idealist, and to show that consistent ‘objec- tive idealism’ takes philosophy to the very eve of historical materialism. But only to the eve; Dunayevskaya does not quote any of Lenin’s spirited sallies at Hegel’s failures to leave idealism behind, even though they are liberally scattered through the Notebooks. A small sample will suffice: ‘The mystic - idealist - spiritualist Hegel (like all official, clerical-idealist philosophy of our day) extols and expatiates on mysticism, idealism in the history of philosophy, while ignoring and slighting material- ism. Cf. Hegel on Democritus-nil!! On Plato a huge mass of mystical slush.’ (pp. 281-2) ‘And a mass of thin porridge ladled out about God... (p. 303) ‘Here in Hegel is often to be found—about God, religion, morality in general—extremely trite idealistic nonsense.’ (p. 309) And in many places Lenin takes Hegel to task for *, .. concealing the weaknesses of idealism’ (p .289), ‘a sophistical dodge from materialism’ (p. 289), ‘a cowardly evasion of materialism’ (p. 288), and ‘he pities God! the idealistic scoundrel! !’ (p. 295) Les Aventures 4. eg., M. Merleau-Ponty, Dialectique. de la That this condemnation of idealism does not stop Lenin from taking the very most from Hegel’s logic is a tribute to his great intellectual acuteness com- bined with an unrelenting partisanship. It is quite foreign to the spirit of his work to quote him selectively in order to convey the impression that he ‘broke with his philosophical past’. He did nothing of the kind, and Materialism and Empirio- Criticism will retain its significance as a brilliant statement of the materialist foundations of Marxism against pseudo-scientific ‘realism’. The presentation of similar problems in the Notebooks is a refinement but by no stretch of the imagination a rejection of the work of 1908. THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS If we examine even the earliest works of Lenin on social and political questions, it is difficult to see any justification for the view of Dunayevskaya that before 1914 Lenin did not really grasp the concept of unity of opposites, that he saw the opposite sides of phenomena simply co-existing alongside each other rather than interpenetrating and determining each other. She has to admit that in his political practice Lenin showed a grasp of dialectics, but this appears to have been ‘unconscious’, while in his thoughts Lenin remained rigid and mechanical. Quite apart from the comic aspect of this division, it can be shown that Lenin’s writings are thoroughly imbued with the dialectical method, studying processes in their totality and in their development, with a bitter struggle waged against those who, like the Narodniks, abstracted seperate features of society and appraised them with some set of abstract norms. Any number of quotations from ‘ What The Friends of the People Are’ or ‘The Economic Content of Narodism’ would illustrate Lenin’s grasp, already in 1896, of ‘the unity of opposites’. A summary of Lenin’s method against the Narodnik sociologists will perhaps be useful. These Narodniks sought to defend small peasant property, particularly as part of the Russian village commune. In order to do this they made a study of the condition of this section of producers, their holdings, the impact on them of other classes and of government policy, etc., and they often gave harrowing accounts of the effect of commerce in driving the independent peasant to misery. Lenin pointed out that a study of land ownership alone, and even a burning and partisan account of the misery of the peasants, were no substitute for beginning with an analysis of the whole economic structure which determined the dominant trends and relationships in Russian society. The sector of that society which the Narodniks chose to defend by

[p041] 38 exposing its misery was not an alternative to the actually developing economic conditions, except in their minds. Only by seeing small peasant owner- ship as one ‘moment’ in the development of the structure of the very conditions they deplored could they ever understand it, i.e., bring their theoretical concepts into line with the actual economic develop- ment. Clearly this is only an example of the principle expounded by Lenin (and Hegel) in the quotations at the beginning of this article. So long as the Narodnik sociologists remained at the level of abstract criticism of the ruin of small peasant farming, then they in fact supported the dominant classes in the status quo. How could Lenin call their criticism of existing conditions abstract when the works they produced were packed with data about conditions of peasant life? Because ‘small peasant farming’ was abstracted from its actually developing context in the economic structure, a context in which it is necessarily tied to all those ‘aspects’ which the Narodniks abstracted and called ‘negative’. The result of this mistaken method was political impotence. Narodism reflected the basic fact of conflict between labour and capital, but ‘through the prism of the living conditions and interests of the small producer, and therefore did so in a distorted and cowardly way, creating a theory which did not give prominence to the antagonism of social interests, but to sterile hopes in a different path of development’.5 But Lenin took up the cudgels against some of the so-called Marxists like Struve, as well as against the Narodniks. It is worth dwelling on his criticism of Struve’s ‘objectivism’, as it leads us to a vital point, the role of human consciousness and the relation between theory and practice. Lenin’s con- sistent attack on ‘objectivism’ in the early writing gives the lie to those critics who claim that he neglected human agency in his pre-1914 theory. Although Struve correctly criticised the Narodniks for their defence of backwardness, he ended up by becoming an apologist for the advance of capitalism, rather than a Marxist able to analyse its contradic- tions. Lenin attacked him for seeing technical progress ‘on the one hand’ as progressive, and bondage ‘on the other hand’ as regressive, a brake on technical progress. These two are phases of the same development of capitalism: ‘This bondage which he has now demolished as retrogressive is nothing but the iniiial manifestation of capitalism in agriculture, of that very same capitalism which leads later to sweeping technical progress, etc.’6 What is lacking in Struve is the standpoint of a given class in the basic class contradiction of society: 5. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 1, p. 400. 6. Ibid, p. 484. LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 ‘The main feature is . . . narrow objectivism, which is confined to proving the inevitability and . necessity of the process and makes no effort to reveal at each specific stage of this process the form of class contradiction inherent in it—an objectivism that describes the process in general, and not each of the antagonistic classes whose conflict make up the process.”7 ‘ |... though he correctly indicates the existence of a process, he does not examine what classes arose while it was going on, what classes were the vehicles of the process, overshadowing other strata of the population subordinate to them; in a word, the author’s objectivism does not rise to the level of materialism . . .”8 - This objectivism leads Struve to pose problems in a non-class way that is not without parallel in political thinking today. For example, he asks, ° In what way, on what basis, can our national economy be reorganised? ’ and Lenin replies, ‘““Our national economy” is a capitalist economy, the organisation and reorganisation of which is determined by the bourgeoisie, who “manage” this economy. Instead of the question of possible re- organisation, what should have been put is the question of the successive stages of the development of this bourgeois economy .. .’”? Lenin, in other words, demands an approach which sees all the ‘aspects’ of the process as necessarily interconnected parts of the whole, developing in necessary opposition; further, the analysis offered must be seen as part of the consciousness of the representatives of the social classes opposed to one another in the developing process, with the characteristic distortions of each class, only the point of view of the working class being able to sustain a scientific view of the unity and general development of the whole system. MHere are the very real bases of Lenin’s whole theoretical and practical approach in politics, bases upon which he built prodigiously for 25 years. The 1905 Revolution was a forcing-house for the political development of Russian Socialist thinking, as well as a decisive step forward in the experience of the working class itself. Lenin showed in his writings of that period that he did not have to wait until 1914 to be able to pose very clearly the difference between dialectical and ‘vulgar’ material- ism in the prominence given to conscious action. In h's Two Tactics of Social Democracy, Lenin con- demns that method which offers «< . a general description of the process (and) does not say a word about the concrete tasks of our activity. The new Iskra-ist method of exposition reminds one of Marx’s reference (in his famous Theses on Feuerbach) to the old materialism, which was alien to the ideas of dialectics... . They degrade the materialist conception of history by ignoring the active, leading and guiding part in history which 7. Ibid, p. 499. 8. Ibid, p. 425. 9. Ibid, p. 468.

[p042] IN THE WORKSHOP OF THE REVOLUTION 39 can and must be played by parties which understand the material prerequisites of a revolution and have placed themselves at the head of the advanced classes.’10 All this reads very strangely beside Dunayevskaya’s suggestion that only in 1914 did Lenin consciously understand the role of consciousness and the role of the masses in history. Lenin had already written in exile in 1897 a very direct characterisation of the connection between the Narodniks’ lack of scientific method and their relation to the action of the masses. This quotation rounds off this section of the argument: ‘ . . their lack of sociological realism impels them ‘to a specific manner of thinking and reasoning about social affairs and problems which might be called narrow self-conceit or, perhaps, the bureaucratic mentality. The Narodnik is always dilating on the path “we” should choose for our country, the misfortunes that would arise if “we” directed the country along such-and-such a path, the prospects “we” could ensure ourselves if we avoided the dangers of the path old Europe has taken, if we “take what is good” both from Europe and from our ancient village-community system, and so on and so forth. Hence the Narodnik’s complete distrust and contempt for the independent trends of the various social classes which are shaping history in accordance with their own interests .. . As man’s history-making activity grows broader and deeper, the size of that mass of the population which is the conscious maker of history is bound to increase. The Narocnik, however, always regarded the population in general, and the working population in particular, as the object of this or that more or less sensible measure, as something to be directed along this or that path, and never regarded the various classes of the population as independent history-makers on the existing path, never asked which conditions of the present path might stimulate (or, on the contrary, paralyse) the independent and conscious activity of these history-makers.”!1 (my emphasis, C.S.) THEORY AND PRACTICE It is only on the basis of seeing the existence of objective reality independent of human consciousness as ‘the main thing’ that Lenin is able to make the great contribution on reflection and cognition as an active process, not as a dead mirroring, which he does in the Notebooks. Only a materialist under- standing of the active role of human practice in the real world could form the basis for the richness of Lenin’s conceptions, for it is from that real world that the infinitely expanding and enriched truth of human understanding is derived. If Lenin had written a book on dialectics based on the Notebooks, it would have been a presentation of the lines of growth of this human knowledge, the process by which man has continuously developed new processes 10. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 68. 11. Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. 523-4. of learning about the real world through his practice and through the development of thought. Every aspect of the development of techniques, of philosophy and social science, must be viewed as part of this process by which man’s concepts become more and more ‘filled with content’. This implies that every aspect of the history of thought and philosophy is viewed not abstractly, negatively, from the point of view of the number of right and wrong elements contained in it, but in its own concrete development, and as part of the whole of human progress. Secondly, it implies the complete denial of dogmatism in theory. There is not a fixed truth, a secret of the world to be one day finally discovered, and our ‘true’ concepts about the reality we know are only true insofar as they express the changing character of the reality concerned, together with the change and flexibility of our own concepts, whose limitations are revealed by every experience and advance in thought. Lenin heavily underscores the following passage: ‘Hegel says, the expression “unity” of thinking and being, of finite and infinite, etc., is false, because it expresses “quietly persisting identity” ... Actually, we have a process.’ (p. 200) Hegel insists that thought must not imagine, once it gets beyond appearance to essence, that it has done its work. On the contrary, the discovery of truth is an infinite process, and the concepts which reflect it are the developing modes of a deeper and deeper penetration of that reality. Lenin says briefly: ‘The coincidence of thought with the object is a process. Man does not arrive at the truth, at ‘repose’ in his relation to truth, by simply reaching conclusions about it. Man’s thought is relaxed, developing freely, in ‘repose’, only through the denial of repose, only through ‘the firmness with which he eternally creates the contradiction between thought and object and eternally overcome it’. This view of the relation between concepts and reality is brilliantly formulated, and to grasp this relation is the essence of Marxist politics as of any other science. Let us take as an example the problems which often arise in the day-to-day work of Marxist organisation. So long as the ‘truth’ about politics is thought to consist of some fixed secret of Marxist doctrine, some set of recipes, then reality proves very intractable indeed, constantly facing the revolu- tionary with frustrations, ‘disappointments’ and ‘disillusionments’, Methods of work become in- consistent and moody, in a word, subjectivist. But if there is constant and conscious effort to probe and learn from reality, from the living movement, and on the deeper and deeper theoretical understanding flowing from this to base the Party’s activity and organisation, a thirsting for enrichment by penetra- tion of living reality, then the result is different. Although this looks more ‘difficult’, less ‘sure’,

[p043] 40 constantly re-examining its own assumptions, yet it gives rise to steadier, more relaxed methods of work, real ‘repose’ resting on strength, by virtue of the security and certainty and determination with which the learning, penetrating, questing process is organized, in order to fill our concepts with objective content. This is the process of creating and over- coming the contradiction between our ideas and objective reality. ‘The Reflection of nature in man’s thought must be understood not “lifelessly’, not “abstractly”, not devoid of movement, not without contradictions, but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.’ (p. 195) The implications of this view of cognition, of the process by which men have gained and will continue to gain knowledge of the truth, for a Marxist view of the history of philosophy, are pointed out by Lenin in some very stimulating short passages, particularly in the fragment, ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, which has appeared previously in English, but will be much more meaningful now that it can be compared with the earlier notes which prepare for it (pp. 87-100). For reasons of space this question must await treatment in a later article. Lenin very specifically says that the self-movement of things through the struggle of opposites is the essence of dialectics. This is the logical consequence of the understanding that dialectics is the self- movement of reality, and of the concepts reflecting reality, and not an external logic which imposes its own distinctions and comparisons on_ reality. Dialectics is the theory of how reality sorts itself out, with growing human knowledge seen as the latest development of this reality, rather than a way of sorting out reality. Hegel is quoted by Lenin to this effect:: ‘Thinking Reason (as compared with “imagina- tion” and “intelligent reflection’), sharpens the blunt differences of Variety, the mere manifold of imagina- tion, into essential difference, that is, Opposition. The manifold entities acquire activity and vitality in relation to one another only when driven on to the sharp point of Contradiction; thence they draw negativity, which is the inherent pulsation of self- movement and vitality...” (p. 142) It is not necessary to mention here the occasions on which Lenin applied this approach to political questions in such a way that he was constantly condemned for doctrinairism and _ factionalism. Right through the history of Russian Social- Democracy he fought bitterly its petty-bourgeois and LABOUR REVIEW-—Spring, 1962 intellectual wing, expressing itself first through Struve and the ‘legal Marxists’, then in Plekhanov’s subjectivism and ‘circle’ spirit and the Menshevik objection to proletarian conceptions of organization, in the ultra-left ideas which sprang up during the years of reaction, through to the struggle against liquidationism and the weakness of those who ‘conciliated’ the reformists rather than fight to establish the independence of the working class against them. As Trotsky later acknowledged, he and others took for pettiness and crudeness what in fact amounted in Lenin to political necessity, based upon a method of proceeding from the basic con- tradictions facing the movement. Again, later articles will take up some of these important points. It is vital to see the unity between Lenin’s political career and his dialectical method. In his iron insistence on principle, even at the exepense of personal and _ organisational difficulties which horrified those with more impressionistic methods, Lenin carried into practice the idea that the working class must decide its own fate, must place the achievement of its political independence through a revolutionary party before all partial considerations. Political and theoretical vacillations, subjective reactions to difficulties and to discipline, these were not separate or partial questions; they had to be analysed and decisively dealt with from the point of view of building a movement in the concrete conditions of Russia. Lenin’s study of Hegel in 1914-15 helped to heighten his awareness of the universality and depth of this method and so equipped him for the even greater task of reorien- tating the socialist movement of the whole world. This could not be done on an empirical basis alone. The facts studied for Lenin’s Imperialism and his work on the Second International and the Russian Revolution were selected and had meaning only in the framework of the dialectical method roughly drafted in the Notebooks, with its stress on the interconnection of all aspects of phenomena, the identity of opposites, the need to go deeper and deeper into the practice of men in changing nature and themselves. A return to the study of Lenin’s practice and method today is an essential part of the solution of our revolutionary tasks. (A further article on ‘ Thought and Action in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks’ will appear in the next issue of LABOUR REVIEW.)

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[p045] 7 JUNE-JULY 1960 P ast I SSUES Once Again—The Summit. CND & Politics (G. Gale). A New Ideologist of Capitalism—Rostow (T. Kemp). Restoring Trotsky’s ha ve incl uded : Place in History (J.B.S.). Alienation and the Working Class OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1960 Scarborough 1960 (G. Healy). 1921 & All That (B. Pearce). What is Revolutionary Leadership (C. Slaughter). Nehru’s India in the Plan Era (T. Kemp). SPRING 1961 Congo Conspiracy. A Socialist Foreign Policy (C. Slaughter). Pasternak and the Calendar of the Revolution (I. Deutscher). Lenin & Trotsky on Pacifism and Defeatism (B. Pearce). SUMMER 1961 Communism in One Country? Opportunism in 1961 The Course of Capitalist Development; An Outline Analysis (T. Kemp). China’s Communes (G, Kane). WINTER 1961 The 22nd Congress of the CPSU—The Final Crisis of Stalinism (Statement by the International Committee of the 4th Inter- national). The World Prospect for Socialism: Necessity for Socialist Revolution; Crisis of Leadership; Imperialism & World Revolution; Colonial Revolution; USSR Since the 20th Congress; The Fourth International (Resolution of the Socialist Labour League). To: New Park Publications Ltd., 186A Clapham High St., London, S.W.4. I enclose cheque/postal order/money order/ Back number are available (1/6 each) . draft for £ S. d. to pay for from Labour Review, . 186A Clapham High St., issues. Price 2/- (postage 6d. per issue) London, S.W.4. NaMe oo... ccc cccccceecsceeevaceeevsuceevauareenns Adress oo... eee eee eec ec ec eee eee ee teneneceeensenenens Printed by PLOUGH PRESS LTD. (TU), ro. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4

[p046] 7 JUNE-JULY 1960 P ast i SSUES Once Again—The Summit. CND & Politics (G. Gale). A New Ideologist of Capitalism—Rostow (T. Kemp). Restoring Trotsky’s have included: Place in History (J.B.S.). Alienation and the Working Class OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1960 Scarborough 1960 (G. Healy). 1921 & All That (B. Pearce). What is Revolutionary Leadership (C. Slaughter). Nehru’s India in the Plan Era (T. Kemp). SPRING 1961 Congo Conspiracy. A Socialist Foreign Policy (C. Slaughter). Pasternak and the Calendar of the Revolution (I. Deutscher). Lenin & Trotsky on Pacifism and Defeatism (B. Pearce). SUMMER 1961 Communism in One Country? Opportunism in 1961 The Course of Capitalist Development; An Outline Analysis (T. Kemp). China’s Communes (G, Kane). WINTER 1961 The 22nd Congress of the CPSU—The Final Crisis of Stalinism (Statement by the International Committee of the 4th Inter- national). The World Prospect for Socialism: Necessity for Socialist Revolution; Crisis of Leadership; Imperialism & World Revolution; Colonial Revolution; USSR Since the 20th Congress; The Fourth International (Resolution of the Socialist Labour League). To: New Park Publications Ltd., 186A Clapham High St., London, S.W.4. I enclose cheque/postal order/money order/ Back number are available (1/6 each) i draft for £ s. d. to pay for from Labour Review, ; , London, S.W.4. be Fe MR conok Hue Geary Coren rt nt ne artne aeex ee Ade Ba NT 5; Bencsctoe24s4; datas crak ty cvecapenetrinses te Printed by PLOUGH PRESS LTD. (TU), ro. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4