On Lenin’s Book Materialism and Empiriocriticism
This work, the only one published by Lenin on purely philosophical questions, is directed against Mach and against the disciples, avowed or not, whom he had in 1908 in the ranks of social-democracy, and especially Russian social-democracy; the best known of these was Bogdanov. Here Lenin examines in detail his opponents’ doctrines, which all endeavoured, with more or less subtlety, to solve the problem of knowledge by doing away with the notion of an object exterior to thought; he shows that they all come back in the end, once stripped of their pretentious phraseology, to the idealism of Berkeley, that is to say to a negation of the outside world; he places in opposition to them the materialism of Marx and Engels. In this controversy, which took him away from his usual preoccupations, Lenin displayed once again his power of work, his taste for serious documentary analysis. The point of the discussion is easy to understand: you cannot claim to stand for “scientific socialism” if you have not a clear idea of what science is, if consequently you have not posited in clear terms the problem of knowledge, of the relationship between thought and its object. Nevertheless, Lenin’s work is almost as tedious and even almost as little instructive as any textbook of philosophy. This is partly due to the mediocrity of the opponents Lenin is attacking, but above all to Lenin’s method itself.
Lenin studied philosophy first of all in 1899, when he was in Siberia; then in 1908, when he was preparing the book in question with a very definite object, namely, in order to refute the theorists in the working-class movement who wished to deviate from the materialism of Engels. That is a very characteristic method which consists in thinking with the object of refuting, the solution being already given before the research. And by what, then, could this solution be given? By the Party, as it is given for the Catholic by the Church. For “the theory of knowledge, exactly in the same way as political economy, is, in our contemporary society, a party science”.
As a matter of fact, one cannot deny that there is a close connection between theoretical culture and the division of society into classes. All oppressive societies give birth to a false conception of the relationship between man and nature, from the mere fact that it is only the downtrodden who are in direct contact with nature, that is to say those who are excluded from theoretical culture, deprived of the right of and opportunity for self-expression; and conversely, the false conception so formed tends to prolong the duration of the oppression, in so far as it causes this separation between thought and work to seem legitimate. In this sense, one is able to say of such and such a philosophical system, of such and such a conception of science, that they are reactionary or bourgeois. But it is not in this way that Lenin seems to understand it. He does not say: such and such a conception distorts the true relationship between man and the world, therefore it is reactionary; but, such and such a conception deviates from materialism, leads to idealism, furnishes religion with arguments; it is reactionary, therefore false. He was not at all concerned with seeing clearly into his own thought, but solely with maintaining intact the philosophical traditions on which the Party lived.
Such a method of thought is not that of a free man. And yet in what other way would Lenin have been able to think? As soon as a party finds itself cemented not only by the co-ordination of activities, but also by unity of doctrine, it becomes impossible for a good militant to think otherwise than in the manner of a slave. It is easy thenceforward to visualize how such a party will behave, once it is in power. The stifling régime which weighs at present upon the Russian people was already implied in embryo in Lenin’s attitude towards his own process of thought. Long before it robbed the whole of Russia of liberty of thought, the Bolshevik party had already taken it away from their own leader.
Marx, fortunately, went about the process of thinking in a different way. In spite of a number of controversies which add nothing to his prestige, he sought rather to put some order into his own thoughts than to lay flat his opponents; and he had learnt from Hegel that instead of refuting incomplete notions it is better “to surmount them whilst retaining them”. That is why Marx’s thought differs sensibly from that of the Marxists, Engels included, and nowhere so much as in the solution of the problem with which Lenin is dealing here, namely, that of knowledge and, more generally, of the relations between the mind and the world.
In order to explain how it happens that the mind has knowledge of the world, one can either visualize the world as being a mere creation of the mind, or visualize the mind as being one of the products of the world—a product which, by an inexplicable coincidence, also constitutes its image or reflection. Lenin submits that every philosophy must come back, in the end, to one or other of these two conceptions, and he chooses, of course, the second. He quotes Engels’s formula according to which the mind and consciousness “are products of the human brain, being, in the last resort, products of nature”; so that “the products of the human brain being, in the last resort, products of nature, far from being in contradiction with the general scheme of nature, correspond to it”; and he repeats ad nauseam that this correspondence lies in the fact that the products of the human brain are, apparently thanks to Providence, the photographs, images, reflections of nature. As if the thoughts of a madman were not, by the same token, “products of nature”!
Now the two conceptions between which Lenin wants to force us to choose both proceed from the same method; in order to solve the problem, they eliminate one of its terms. One of them eliminates the world, the object of knowledge, the other the mind, the subject of knowledge; each strips knowledge of all meaning. If you want, not to construct a theory, but to ascertain the condition in which man is actually placed, you will not ask yourself how it happens that the world is known, but how, in fact, man knows the world; and you will have to acknowledge the existence both of a world which lies beyond mind and of a mind which, far from passively reflecting the world, exercises itself on the world with the double aim of knowing it and transforming it. This is the way Descartes thought; but it is significant that Lenin, in this book, does not even mention his name; this is also, undoubtedly, the way Marx thought.
It will doubtless be objected that Marx never expressed himself in disagreement with the doctrine expounded by Engels in his philosophical works; that he read Anti-Dühring in manuscript and approved it; but this only means that Marx never took the time to think over these problems sufficiently to become aware of what separated him from Engels. The entire works of Marx are permeated with a spirit incompatible with the vulgar materialism of Engels and Lenin. He never regards man as being a mere part of nature, but always as being at the same time, owing to the fact that he exercises a free activity, an antagonistic term vis-à-vis nature. In a study on Spinoza, he expressly reproaches him with confounding together man and the nature which contains him, instead of placing them in opposition. In his Dissertations on Feuerbach, he writes: “The chief defect in all the materialistic doctrines that have so far been elaborated, including Feuerbach’s, lies in the fact that the real, the sensible, are conceived only in the form of object, of contemplation, and not as sensible human activity, as praxis, in a subjective way. That is why the active side has been developed—in an abstract way, it is true—in opposition to materialism, by idealism, which, of course, does not know real, sensible activity as such.”
Although these pronouncements are obscure, they at least state clearly that it is a question of making a synthesis of idealism and materialism, a synthesis in which a radical opposition between passive nature and human activity is preserved. Actually, Marx refuses to conceive of pure thought exercising itself outside all contact with nature; but there is nothing in common between a doctrine which turns man as a whole into a mere product of nature, mind into a mere reflection, and a conception which shows reality appearing as a result of contact between mind and the world, in the act by which thinking man takes possession of the world.
It is according to this conception that we must interpret historical materialism, which means, as Marx explains at length in his German Ideology, that the thoughts formed by men in the midst of given technical, economic and social conditions correspond to the way in which they act upon nature by producing their own conditions of existence. Finally, it is from this conception that the idea itself of the proletarian revolution must be drawn; for the very essence of the capitalist system consists, as Marx forcibly showed, of a “reversal of the relationship between subject and object”, a reversal brought about by the subordination of subject to object, of “the worker to the material conditions of work”; and the revolution can have no other meaning except to restore to the thinking subject his proper relationship to matter, by giving him back the control which it is his function to exercise over it.
It is not in the least surprising that the Bolshevik party, whose very organization has always rested on the subordination of the individual, and which, once in power, was to enslave the worker to the machine every bit as much as capitalism, should have adopted as its doctrine the naïve materialism of Engels rather than the philosophy of Marx. Nor is it surprising that Lenin should have kept to a purely polemical method and preferred to entangle his opponents in all sorts of difficulties, rather than show how his materialistic theory would have avoided like difficulties. For him, a quotation from Anti-Dühring takes the place of all analyses; but it is not by speaking disdainfully of the “errors, long since refuted, committed by Kant” that he can prevent the Critique of Pure Reason from remaining, in spite of its omissions, far more instructive than Anti-Dühring for anyone who wishes to ponder the problem of knowledge. And one can only laugh on seeing him—him who has constantly invoked “dialectical materialism” as a complete doctrine, capable of solving everything—admit, in a fragment concerning dialectics, that so far one has only been concerned with popularizing the dialectical method, and not with verifying its truth through the history of the sciences.
Such a work is a very distressing mark of the socialist movement’s deficiency in the domain of pure theory. And one cannot console oneself for it by saying that social and political action are more important than philosophy; the revolution has got to be as much an intellectual as a social revolution, and purely theoretical speculation has its part therein, a part which it cannot renounce under pain of making all the rest impossible. All genuine revolutionaries have understood that the revolution implies the dissemination of knowledge among the population as a whole. On that score there is complete agreement between Blanqui, who regards communism as impossible before “enlightenment” has been spread everywhere; Bakunin, who wished to see science, according to his admirable expression, “become fused with the real and immediate life of every individual”; and Marx, for whom socialism was to be, above all, the abolition of the “degrading division of labour into intellectual and manual labour”.
However, we do not seem to have understood what the conditions of such a transformation are. To send every citizen to secondary school and university up to the age of 18 or 20 would be a feeble, not to say a useless, remedy for the actual state of things from which we suffer. If it were simply a question of popularizing science such as our scientists have made it for us, it would be an easy matter; but nothing about present-day science can be popularized, unless it be the results, and this compels those one imagines one is instructing to believe without understanding. As for the methods which constitute the very soul of science, these are by their very essence unfathomable to laymen, and consequently also to scientists themselves, whom specialization always turns into laymen outside their own very restricted field of study.
Thus, just in the same way as the worker, in modern industrial production, has to submit to the material conditions of his work, so the mind, in scientific research, has nowadays to submit to established scientific facts; and science, which was to have made all things clear and unveiled all mysteries, has itself become the outstanding mystery, so much so that obscurity, and indeed absurdity, appear today in a scientific theory as a mark of profundity.
Science has become the most modern form of the consciousness of man who has not yet found himself or has once again lost himself, to apply Marx’s telling dictum concerning religion. And no doubt present-day science can serve very suitably as a theology for our more and more bureaucracy-ridden society, if it is true, as Marx wrote in his youth, that “the universal soul of bureaucracy is secrecy, mystery, inwardly through its hierarchical system, outwardly through its character of closed corporation”. More generally, the condition of all privilege, and consequently of all oppression, is the existence of a corpus of knowledge essentially closed to the working masses, which thus find themselves compelled to believe just in the same way as they are forced to obey. Religion, nowadays, no longer suffices to fill this role, and science has taken its place. That is why Marx’s excellent observation about the criticism of religion, as being the condition of all criticism, must be extended also to include modern science. Socialism will not even be conceivable as long as science has not been stripped of its mystery.
Descartes thought, in his time, he had founded a science without mystery, that is to say a science wherein there would be so much unity and simplicity of method that the most complicated parts would merely take longer and not be more difficult to understand than the simplest parts; in which everyone would therefore be able to understand how the actual results which he had not the time to verify had been obtained; in which each result would be given with the method leading to its discovery, in such a way that every schoolboy would have the feeling of inventing science anew. It was Descartes, too, who formed the project of a School of Arts and Crafts, where each artisan would learn fully to understand the theoretical bases of his own craft; he thus showed himself to be more socialist, in the matter of culture, than all Marx’s disciples have been. However, he only accomplished what he wanted to a very limited extent, and even betrayed himself, out of vanity, by publishing a wilfully obscure Géométrie. Since his day, there have been hardly any scientists seeking to undermine their own caste privileges. As for the intellectuals of the working-class movement, they have not thought of tackling such an indispensable task; an overwhelming task, it is true, which implies a critical re-examination of the whole of science, and especially of mathematics, where the quintessence of mystery has taken refuge; but a task clearly set by the very notion of socialism, whose accomplishment, independent of outside conditions and the present position of the working-class movement, depends solely on those who will dare to undertake it; furthermore, of such importance that one step made in this direction would be more useful perhaps to humanity and to the proletariat than a whole host of partial successes in the sphere of action. But the theorists of the socialist movement, when they leave the sphere of practical action or that useless commotion amidst rival tendencies, groups and sub-groups which gives them the illusion of action, never think at all of undermining the privileges of the intellectual caste—far from it; instead, they elaborate a complicated and mysterious doctrine which serves to maintain bureaucratic oppression at the heart of the working-class movement. In this sense, philosophy is indeed, as Lenin said, a party matter.
(Critique sociale, November 1933.)