The Theoretical Front (Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks)

[p036] ‘The Theoretical Front?’ Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks (Second Article) By C. Slaughter IN this second article on the lessons of Lenin’s recently translated Philosophical Notebooks, only one aspect of that rich work is taken up. Lenin is always concerned with the development of theory in relation to the actual experience of man in society. Dialectics itself is the result of a struggle to under- stand reality through practice. In studying Hegel, Lenin sought to deepen his understanding of Marxist theory itself. Theory is a material force; like every other aspect of nature it must be understood in its development, in terms of the material conditions which give birth to it and act upon it. By under- standing the struggles through which scientific theories have been discovered and developed, we can understand better the theories themselves and be ‘better equipped to ourselves develop theory creatively. In the struggle of the working class to achieve consciousness of its role and its tasks in capitalist society, dialectical materialism has neces- sarily developed in conflict with ideologies which reflect the interests of the enemy class. Thus the struggle against revisionism which has preceded every great advance in the revolutionary process is not a doctrinal squabble but the necessary form through which theory is advanced. Engels once said that the struggle must be fought on the political, the economic and the theoretical fronts. The fight on the theoretical front involves problems which are at first sight abstract and obscure, concerned as they are with philosophical concepts and problems of method. Lenin’s profound concern with Hegel’s philosophy during the First World War should warn against going on these impressions. The purpose of this article is to indicate the relevance of some of the ‘abstract’ and ‘philosophical’ questions to which he turned. Despite Hegel’s insistence that the dialectic must take into account the constant state of change of all reality, his own philosophy became an adaptation to the existing political set-up in Germany. This came about not because of the dialectical character of his thought, but because he remained an idealist, con- sidering the activity of the mind, the movement of ideas, to be the essential reality, with the material world only its external passing form. As Marx said: “In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time, also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid move- ment and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.’! For Hegel the subject-matter of philosophy was thought itself and the history of thought. He did not realise that for philosophers to concentrate only on this aspect of man’s conscious existence was itself a form of ‘alienation’, an expression of the class society which divides men into ‘thinkers’ and ‘workers’, obscuring the essential unity and inter- dependence of their various activities, distorting each individual to the needs of a class-dominated mode of production. For all his brilliance in analysing the forms of thought, and in criticising the rigidity of formal logic, Hegel remained imprisoned by philo- sophy itself. His life’s work, a great feat of critical scholarship, exposed the limits, inter-relations and contradictions of previous philosophies and systems of logic, but the solution he offered was a false one: so long as he remained an idealist, his ‘solution’ was purely in the realm of ideas, of philosophy itself. The philosopher could be satisfied with his rational and dynamic picture of the evolution of notions—but the real social world which created these notions 1. Karl Marx, Preface to the Second Edition of Das Kapital.

[p037] “THE THEORETICAL FRONT’ Frederick Engels: the class struggle, he said, must be fought not only on the economic and political fronts, but also on the theoretical front. and their movement remained as solidly in existence as before. Because the activity of man is taken by Hegel to be purely mental activity, then the philoso- phical act of transcending existing concepts is a complete victory for reason and freedom; the con- quest of alienation and false consciousness can be achieved purely in the realm of thought. LENIN AND ‘THE YOUNG MARX’ Already in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) the youthful Marx brilliantly exposed this fundamental weakness of the idealist dialectic: in his philosophy, said Marx, Hegel goes beyond (‘supersedes’ or ‘transcends’) the existing ideas of men; but he considers these ideas purely as thought-forms and not as part of human practice— *. . . Hegel supersedes in philosophy . . . therefore not real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion itself already become an object of know- ledge, i.e., Dogmatics; the same with Jurisprudence, Political Science and Natural Science.’ In other words the Hegelian might develop a thoroughgoing critique of existing theories of say, the State, 75 developing out of their contradictions a more con- sistent theory. But if the process stops there, the real state remains unaltered, not superseded. Indeed, to confine theory to the successful criticism of other theories of the State amounts objectively to prevent- ing the conscious action that is required to change the actual State. In Hegel therefore all the laws of the dialectic remain locked within pure speculative philosophy. Marx, on the other hand, saw the history of man and his consciousness as the developing active force of labour, of the practice of social man in his necessary conquest of nature. In production, man expressed /ijs nature as part of the objective world. Instead of speculating about wnat ‘human nature’ or ‘the essence of man’ might be, we should recognise that the history of human industry is ‘an open book of the human faculties’, a ready-made basis for a scientific psychology, as he wrote a little later. Instead of seeing history as the ‘realisation’ of some abstract ‘self-consciousness’ of man, it was necessary to study it as the creation and emergence of man’s self-consciousnes through his developing material practice. This was how Marx first criticised Hegel materialistically, in the same way that Lenin was to project a ‘materialist reading’ of Hegel’s Logic: ‘Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self- consciousness of man, of the real man, and therefore of man living also in a real objective world and determined by that world.’2 Philosophy, appearing and flourishing in that phase of social evolution which brought the divorce of mental from manual labour, ignored the practical root of all thought and tried to examine thought as such. From this point of view, with pure thought seen as the essence of man, the objective world could only be ‘understood’ as an alienated form of self-consciousness. According to the idealists, once this alienated form has been grasped as Idea, then it has been mastered, the alienation has been overcome. The objective world is nothing but a ‘negative’ form of self-consciousness itself. Once this is grasped dialectically, the alienated form, the negation, returns to the essential self- consciousness of man. The negation is itself negated. A scientific view of society on the other hand, must see the active forces of real men in society as the means of changing reality. To change one’s ideas about the reality can only be part of this process. As Marx summarised it: ‘The weapon of criticism is replaced by the criticism of weapons’; by this he meant that existing institutions would be changed by social forces within the society producing them and not by the blows of philosophy, however ‘critical’. 2. ‘Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic’ in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844). Lawrence & Wishart, 1960.

[p038] 76 Here Marx, and Lenin after him, are not only counterposing a programme of action to the wordy criticism of philosophers. They are arguing from a whole view of the relation between thought and action, between men and nature. The science of society founded by Marx has no room for philosophy as such, for the idea of independently moving thoughts, with a subject-matter and development of its own, independent of reality but sometimes des- cending to impinge upon it. By Marx’s day, the achievements of political economy, science and logic had laid the necessary basis upon which the develop- ment of humanity itself could be viewed as objec- tively as any natural process instead of being the subject of speculation. As Marx put it in The German Ideology (1847): ‘Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of develop- ment of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence.’3 From then on it was a question of grasping in consciousness the motive forces of the development of the material life of man. “Men can be distinguished from animals by con- sciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.’4 The existence of the working class, in struggle against capitalism, is the basis of the possibility of ending that state of affairs where man’s product dominates him through the power of the ruling class, ‘Alienation’ will be conquered by the overthrow of capitalism; in a socialist economy men will put to their own planned use all the products of human history. Contrast this with Hegel: his ‘philosophical’ conquest of alienation amounted to ‘re-appropriating’ to man the objective world by destroying its objec- tivity, by seeing it as purely an expression of self- consciousness, by grasping it only in thought. Its objectivity had to be destroyed, because it was precisely in this respect that it failed to coincide with the ‘essence’ of man, subjectivity, self- consciousness. For Marx this ‘essence’ is only the historical practical activity of man himself. A materialist dialectic, of the kind which Marx always wanted to find the time to write, and for which Lenin deliberately laid the groundwork in his Notes on Hegel, must therefore reverse the picture given by Hegel of the relation between the forms of 3. Karl Marx, The German Ideology. Lawrence & Wishart, 1942, p. 15. 4. Ibid, p. 7. LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 thought and the history of nature and society. The evolution of thought, the origin and development of logic and science, must be seen in their total context as the outgrowth and a vital part of the development of man’s practice, his organization in society to develop and explore the techniques at his disposal for the conquest of nature. Not only the science of history, above all that economic history which was to all intents and purposes a closed book before Marx, but also a scientific psychology, will be necessary for the development and deepening of materialist dialectics: The history of philosophy, ERGO: Briefly, the