Section two of " How the “Marxists” Buried Marx" By Cyril Smith
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’Dialectical Materialism’

The Stalinist movement has ensured that the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’ is widely associated with Karl Marx. It had been used earlier, but not in Marx’s lifetime. In the preface to his 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin declared: ‘Marx and Engels scores of times termed their philosophical views dialectical materialism.’ He was so sure about this, that he felt no need to give any references.

In fact, there is not one! Marx never employed the phrase in any of his writings. The term ‘dialectical materialism’ was introduced in 1891 by Plekhanov, in an article in Kautsky’s Neue Zeit. He thought wrongly, I believe — that he was merely adapting it from Engels’s usage in Anti-Duhring and Ludwig Feuerbach. This was not just a matter of terminology. He was intent on combating the tendency of the populists (narodniki) to put subjective revolutionary will at the foundation of their idea of the Russian Revolution. In its place, Plekhanov installed a materialism which left no room for will at all and this is what he foisted on to Marx. Many years later (1920), Lenin wrote: ‘Bolshevism arose in 1903 on a very firm foundation of Marxist theory.’ Alas, it did nothing of the kind.

Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) was one of Lenin’s closest collaborators and an enthusiastic advocate of the basic ideas of What is to be Done? Along with other Party members, Bogdanov was also an enthusiastic follower of Ernst Mach (1838-1916) a leading Austrian physicist, philosopher and historian of science, who was concerned with the methodological problems arising from contemporary developments in physics. Bogdanov thought that his ideas offered a ‘scientific’ alternative to ‘dialectics’ as a foundation for socialism.

Mach’s ‘theory of knowledge’ was based on sensation — something like the scepticism of the eighteenth-century Scot, David Hume. Lenin, following Plekhanov, later came to see it as an attack on ‘Marxist orthodoxy’. This, they believed, was founded on ‘materialism’, which began with the objective existence of the world, independent of what anyone thinks about it.

But that came later. Trotsky recalls how, when he came to London in 1902 (after his escape from Siberia), he told Lenin about his discussions in prison:

In philosophy we had been much impressed with Bogdanov’s book, which combined Marxism with the theory of knowledge put forward by Mach and Avenarius. Lenin also thought, at the time, that Bogdanov’s theories were right. ‘I am not a philosopher,’ he said with a slightly timorous expression, ‘but Plekhanov denounces Bogdanov’s philosophy as a disguised sort of idealism’. A few years later, Lenin dedicated a big volume to the discussion of Mach and Avenarius; his criticism of their theories was fundamentally identical with that voiced by Plekhanov.

Between 1904 and 1906, Bogdanov’s three-volume Empirio-Monism appeared in Moscow, while its author remained Lenin’s second-in command in the Bolshevik faction. After the defeat of the 1905 uprising, all factions of the RSDLP inevitably faced great political difficulties. One expression of these was the renewal of interest in Mach’s philosophy of science. (Another was the effort of Lunacharsky (1875-1933) to build a secular ‘socialist religion’.)

In 1905, Mach’s Knowledge and Error had appeared. The following year, Machist members of both Menshevik and Bolshevik factions combined to issue Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism. In 1908, a Russian edition of Mach’s earlier The Analysis of Sensations appeared, with an enthusiastic Introduction by Bogdanov. Lenin now decided that these ideas represented a fundamental attack on Marxism and were thus embarrassing for the Bolshevik faction.

For a long time, he held his tongue to avoid a split among the Bolsheviks, and stood by an agreement on the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Proletary that it should remain neutral on philosophical issues. Plekhanov, now leading Lenin’s Menshevik opponents, was delighted at Lenin’s embarrassment. He made the most of the accusation that Lenin’s group were ‘subjectivists’ like old narodnik terrorists. Attacking ‘Lenin and the Nietzscheans and Machists who surround him’, Plekhanov gleefully alleged that those who ‘talk about the seizure of power by the Social-Democrats in the now impending bourgeois revolution ... are returning to the political standpoint of the late “Narodnaya Volya trend”’.

For a time a perplexed Lenin considered proposing a struggle jointly with Plekhanov against both Menshevik and Bolshevik Machists. Then Lenin broke the agreement with the Bolshevik Machists, with whom he now had important political disagreements. Borrowing a large number of books on philosophy from the Menshevik-Machist Valentinov (1890-1975) — one of the targets for his attack — Lenin began work on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and spent the best part of 1908 on it, in Geneva, London and Paris. (Valentinov reports that Lenin returned all his books when the job was done.) Under Stalin, this book became the unquestionable source for ‘dialectical materialism’.

In The Development of the Monist View of History (1894), Plekhanov had been rather cautious. The Machist controversy had not yet begun and ‘revisionism’ had not yet shown its hand.

Materialism ... tries to explain psychic phenomena by these or those qualities of matter, by this or that organisation of the human, or in more general terms, of the animal body.... That is all that can be said about materialism in general.

In the preface to his Essays on the History of Materialism (1896), Plekhanov had brushed aside all questions about the ‘theory of knowledge’:

Since I do not number myself among the adherents of the theoretico-scholasticism that is such vogue today, I have had no intention of dwelling on this absolutely secondary question.

But in 1908, Plekhanov answered an open challenge from Bogdanov with his booklet Materialismus Militans. In his usual lofty manner, he attacked the superficiality of Bogdanov’s arguments. For Plekhanov and Lenin, the way to combat philosophical attacks on Marxism in the International was to underline the continuity between the views of Marx and Engels and those of earlier materialists, and they both thought this meant stressing how ‘materialist’ they were. So, in Materialismus Militans, Plekhanov gave a ‘definition of matter’:

In contrast to ‘spirit’, we call ‘matter’ that which acts on our sense-organs and arouses in us various sensations.... We call material objects (bodies) those objects that exist independently of our consciousness and, acting on our senses, arouse in us certain sensations which in turn underlie our notions of the material world, that is, of those same material objects as well as of their reciprocal relationships.

Plekhanov goes on to identify matter with Kant’s ‘things-in-themselves’, while denying Kant’s contention that ‘things-in-themselves’ were essentially unknowable. Does that mean that our sensations give us direct knowledge of matter? No, says Plekhanov. What we get from our senses is a ‘hieroglyph’, which has then to be decoded by thought.

Plekhanov’s ‘definition’ of matter has an honourable history, but not in the works of either Marx or Engels. That matter is ‘given to us in our sensations’ had certainly been the view of the old materialists, whose writings were well known to Plekhanov. He quotes the great eighteenth-century mechanical materialist Holbach, for whom ‘matter is what acts in one way or another on our senses’.

But these were bourgeois thinkers, in the sense that they took human beings to be discrete, reasoning atoms. For them, sensations were the physical traces left by the impact of external bodies in these individuals. Knowledge was thus implicitly reducible to the passive responses of individual citizens, w ho were assumed to exist outside society.

Plekhanov had tried to demonstrate that Bernstein’s return to Kant (or rather to the neo-Kantian version of Kant) was part of a general adaptation to bourgeois society. But, in effect, so was his version of eighteenth-century materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin also gives a definition of matter, very much like Plekhanov’s:

Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photo graphed and reflected by our sensations while existing independently of them.

Characteristically, to show that he is a more radical philosopher than Plekhanov, Lenin sharpens his materialism. He insists that sensations are ‘copies’ of material reality. The theory of ‘hieroglyphs’, declares Lenin, is an impermissible concession to the Kantians and positivists: ‘To regard our sensations as images of the external world, to recognise objective truth, to hold the materialist theory of knowledge — these are all one and the same thing ‘ (By the way, Plekhanov later withdrew his use of the term ‘hieroglyph’, saying it had been ‘a mistake’.)

Lenin’s ‘copy theory’ — and it is hard to see just what he meant by it — was designed to root out the last traces of idealism and subjectivism. But, in fact, it left ‘dialectical materialism’ perched precariously on the view that ‘objective truth’ is founded on individual ‘sensation’.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin is sometimes vaguely aware of these weaknesses, but on the fundamental issues he is still not able to break free from Plekhanov’s philosophical tutelage. When, twenty years later, Lenin’s works had been transformed from a living struggle for clarification into religious dogma, this provided a basis for the philosophy of the bureaucrats.

Lenin did emphasise Engels’s remark in Ludwig Feuerbach that materialism ‘has to change its form’ ‘with every epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science’. But Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, with all its inconsistencies, itself became fixed as a definitive text, a central part of the canon of ‘dialectical materialism’. This dogmatic outlook was, of course, obligatory for Stalinists; but those who followed Trotsky in his battle against Stalinism were never able to challenge it and so free themselves from its influence.

Lenin’s political conceptions were demonstrated in practice to be diametrically opposed to those of his philosophical mentor. But he was never able to clarify the philosophical foundation of this vital difference, or his attitude to Plekhanov’s work as 3 whole. While denouncing Plekhanov’s political treachery in 1905, his attitude to the World War in 19t4 and his support for Kerensky’s Provisional Government in 1917, he never ceased to pay tribute to Plekhanov’s philosophical work and never broke with it openly. (Interestingly, Bogdanov’s views actually crop up again in the history of Bolshevism, through their influence on Bukharin.)

Lenin versus ‘Orthodoxy’

Until August 1914, Lenin supported the theoretical authority of Karl Kautsky without fundamental disagreement. Although the Bolsheviks had fought against Georgi Plekhanov’s political line for a decade, his writings on philosophy continued to be accepted by them as the genuine continuation of the work of Marx and Engels, with only minor amendments.

In the early part of the century, as the acknowledged leader of the International, Kautsky, supported by Plekhanov, had signed, and sometimes written, resolutions pledging working-class action against imperialist war. Then, in August 1914, these two became supporters of opposing empires in the imperialist war. When the German Social Democrats voted for the Kaiser’s War Budget in the Reichstag, only Karl Liebknecht’s voice protested. Kautsky, the ‘pope of Marxism’, found quotations from Marx and Engels to justify some kind of compromise. The Second International, as the universally accepted organisation of workers’ parties, was finished.

This evolution of the leader of Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ came as no great surprise to Rosa Luxemburg. She had broken with Kautsky four years earlier, in a dispute in which Lenin had sided with Kautsky. Now, she brilliantly analysed the break-up of the International, and with her cothinkers fought heroically to reaffirm the principles of proletarian internationalism. In 1919, she was to meet a brutal death at the hands of thugs encouraged by the Social Democratic leaders.

But to Lenin, Kautsky’s 1914 betrayal was totally unexpected. Shocked by this development, he determined to discover all its implications and its objective basis. He began to probe every aspect of the ideas of the International, including especially his own — although he rarely says so.

In Switzerland at the start of the war, he turned to the study of philosophy and especially to Hegel. In his ‘Notebooks’ of 1914-15, it is possible to trace how this study of Hegel’s Science of Logic and parts of his History of Philosophy became more and more important to him as it went on. The Stalinised version of history has naturally denied the radical nature of the shift in his thought.

In 1908, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin had defended ‘orthodoxy’, leaning heavily on Plekhanov’s work and quoting Kautsky as an authority. But in his 1915 ‘Notebooks’ he writes about Capital: ‘Half a century later, none of the Marxists understood Marx!!’ Lenin’s startlingly self-critical statement must not be dismissed as rhetoric. He was trying to use Hegel to deepen and clarify the theoretical and political break with Kautsky and Plekhanov which he belatedly recognised as essential.

’Orthodox Marxists’ — myself among them! — have twisted and turned, trying to reconcile Lenin’s ‘Notebooks’ with Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written only six years earlier. Of course, it can’t be done. For example, in 1908 Lenin had identified idealist philosophy with ‘clerical obscurantism’. Seven years on, he wrote: ‘Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism.’ In his earlier book, his disagreements with Plekhanov were secondary. In the Notebooks he writes:

Concerning the question of the criticism of modem Kantianism, Machism, etc.: Plekhanov criticises Kantianism (and agnosticism in general) more from a vulgar-materialist standpoint than from a dialectical-materialist standpoint, insofar as he merely rejects their views a limine [from the threshold].

And yet Lenin was never able to complete his break with the philosophical ideas he had learnt from Plekhanov.

Lenin and the State

In July 1917, Lenin sent a note to Kamenev (1883-1936) which reveals a great deal about the real story of the development of Marxism:

Comrade Kamenev, in strict confidence, if I should be killed [the Russian original actually reads more like ‘bumped off’, or ‘done ill’], T beg you to publish a notebook with the title ‘Marxism and the State’ (it has been left in safe keeping in Stockholm). Bound, with a blue cover. There are collected all the quotations from Marx and Engels, as well as those of Kautsky’s controversy with Pannekoek. Also a series of remarks and reviews. It has only to be edited. l think this work could be published within a week. l think it is very important, because it isn’t only Kautsky and Plekhanov who have gone off the rails. [My emphasis]. All this on one condition; that it is in strictest confidence between ourselves.

When Lenin began to write up this material in The State and Revolution — he never finished the work — he was surprised to find how far the views of Marx and Engels had been forgotten. This was especially striking when it came to the question of the destiny of the state in the course of the transition to communism, following a proletarian revolution.

For instance, Lenin quotes, from The Poverty of Philosophy Marx’s statement that ‘the working class .. . will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power proper’. And in the Communist Manifesto he finds what he ironically calls ‘one of the forgotten words of Marxism’:

... the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political power to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class.

It is interesting to note that, in The State and Revolution, Lenin is quite clear that the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which Marx and Engels used on some occasions, is equivalent precisely to this idea: that the proletariat will organise itself as the ruling class. Then, the state will begin at once to ‘wither away’.

Lenin notes especially the development which Marx was able to make as a result of the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Now he could be clear that ‘the precondition for any real people’s revolution on the Continent’ was ‘no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it’.

What was to replace this ‘machine’? Lenin recalls that Marx saw the form of this replacement in the way the Commune organised itself.

1. The standing army was to be suppressed and replaced by ‘the armed people’.
2. The people’s representatives were to be elected by universal suffrage, subject to recall at any time and paid the wages of a workman. Judges were also to be elected.
3. Instead of an executive, inaccessible to electors, ‘the Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time’.
4. Local communes would take over many of the functions of the central government.

When Marx spoke of the violent overthrow of the existing order and the establishment of proletarian dictatorship, this is what he had in mind. In 1917, Lenin agreed with him, seeing the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies as the Russian equivalent of the Commune, as ‘a democratic republic of the Commune type’. But, as the brutality and desperation of the wars of intervention and the Civil War swept away all such notions, these ideas were once more forgotten.

Perhaps with the exception of the April Theses of a few months earlier, Lenin had never written anything like The State and Revolution. As a follower of Plekhanov on nearly all theoretical issues, he had accepted his teacher’s crude interpretation of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which had been written into the programmes of both Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the RSDLP. As we have seen, it was Plekhanov who introduced the notion that this ‘dictatorship’ was to be exercised by a devoted minority, in a state form opposed to that of ‘democracy’.

Lenin in 1914-17 was partially rediscovering Marx’s notion of communism, self-critically trying to develop his ideas in the light of the collapse of the International. Returning to the most fundamental issues, he was grappling with their falsification in the movement of which he had been a part. These books are permeated with this deeper understanding of the way forward for humanity to liberate itself through the world socialist revolution. However, they represent the start of work which was never continued, and then forgotten.

Even after the political outlooks of Kautsky and Plekhanov were clear for all to see, and Lenin was engaged in defending what he thought were the ideas of Marx and Engels against them, he never published a word which challenged their philosophical outlooks. Even when he did begin to see the importance of Hegel for Marx’s thinking, and glimpsed the superficiality of Plekhanov’s discussion of this, he could not break free from his mentor’s influence. After 1917, there was no opportunity to continue this advance or consider its significance. Later, the mythological picture of Lenin which Stalinism inflicted on the world prevented any objective assessment being made.

Indeed, as far as I can make out, Lenin hardly breathed a word about his reading of Hegel to anyone else. I know of two exceptions. One was in the article On the Significance of Militant Materialism (1922), and even there, he makes a favourable mention of Plekhanov. The other reference was in the Trade Union discussion of 1920-21, mentioned on pages 31-2. There, too, Lenin was unable to talk about philosophy without invoking the name of Plekhanov.

Let me add in parenthesis for the benefit of young Party members that you cannot hope to become a real, intelligent Communist without making a study — and I mean study — of all of Plekhanov’s philosophical writings, because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world.

He even adds a footnote calling for a special edition of Plekhanov’s works, including an index.

What I am trying to show is that the philosophical bases of Marx’s thought, lost in the days of the Second International, were never rediscovered in the Third. Even before Stalin began his ‘revision’ of Marxism — ‘not with the theoretician’s pen but with the heel of the GPU’ the fundamental ideas of Marx had been buried.

Engels and ‘Marxism’

Frederick Engels worked closely with Marx from 1844, until Marx’s death in 1883. From then until his own death in 1895, Engels was the leading figure in the rapidly growing movement which became the Second International.

It is quite common to hear Engels blamed exclusively for the vulgarisation of Marx’s ideas, but I think this is too easy an option. It is true that some of Engels’s formulations do lend themselves to the spread of several inadequate conceptions. In particular, the idea that Capital was a book about ‘capitalist economics’ owes more than a little to Engels’s Anti-Duhring, his treatment of Volumes 2 and 3, and to his authorisation of the appalling English translation of Volume 1.

However, compared with the later perversions of Marx’s work, Engels’s errors are insignificant. By the end of his life, he was almost entirely isolated amidst a sea of opportunism, and fighting a lone battle for the concepts Marx had originated, as he understood them. His followers certainly made use of the weaknesses of his writings in the construction of their ‘Marxism’. However, in this process, these works, which played an enormous part in the popularisation of Marx’s ideas, were misinterpreted nearly as badly as Marx’s own writings.

Engels wrote Anti-Duhring in Marx’s lifetime, and it rapidly became one of the most popular theoretical works in the socialist movement. (Parts were later issued as the pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.) In it, he wrote: ‘Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history.’

Such remarks, made in texts designed for popular reading, do not say everything which Marx thought on these issues. But they in no way conform to the Plekhanovite picture. The closest Engels comes to speaking about ‘dialectical materialism’ is this:

Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French of the eighteenth century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of nature as a whole moving in narrow circles and for ever immutable.... Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which nature also has its history in time.... In both cases, it [modern materialism] is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences.

This passage may not be written with Engels’s usual clarity, but it gives no support to the idea that ‘modern materialism’ is just the ‘old materialism’ with an extra ‘dialectical’ flourish. Nor is there any question of ‘applying’ dialectic independently to nature and to history. Rather, Engels is arguing quite the opposite: the ‘dialectic’ of Hegel has been refounded on a materialist basis.

Engels’s incomplete manuscripts on the natural sciences were written in the 1870s, but published only in 1925, under the title Dialectics of Nature. The ‘Marxists’ then absorbed them into their world-outlook Despite the fairly tentative way that Engels wrote about the ‘laws of dialectics’, they were turned into tablets of stone

In 1888, Engels wrote a review article, Ludwig Feuerbach, and this became another source for ‘dialectical materialism’ However, it was when Plekhanov translated it into Russian, and wrote extensive explanatory notes for it, that it formed the shape in which it became a major part of the ‘Marxist’ canon.

This is how Engels posed the question of materialism:

The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in one form or another — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate than in Christianity comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.

Later in this book he contrasts the views of Marx and himself with those of Hegel:

It was resolved to comprehend the real world — nature and history — just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist crotchets. It was decided mercilessly to sacrifice every idealist crotchet which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived on their own and not in a fantastic interconnection. And materialism means nothing more than this.

We comprehended the concepts in our head once more materialistically — as images of real things instead of regarding the real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept. Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought — both sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. In this way the dialectic of ideas became merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical movement of the real world, and thus Hegel’s dialectic was put on its head, or rather, from its head, on which it was standing, it was put on its feet.

I do not believe that this is the same as Plekhanov’s ‘dialectical materialism’ at all. For Engels, ‘laws of history’ have ‘asserted themselves unconsciously’ only ‘up to now’.

In any case, Engels deserves to be considered as an independent thinker and not looked at as if his writings were merely a part of Marx’s output. Since it would take me too far away from my present purpose to undertake this study here, in this book I shall restrict myself almost entirely to Marx’s own writings.

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