The Abdication, by Broad

[p036] the publication of his Philosophical Notebooks (Vol. 38) in English for the first time is a useful occasion for taking up the question more generally. The Notebooks are not bedtime reading. Not one sentence in them was in any way prepared for publication. The text consists entirely of extracts taken by Lenin from various philosophical works

[p037] 34 and reviews, his underlinings in these extracts, and his own comments, usually very cryptic. Of most interest are the notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic and Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Anyone undertaking a systematic study of Lenin’s Notebooks will have to have beside him Hegel’s Logic; only in this way can one see the continuity between separate notes and extracts. Even without this, Marxist students will find many of Lenin’s brief notes very stimulating and worth detailed study. But these notes and extracts are part of a single project, and are therefore best taken as a whole, read through and reworked several times by the student in the light of his own knowledge of Marxism and of Lenin’s own writings and actions. Once he gets past Hegel’s Preface and Introduction, Lenin writes: ‘I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically ... It is clear from his notes that his intention was to prepare the basis for a materialist exposition of the dialectical method which in Hegel remains in mystical form. A study of these notes clarifies greatly what Marx and Engels meant when they said that in order to arrive at a scientific method they had only to ‘stand Hegel on his head, or rather, on his feet’. LOGIC AND REALITY Hegel insisted on a Logic which was not something separate from the reality which confronted man, a Logic which was identical with the richness and movement of all reality, a Logic which expressed the whole process of man’s growing consciousness of reality, and not just a dry summary of formal principles of argument, reflecting only one brief phase in the definition of reality by thinking men. Lenin notes: ‘What Hegel demands is a Logic, the forms of which would be gehaltvolle Formen (forms with content), forms of living, real content, inseparably connected with the content.’ ‘Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development “of all material, natural and spiritual things”, i.e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition i.e. the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world.’ (p. 92) Lenin’s aim in ‘reading Hegel materialistically’ was to sift out the rational kernel of this Logic from the idealism in which it was constricted, for Hegel believed that only the ‘Absolute Idea’ had reality, expressing its necessary development in nature and history. When the highest product of this natural and historical evolution, critical philosophy, grasped consciously the truth of this process, then freedom replaced necessity. When Lenin ‘rewrites’ passages of the Logic, the relationship is inverted, without LABOUR REVIEW-—Spring, 1962 losing any of the brilliance and wealth of Hegel’s insight. Our concepts are the reflection, worked out in the history of logic and philosophy, of the objective world of nature grasped by social man in his practical struggle to survive and develop. The ‘leap from necessity to freedom’ is then not a matter of philosophy, not a mental act, but a practical transformation of society and nature by men who have achieved consciousness of the social