Abstract
This article attempts to understand the philosophical significance of Lenin’s work, Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909), by putting it in the historical perspective and context of the theoretical debates of the time. The author argues that Lenin’s decision to engage in philosophical discussion was motivated by the need to respond to the growing struggles of Marxism, and specifically to the dangerous consequences of positivism that spread to Russia, which thereby led to a crisis in theory and political practice. Lenin’s work is the first philosophical assault on positivism, and most notably on its specific form, Machism, which he criticizes from the position of dialectical materialism. Recognizing the damaging effects of the positivistic position for Marxism, Lenin attacks Alexander Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism as a form of Machism which undermines the materialistic foundation of Marxist philosophy.
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Notes
For more specific details on this issue see my discussion below.
For a full discussion of the development and influence of positivism in nineteenth century Europe, see Simon (1963).
By that time, Plekhanov had already established himself as the leading Russian Marxist theoretician.
A dispute in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1994 between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov led to the party splitting into two factions: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
In fact, this was the tendency among the Young Hegelians that Marx and Engels had attacked in The German Ideology some 60 years earlier. Lenin was certainly concerned about it as well. However, it was not his chief motivation to respond to Bogdanov and his followers in Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
Plekhanov first accused the Bolsheviks of revisionism at the Third Party Congress in April 1905, and he openly repeated the charge at the Fifth Party Congress that took place 2 years later. For Lenin, it was a signal for action. He must have feared, and not without reason, that the entirety of Bolshevism would be seen as revisionism that renounced Marxist ideas.
See, for example, Russell (2009).
Lenin explains: “The recognition of theory as a copy, as an approximate copy of objective reality, is materialism” (Lenin 1973, vol. 14, p. 265).
Some of these issues are mentioned and discussed by David Bakhurst, who devotes a special section in his study to ambiguity in Lenin’s materialism. Cf. Bakhurst (1991, pp. 111–123).
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Bykova, M.F. Lenin and the crisis of Russian Marxism. Stud East Eur Thought 70, 235–247 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-018-9313-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-018-9313-5