What does Lenin mean here?

[Cactus]

This is from A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism by V.I. Lenin.

The great basic thought,” Engels writes, “that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away...

When Engels[edit here, obviously I should have asked what Engels mean't] says 'the concepts', does he mean that our ideas come into physical being and passing away, or all material things are in constant change uninfluenced by ideas and neither emanating from ideas. To me the former seems like the Hegelian conception of dialectics?

Sorry for the nooby question.

[Thirsty Crow]

He means both, but it is possible to argue that a particular emphasis is put on all material things being in constant flux (and our thinking about it all too).

You're right, it is a Hegelian notion with sources in Hermetic mysticism. You can also catch a glimpse in this quote (Lenin quotes Engels) that there's an underlying insistence on change as a fundamental factor in the physical and human world (ready made things, with a charitable reading, implying a static view, something akin to the medieval ideological cosmogony of the Great Chain of Being). As such, it's completely innocent and correct, but the philosophical shroud it received was simply mystifying.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

This is from A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism by V.I. Lenin.

The great basic thought,” Engels writes, “that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away...

When Engels[edit here, obviously I should have asked what Engels mean't] says 'the concepts', does he mean that our ideas come into physical being and passing away, or all material things are in constant change uninfluenced by ideas and neither emanating from ideas. To me the former seems like the Hegelian conception of dialectics?

Sorry for the nooby question.

What Engels meant was the latter, that material objects external to our brains, which seem as stable and unchanging as our concepts of these objects, are always coming into being and passing from being.

Of course it also follows that ideas, being material states of our very material brains, also come into being and pass from being. This seems like a fairly trivial point, to me. Brain-states are like other material structures because, well, they are material structures.

And unlike LinksRadikal, I don't think the point Engels is making is trivial. The insistence on the changing nature of material structures etc. is nowhere more important than in the ontology of society. The Marxist view that every apparently stable structure conceals processes of becoming and dissolution then corresponds to the notion that social structures are not static but need to be actively reproduced, a concept that can't be stressed enough when it comes to the Marxist analysis of society.

[Thirsty Crow]

And unlike LinksRadikal, I don't think the point Engels is making is trivial. The insistence on the changing nature of material structures etc. is nowhere more important than in the ontology of society. The Marxist view that every apparently stable structure conceals processes of becoming and dissolution then corresponds to the notion that social structures are not static but need to be actively reproduced, a concept that can't be stressed enough when it comes to the Marxist analysis of society.
I'm fairly sure that you can't even derive any implication on my behalf that the point Engels is making is trivial (with the simple starting point that I nowhere said it was trivial). Historical change is indeed the crux of the matter.

But this isn't well served by a fancy philosophy of eternal change and hidden correspondences and sympathies that explains every change and everything that exists. It's completely subverted that way in fact. And that lofty philosophizing is something Engels occasionally dabbled in in his own way, along with a whole host of other Marxists.

[Rafiq]

He means both, but it is possible to argue that a particular emphasis is put on all material things being in constant flux (and our thinking about it all too).

What is being conveyed here is much more complex: When Engels, or Lenin afterwards claim that everything is in constant motion, rather than the world compromising "static" ready-made things, they are not making the banal assertion that things are simply constantly in motion. What Engels here is stressing is expressive of the general Marxist opposition to bourgeois formalism, namely, the idea that all the changes that do occur (which everyone recognizes), are reducible to formal abstractions, absolute truths, and the irk, wherein the flow of matter is conceived merely as different expressions of the magnitude of the one, qualitative idea (or material formation).

All bourgeois metaphysicians will recognize that the world is not "static", but the error derives from conceiving qualitative abstractions of the real, for the eternal nature of the real itself. On example is that, in having discussions with other Marxists, I was surprised to see that most are of the mentality that new qualitative changes in capitalism following neoliberalism are just "more of the same", etc.


The Marxist view that every apparently stable structure conceals processes of becoming and dissolution then corresponds to the notion that social structures are not static but need to be actively reproduced, a concept that can't be stressed enough when it comes to the Marxist analysis of society.

To further substantiate this point, the reason why this 'can't be stressed enough' is precisely because bourgeois-liberals often conceive present-day problems as vestiges of old, or the result of the culmination of previously reinforced processes, from racism to the "ingrained" stubbornness of the Muslims in the near east which resulted from "centuries old" traditions or whatever you want. The point is that social structures do not persist passively, simply by merit of "being there", they are qualitatively and actively reproduced through active processes.

For all of Engels' questionable dabbling in the metaphysical, it does help to make allegories with, for example, the reality that even something like a rock constitutes processes in it that must constantly reproduce its existence.