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Title: Lenin as Philosopher
Author: Anton Pannekoek
Date: 1938
Language: en
Topics: council communism, Leninism, anti-state, anti-authoritarianism, Vladimir Lenin, philosophy
Source: https://libcom.org/files/Pannekoek%20-%20Lenin%20as%20Philosopher.pdf

Anton Pannekoek

Lenin as Philosopher

Introduction

The Russian Revolution was fought under the banner of Marxism. In the

years of propaganda before the First World War the Bolshevist Party came

forward as the champion of Marxist ideas and tactics. It worked along

with the radical tendencies in the socialist parties of Western Europe,

which were also steeped in Marxian theory, whereas the Menshevist Party

corresponded rather to the reformist tendencies over here. In

theoretical controversies the Bolshevist authors, besides the so-called

Austrian and Dutch schools of Marxism, came forward as the defenders of

rigid Marxist doctrines. In the Revolution the Bolshevists, who now had

adopted the name of Communist Party, could win because they put up as

the leading principle of their fight the class war of the working masses

against the bourgeoisie. Thus Lenin and his party, in theory and

practice, stood as the foremost representatives of Marxism.

Then, however, a contradiction appeared. In Russia a system of

state-capitalism consolidated itself, not by deviating from but by

following Lenin’s ideas (e.g. in his State and Revolution). A new

dominating and exploiting class came into power over the working class.

But at the same time Marxism was fostered, and proclaimed the

fundamental basis of the Russian state. In Moscow a “Marx-Engels

Institute” was founded that collected with care and reverence all the

well-nigh lost and forgotten works and manuscripts of the masters and

published them in excellent editions. Whereas the Communist Parties,

directed by the Moscow Comintern, refer to Marxism as their guiding

doctrine, they meet with more and more opposition from the most advanced

workers in Western Europe and America, most radically from the ranks of

Council-communism. These contradictions, extending over all important

problems of life and of the social struggle, can be cleared up only by

penetrating into the deepest, i.e. the philosophical, principles of what

is called Marxism in these different trends of thought.

Lenin gave an exposition of his philosophical ideas in his work

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that appeared in Russian in 1908, and

was published in 1927 in German and in English translations. Some of the

Russian socialist intellectuals about 1904 had taken an interest in

modern Western natural philosophy, especially in the ideas of Ernst

Mach, and tried to combine these with Marxism. A kind of “Machism”, with

Bogdanov, Lenin’s most intimate collaborator, and Lunatcharsky as

spokesmen, developed as an influential trend in the socialist party.

After the first revolution the strife flared up again, connected as it

was with all the various tactical and practical differences in the

socialist movement. Then Lenin took a decisive stand against these

deviations and, aided by Plechanov, the ablest representative of Marxian

theory among the Russians, soon succeeded in destroying the influences

of Machism in the socialist party.

In the Introduction to the German and English editions of Lenin’s book,

Deborin – at that time the official interpreter of Leninism, but

afterwards disgraced – exalts the importance of the collaboration of the

two foremost theoretical leaders for the definite victory of true

Marxism over all anti-marxist, reformist trends.

“Lenin’s book is not only an important contribution to philosophy, but

it is also a remarkable document of an intra-party struggle which was of

utmost importance in strengthening the general philosophical foundations

of Marxism and Leninism, and which to a great degree determined the

subsequent growth of philosophical thought amongst the Russian Marxists

... Unfortunately, matters are different beyond the borders of the

Soviet Union ... where Kantian scholasticism and positivistic idealism

are in full bloom.”

Since the importance of Lenin’s book is so strongly emphasised here, it

is necessary to make it the subject of a serious critical study. The

doctrine of Party-Communism of the Third International cannot be judged

adequately unless their philosophical basis is thoroughly examined.

Marx’s studies on society, which for a century now have been dominating

and shaping the workers’ movement in increased measure, took their form

from German philosophy. They cannot be understood without a study of the

spiritual and political developments of the European world. Thus it is

with other social and philosophical trends and with other schools of

materialism developing besides Marxism. Thus it is, too, with the

theoretical ideas underlying the Russian revolution. Only by comparing

these different systems of thought as to their social origin and their

philosophical contents can we arrive at a well-founded judgement.

Chapter 1. Marxism

The evolution of Marx’s ideas into what is now called Marxism can be

understood only in connection with the social and political developments

of the period in which they arose. It was the time when industrial

capitalism made its entry into Germany. This brought about a growing

opposition to the existing aristocratic absolutism. The ascending

bourgeois class needed freedom of trade and commerce, favourable

legislation, a government sympathetic to its interests, freedom of press

and assembly, in order to secure its needs and desires in an unhampered

fight. Instead it found itself confronted with a hostile regime, an

omnipotent police, and a press censorship which suppressed every

criticism of the reactionary government. The struggle between these

forces, which led to the revolution of 1848, first had to be conducted

on a theoretical level, as a struggle of ideas and a criticism of the

prevailing system of ideas. The criticism of the young bourgeois

intelligentsia was directed mainly against religion and Hegelian

philosophy.

Hegelian philosophy in which the self-development of the “Absolute Idea”

creates the world and then, as developing world, enters the

consciousness of man, was the philosophical guise suited to the

Christian world of the epoch of the “Restoration” after 1815. Religion

handed down by past generations served, as always, as the theoretical

basis and justification for the perpetuation of old class relations.

Since an open political fight was still impossible, the struggle against

the feudal oligarchy had to be conducted in a veiled form, as an attack

on religion. This was the task of the group of young intellectuals of

1840 among whom Marx grew up and rose to a leading position.

While still a student Marx admitted, although reluctantly, the force of

the Hegelian method of thought, dialectics, and made it his own. That he

chose for his doctor’s thesis the comparison of the two great

materialistic philosophers of ancient Greece, Democritus and Epicurus,

seems to indicate, however, that in the deep recesses of

sub-consciousness Marx inclined to materialism. Shortly thereafter he

was called upon to assume the editorship of a new paper founded by the

oppositional Rheinish bourgeoisie in Cologne. Here he was drawn into the

practical problems of the political and social struggle. So well did he

conduct the fight that after a year of publication the paper was banned

by the State authorities. It was during this period that Feuerbach made

his final step towards materialism. Feuerbach brushed, away Hegel’s

fantastic system, turned towards the simple experiences of everyday

life, and arrived at the conclusion that religion was a man-made

product. Forty years later Engels still spoke fervently of the

liberating effect that Feuerbach’s work had on his contemporaries, and

of the enthusiasm it aroused in Marx, despite critical reservations. To

Marx it meant that now instead of attacking a heavenly image they had to

come to grips with earthly realities. Thus in 1843 in his essay Kritik

der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (A Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy

of Law) he wrote:

“As far as Germany is concerned the criticism of religion is practically

completed; and the criticism of religion is the basis of all criticism

... The struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against

that world whose spiritual aroma is religion ... Religion is the moan of

the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, as it is the

spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The

abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the

demand for their real happiness, the demand to abandon the illusions

about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires

illusions. The criticism of religion therefore contains potentially the

criticism of the Vale of Tears whose aureole is religion. Criticism has

plucked the imaginary flowers which adorned the chain, not that man

should wear his fetters denuded of fanciful embellishment, but that he

should throw off the chain and break the living flower ... Thus the

criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth, the

criticism of religion into the criticism of Law, and the criticism of

theology into the criticism of politics.”

The task confronting Marx was to investigate the realities of social

life. In collaboration with Engels during their stay in Paris and

Brussels, he made a study of the French Revolution and French socialism,

as well as of English economy and the English working-class movement,

which led towards further elaboration of the doctrine known as

“Historical Materialism”. As the theory of social development by way of

class struggles we find it expounded in La misère de la philosophie

(written in 1846 against Proudhon’s Philosophie de le misère), in The

Communist Manifesto (1848), and in the oft-quoted preface to Zur Kritik

der Politischen Oekonomie (1859).

Marx and Engels themselves refer to this system of thought as

materialism, in opposition to the “idealism” of Hegel and the Young

Hegelians. What do they understand by materialism? Engels, discussing

afterwards the fundamental theoretical problems of Historical

Materialism in his Anti-Dühring and in his booklet on Feuerbach, states

in the latter publication:

“The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of modern

philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and

being...Those who asserted the primacy of the spirit to nature and,

therefore, in the last instance, assumed world-creation in some form or

other, comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature

as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.”

That not only the human mind is bound up with the material organ of the

brain, but that, also, man with his brain and mind is intimately

connected with the rest of the animal kingdom and the inorganic world,

was a self-evident truth to Marx and Engels. This conception is common

to all “schools of materialism.” What distinguishes Marxist materialism

from other schools must be learned from its various polemic works

dealing with practical questions of politics and society. Then we find

that to Marx materialistic thought was a working method. It was meant to

explain all phenomena by means of the material world, the existing

realities. In his writings he does not deal with philosophy, nor does he

formulate materialism in a system of philosophy; he is utilising it as a

method for the study of the world, and thus demonstrates its validity.

In the essay quoted above, for example, Marx does not demolish the

Hegelian philosophy of Law by philosophical disputations, but through an

annihilating criticism of the real conditions in Germany.

In the materialist method philosophical sophistry and disputations

around abstract concepts are replaced by the study of the real world.

Let us take a few examples to elucidate this point. The statement “Man

proposes, God disposes” is interpreted by the theologian from the point

of view of the omnipotence of God. The materialist searches for the

cause of the discrepancy between expectations and results, and finds it

in the social effects of commodity exchange and competition. The

politician debates the desirability of freedom and of socialism; the

materialist asks: from what individuals or classes do these demands

spring, what specific content do they have, and to what social need do

they correspond? The philosopher, in abstract speculations about the

essence of time, seeks to establish whether or not absolute time exists.

The materialist compares clocks to see whether simultaneousness or

succession of two phenomena can be established unmistakably.

Feuerbach had preceded Marx in using the materialist method, insofar as

he pointed out that religious concepts and ideas are derived from

material conditions. He saw in living man the source of all religious

thoughts and concepts. “Der Mensch ist, was er isst” (Man is what he

eats) is a well-known German pun summarising his doctrine. Whether his

materialism would be valid, however, depended on whether he would be

successful in presenting a clear and convincing explanation of religion.

A materialism that leaves the problem obscure is insufficient and will

fall back into idealism. Marx pointed out that the mere principle of

taking living man as the starting point is not enough. In his theses on

Feuerbach in 1845 he formulated the essential difference between his

materialistic method and Feuerbach’s as follows:

“Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence (das

menschliche Wesen). But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in

each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social

relationships” (Thesis 6). “His work consists in the dissolution of the

religious world into its secular basis. The fact, however, that the

secular foundation lifts itself above itself and establishes itself in

the clouds as an independent realm is only to be explained by the

self-cleavage and self-contradictions of this secular basis. The latter

itself, therefore, must first be understood in its contradictions, and

then, by the removal of the contradiction, must be revolutionised in

practice” (Thesis 4).

In short, man can be understood only as a social being. From the

individual we must proceed to society, and then the social

contradictions out of which religion came forth, must be dissolved. The

real world, the material, sensual world, where all ideology and

consciousness have their origin, is the developing human society – with

nature in the background, of course, as the basis on which society rests

and of which it is a part transformed by man.

A presentation of these ideas may be found in the manuscript of Die

Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology), written in 1845 but not

published. The part that deals with Feuerbach was first published in

1925 by Rjazanov, then chief of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow; the

complete work was not published until 1932. Here the theses on Feuerbach

are worked out at greater length. Although it is manifest that Marx

wrote it down quite hurriedly, he nevertheless gave a brilliant

presentation of all the essential ideas concerning the evolution of

society, which later found their short expression, practically, in the

proletarian propaganda pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto and,

theoretically, in the preface to Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie

(Critique of Political Economy).

The German Ideology is directed first of all against the dominant

theoretical view which regarded consciousness as the creator, and ideas

developing from ideas as the determining factors of human history. They

are treated here contemptuously as “the phantoms formed in the human

brain” that are “necessary sublimates of their material, empirically

verifiable life process bound to material premises.” It was essential to

put emphasis on the real world, the material and empirically-given world

as the source of all ideology. But it was also necessary to criticise

the materialist theories that culminated in Feuerbach. As a protest

against ideology, the return to biological man and his principal needs

is correct but it is not possible to find a solution to the question of

how and why religious ideas originate if we take the individual as an

abstract isolated being. Human society in its historical evolution is

the dominant reality controlling human life. Only out of society can the

spiritual life of man be explained. Feuerbach, in his attempt to find an

explanation of religion by a return to the “real” man did not find the

real man, because he searches for him in the individual, the human being

generally. From his approach the world of ideas cannot be explained.

Thus he was forced to fall back on the ideology of universal human love.

“Insofar as Feuerbach is a materialist,” Marx said, “he does not deal

with history, and insofar as he considers history, he is not a

materialist.”

What Feuerbach could not accomplish was accomplished by the Historical

Materialism of Marx: an explanation of man’s ideas out of the material

world. A brilliant survey of the historical development of society finds

its philosophical summary in the sentence: “Men, developing their

material production and their material intercourse along with this,

their real existence, alter their thinking and the products of their

thinking.” Thus, as relation between reality and thinking, materialism

is in practice proven to be right. We know reality only through the

medium of the senses. Philosophy, as theory of knowledge, then finds its

basis in this principle: the material, empirically given world is the

reality which determines thought.

The basic problem in the theory of knowledge (epistemology) was always:

what truth can be attributed to thinking. The term “criticism of

knowledge” (Erkenntniskritik) used by professional philosophers for this

theory of knowledge, already implies a viewpoint of doubt. In his second

and fifth theses on Feuerbach Marx refers to this problem and again

points to the practical activity of man as the essential content of his

life:

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human

thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. In

practice man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the

this-sidedness of his thinking” (Thesis 2). “Feuerbach, not satisfied

with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous perception (Anschauung), but

he does not conceive sensuousness (die Sinnlichkeit) as a practical

human-sensuous activity” Thesis 5).

Why practical? Because man in the first place must live. His bodily

structure, his faculties and his abilities, and all his activity are

adapted to this very end. With these he must assert himself in the

external world, i.e. in nature, and as an individual in society. To

these abilities belongs the activity of the organ of thought, the brain,

and the faculty of thinking itself. Thinking is a bodily faculty. In

every phase of life man uses his power of thought to draw conclusions

from his experiences, on which expectations and hopes are built, and

these conclusions regulate his behaviour and his actions. The

correctness of his conclusions, the truth of his thinking, is shown by

the very fact of his existence, since it is a condition for his

survival. Because thinking is an efficient adaptation to life, it

embodies truth, not for every conclusion, but in its general character.

On the basis of his experiences man derives generalisations and rules,

natural laws, on which his expectations are based. They are generally

correct, as is witnessed by his survival. Sometimes, however, false

conclusions may be drawn, with failure and destruction in their wake.

Life is a continuous process of learning, adaptation, development.

Practice is the unsparing test of the correctness of thinking.

Let us first consider this in relation to natural science. In the

practice of this science, thought finds its purest and most abstract

form. This is why philosophical scientists take this form as the subject

of their deductions and pay little attention to its similarity to the

thinking of everybody in his everyday activity. Yet thinking in the

study of nature is only a highly developed special field in the entire

social labour process. This labour process demands an accurate knowledge

of natural phenomena and its integration into “laws of nature”, in order

to utilise them successfully in the field of technics. The determination

of these laws through observation of special phenomena is the task of

specialists. In the study of nature it is generally accepted that

practice, experiment, is the test of truth. Here, too, we find that the

observed regularities, formulated as laws of nature, are generally

fairly dependable guides to human practice; though they are frequently

not entirely correct and often balk expectation, they are improved

constantly through the progress of science, If, therefore, man at times

was referred to as the “legislator of nature” it must be added that

nature often disregards his laws and summons him to make better ones.

The practice of life, however, comprises much more than the scientific

study of nature. The relation of the scientist to the world, despite his

experiments, remains observational. To him the world is an external

thing to look at. But in reality man deals with nature in his practical

life by acting upon it and making it part of his existence. Man does not

stand against nature as to an external alien world. By the toil of his

hands man transforms the world, to such an extent that the original

natural substance is hardly discernible, and in this process transforms

himself too. Thus man himself builds his new world: human society,

embedded in nature transformed into a technical apparatus. Man is the

creator of this world. What meaning, then, has the question of whether

his thinking embodies truth? The object of his thinking is what he

himself produces by his physical and mental activities, and which he

controls through his brain.

This is not a question of partial truths. Engels in his booklet on

Feuerbach referred to the synthesising of the natural dye alizarin

(contained in madder) as a proof of the truth of human thinking. This,

however, proves only the validity of the chemical formula employed; it

cannot prove the validity of materialism as against Kant’s

“Thing-in-itself.” This concept, as may be seen from Kant’s preface to

his Criticism of Pure Reason, results from the incapacity of bourgeois

philosophy to understand the earthly origin of moral law. The

“Thing-in-itself” is not refuted by chemical industry but by Historical

Materialism explaining moral law through society. It was Historical

Materialism that enabled Engels to see the fallacy of Kant’s philosophy,

to prove the fallaciousness of which he then offered other arguments.

Thus, to repeat, it is not a question of partial truths in a specific

field of knowledge, where the practical outcome affirms or refutes them.

The point in question is a philosophical one, namely, whether human

thought is capable of grasping the deepest truth of the world. That the

philosopher in his secluded study, who handles exclusively abstract

philosophical concepts, which are derived in turn from abstract

scientific concepts themselves formulated outside of practical life –

that he, in the midst of this world of shadows, should have his doubts,

is easily understood. But for human beings, who live and act in the

practical everyday world, the question cannot have any meaning. The

truth of thought, says Marx, is nothing but the power and mastery over

the real world.

Of course this statement implies its counterpart: thinking cannot embody

truth where the human mind does not master the world. When the products

of man’s hand – as Marx expounded in Das Kapital – grow into a power

over him, which he no longer controls and which in the form of commodity

exchange and capital confronts him as an independent social being,

mastering man and even threatening to destroy him, then his mind submits

to the mysticism of supernatural beings and he doubts the ability of his

thinking to distinguish truth. Thus in the course of past centuries the

myth of supernatural heavenly truth unknowable to man overshadowed the

materialistic practice of daily experiences. Not until society has

evolved to a state where man will be able to comprehend all social

forces and will have learned to master them – in communist society in

short – will his thinking entirely correspond to the world. But already

before, when the nature of social production as a fundamental basis of

life and future development has become clear to man, when the mind – be

it only theoretically at first – actually masters the world, our

thinking will be fully true. That means that by the science of society

as formulated by Marx, because now his thesis is fulfilled, materialism

gains permanent mastery and becomes the only comformable philosophy.

Thus Marxian theory of society in principle means a transformation of

philosophy.

Marx, however, was not concerned with pure philosophy. “Philosophers

have interpreted the world differently, but what matters is to change

it,” he says in his last thesis on Feuerbach. The world situation

pressed for practical action. At first inspired by the rising bourgeois

opposition to absolutism, then strengthened by the new forces that

emanated from the struggle of the English and French working class

against the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels, through their study of social

realities, arrived at the conclusion that the proletarian revolution

following on the heels of the bourgeois revolution would bring the final

liberation of mankind. From now onward their activity was devoted to

this revolution, and in “The Communist Manifesto” they laid down the

first directions for the workers’ class struggle.

Marxism has since been inseparably connected with the class fight of the

proletariat. If we ask what Marxism is, we must first of all understand

that it does not encompass every thing Marx ever thought and wrote. The

views of his earlier years, for instance, such as quoted above, are

representative only in part; they are phases in a development leading

toward Marxism. Neither was it complete at once; whereas the role of the

proletarian class struggle and the aim of communism is already outlined

in The Communist Manifesto, the theory of capitalism and surplus value

is developed much later. Moreover, Marx’s ideas themselves, developed

with the change of social and political conditions. The character of the

revolution and the part played by the State in 1848, when the

proletariat had only begun to appear, differed in aspect from that of

later years at the end of the century, or today. Essential, however, are

Marx’s new contributions to science. There is first of all the doctrine

of Historical Materialism, the theory of the determination of all

political and ideological phenomena, of spiritual life in general, by

the productive forces and relations. The system of production, itself

based on the state of productive forces, determines the development of

society, especially through the force of the class struggle. There is,

furthermore, the presentation of capitalism as a temporary historical

phenomenon, the analysis of its structure by the theory of value and

surplus value, and the explanation of its revolutionary tendencies

through the proletarian revolution towards communism. With these

theories Marx has enriched human knowledge permanently. They constitute

the solid foundation of Marxism as a system of thought. From them

further conclusions may be drawn under new and changed circumstances.

Because of this scientific basis, however, Marxism is more than a mere

science. It is a new way of looking at the past and the future, at the

meaning of life, of the world, of thought; it is a spiritual revolution,

it is a new world-view, a new life-system. As a system of life Marxism

is real and living only through the class that adheres to it. The

workers who are imbued with this new outlook, become aware of themselves

as the class of the future, growing in number and strength and

consciousness, striving to take production into their own hands and

through the revolution to become masters of their own fate. Hence

Marxism as the theory of proletarian revolution is a reality, and at the

same time a living power, only in the minds and hearts of the

revolutionary working class.

Thus Marxism is not an inflexible doctrine or a sterile dogma of imposed

truths. Society changes, the proletariat grows, science develops. New

forms and phenomena arise in capitalism, in politics, in science, which

Marx and Engels could not have foreseen or surmised. Forms of thought

and struggle, that under former conditions were necessary must under

later conditions give way to other ones. But the method of research

which they framed remains up to this day an excellent guide and tool

towards the understanding and interpretation of new events. The working

class, enormously increased under capitalism, today stands only at the

threshold of its revolution and, hence, of its Marxist development;

Marxism only now begins to get its full significance as a living force

in the working class. Thus Marxism itself is a living theory which

grows, with the increase of the proletariat and with the tasks and aims

of its fight.

Chapter 2. Middle-Class Materialism

Returning now to the political scene out of which Marxism emerged, it

must be noted that the German revolution of 1848 did not bring full

political power to the bourgeoisie. But after 1850 capitalism developed

strongly in France and Germany. In Prussia the Progressive Party began

its fight for parliamentarism, whose inner weakness became evident later

when the government through military actions met the demands of the

bourgeoisie for a strong national State. Movements for national unity

dominated the political scene of Central Europe. Everywhere, with the

exception of England where it already held power, the rising bourgeoisie

struggled against the feudal absolutist conditions.

The struggle of a new class for power in State and society is at the

same time always a spiritual struggle for a new world view. The old

powers can be defeated only when the masses rise up against them or, at

least, do not follow them any longer. Therefore it was necessary for the

bourgeoisie to make the working masses its followers and win their

adherence to capitalist society. For this purpose the old ideas of the

petty bourgeoisie and the peasants had to be destroyed and supplanted

with new bourgeois ideologies. Capitalism itself furnished the means to

this end.

The natural sciences are the spiritual basis of capitalism. On the

development of these sciences depends the technical progress that drives

capitalism forward. Science, therefore, was held in high esteem by the

rising bourgeois class. At the same time this science freed them from

the conventional dogmas embodying the rule of feudalism. A new outlook

on life and on the world sprang up out of the scientific discoveries,

and supplied the bourgeoisie with the necessary arguments to defy the

pretensions of the old powers. This new world outlook it disseminated

among the masses. To the peasant farm and the artisan workshop belong

the inherited biblical faith. But as soon as the sons of the peasants or

the impoverished artisans become industrial workers their mind is

captured by capitalist development. Even those who remain in

pre-capitalistic conditions are lured by the more liberal outlook of

capitalist progress and become susceptible to the propaganda of new

ideas.

The spiritual fight was primarily a struggle against religion. The

religious creed is the ideology of past conditions; it is the inherited

tradition which keeps the masses in submission to the old powers and

which had to be defeated. The struggle against religion was imposed by

the conditions of society; hence it had to take on varying forms with

varying conditions. In those countries where the bourgeoisie had already

attained full power, as for instance in England, the struggle was no

longer necessary and the bourgeoisie paid homage to the established

church. Only among the lower middle class and among the workers did more

radical trends of thought find some adherence. In countries where

industry and the bourgeoisie had to fight for emancipation they

proclaimed a liberal, ethical Christianity in opposition to the orthodox

faith. And where the struggle against a still powerful royal and

aristocratic class was difficult, and required the utmost strength and

exertion, the new world view had to assume extreme forms of radicalism

and gave rise to middle-class materialism. This was so to a great extent

in Central Europe; so it is natural that most of the popular propaganda

for materialism (Moleschott, Vogt, Büchner), originated here, though it

found an echo in other countries. In addition to these radical

pamphlets, a rich literature popularising the modern scientific

discoveries appeared, supplying valuable weapons in the struggle to free

the masses of the citizens, the workers, and the peasants, from the

spiritual fetters of tradition, and to turn them into followers of the

progressive bourgeoisie. The middle-class intelligentsia – professors,

engineers, doctors – were the most zealous propagandists of the new

enlightenment.

The essence of natural science was the discovery of laws operating in

nature. A careful study of natural phenomena disclosed recurring

regularities which allowed for scientific predictions. The 17th century

had already known the Galilean law of falling bodies and gravity,

Kepler’s laws of the planetary motions, Snell’s law of the refraction of

light, and Boyle’s law of the gas pressure. Towards the end of the

century came the discovery of the law of gravitation by Newton, which

more than all preceding discoveries exerted a tremendous influence in

the philosophical thought of the 18th and 19th centuries. Whereas the

others were rules that were not absolutely correct, Newton’s law of

gravitation proved to be the first real exact law strictly dominating

the motions of the heavenly bodies, which made possible predictions of

the phenomena with the same precision with which they could be observed.

From this the conception developed that all natural phenomena follow

entirely rigid definite laws. In nature causality rules: gravity is the

cause of bodies falling, gravitation causes the movements of the

planets. All occurring phenomena are effects totally determined by their

causes, allowing for neither free will, nor chance nor caprice.

This fixed order of nature disclosed by science was in direct contrast

to the traditional religious doctrines in which God as a despotic

sovereign arbitrarily rules the world and deals out fortune and

misfortune as he sees fit, strikes his enemies with thunderbolts and

pestilence and rewards others with miracles. Miracles are contradictory

to the fixed order of nature; miracles are impossible, and all reports

about them in the Bible are fables. The biblical and religious

interpretations of nature belong to an epoch in which primitive

agriculture prevailed under the overlordship of absolute despots. The

natural philosophy of the rising bourgeoisie, with its natural laws

controlling all phenomena, belongs to a new order of state and society

where the arbitrary rule of the despot is replaced by laws valid for

all.

The natural philosophy of the Bible, which theology asserts to be

absolute, divine, truth is the natural philosophy of ignorance that has

been deceived by outward appearances, that saw an immovable earth as the

centre of the universe, and held that all matter was created and was

perishable. Scientific experience showed, on the contrary, that matter

which apparently disappeared (as for instance in burning) actually

changes into invisible gaseous forms. Scales demonstrated that a

reduction of the total weight did not occur in this process and that,

therefore, no matter disappeared. This discovery was generalised into a

new principle; matter cannot be destroyed, its quantity always remains

constant, only its forms and combinations change. This holds good for

each chemical element; its atoms constitute the building stones of all

bodies. Thus science with its theory of the conservation of matter, of

the eternity of nature, opposed the theological dogma of the creation of

the world some 6,000 years ago.

Matter is not the only persistent substance science discovered in the

transient phenomena. Since the middle of the 19th century the law known

as the conservation of energy came to be regarded as the fundamental

axiom of physics. Here, too, a fixed and far reaching order of nature

was observed; in all phenomena changes of the form of energy take place:

heat and motion, tension and attraction, electrical and chemical energy;

but the total quantity never changes. This principle led to an

understanding of the development of cosmic bodies, the sun and the

earth, in the light of which all the assertions of theology appeared

like the talk of a stuttering child.

Of even greater consequence were the scientific discoveries concerning

man’s place in the world. Darwin’s theory of the origin of species,

which showed the evolution of man from the animal kingdom, was in

complete contradiction to all religious doctrines. But even before

Darwin, discoveries in biology and chemistry revealed the organic

identity of all human and living creatures with non-organic nature. The

protoplasm, the albuminous substance of which the cells of all living

beings are composed and to which all life is bound, consists of the same

atoms as all other matter. The human mind, which was elevated into a

part of divinity by the theological doctrine of the immortal soul, is

closely bound up with the physical properties of the brain; all

spiritual phenomena are the accompaniment to or the effect of material

occurrences in the brain cells.

Middle-class materialism drew the most radical conclusions from these

scientific discoveries. Everything spiritual is merely the product of

material processes; ideas are the secretion of the brain, just as bile

is the secretion of the liver. Let religion – said Büchner – go on

talking about the fugacity of matter and the immortality of the mind; in

reality it is the other way around. With the least injury of the brain

everything spiritual disappears; nothing at all remains of the mind when

the brain is destroyed, whereas the matter, its carrier, is eternal and

indestructible. All phenomena of life, including human ideas, have their

origin in the chemical and physical processes of the cellular substance;

they differ from non-living matter only in their greater complexity.

Ultimately all their processes must be explained by the dynamics and

movements of the atoms.

These conclusions of natural-science materialism, however, could not be

upheld to their utmost consequences. After all, ideas are different from

bile and similar bodily secretions; mind cannot be considered as a form

of force or energy, and belongs in a quite different category. If mind

is a product of the brain which differs from other tissues and cells

only in degree of complexity, then, fundamentally, it must be concluded

that something of mind, some sensation, is to be found in every animal

cell. And because the cellular substance is only an aggregate of atoms,

more complex but in substance not different from other matter, the

conclusion must be that something of what we call mind is already

present in the atom: in every smallest particle of matter there must be

a particle of the “spiritual substance.” This theory of the “atom-soul”

we find in the works of the prominent zoologist Ernst Haeckel, energetic

propagandist of Darwinism and courageous combater of religious

dogmatism. Haeckel did not consider his philosophical views as

materialism but called them monism – strangely enough since he extends

the duality of mind-matter down to the smallest elements of the world.

Materialism could dominate the ideology of the bourgeois class only for

a short time. Only so long as the bourgeoisie could believe that its

society of private property, personal liberty, and free competition,

through the development of industry, science and technique, could solve

the life problems of all mankind – only so long could the bourgeoisie

assume that the theoretical problems could be solved by science, without

the need to assume supernatural and spiritual powers. As soon, however,

as it became evident that capitalism could not solve the life problems

of the masses, as was shown by the rise of the proletarian class

struggle, the confident materialist philosophy disappeared. The world

was seen again full of insoluble contradictions and uncertainties, full

of sinister forces threatening civilisation. So the bourgeoisie turned

to various kinds of religious creeds, and the bourgeois intellectuals

and scientists submitted to the influence of mystical tendencies. Before

long they were quick to discover the weaknesses and shortcomings of

materialist philosophy, and to make speeches on the “limitations of

science” and the insoluble “world-riddles.”

Only a small number of the more radical members of the lower and middle

classes, who clung to the old political slogans of early capitalism,

continued to hold materialism in respect. Among the working class it

found a fertile ground. The adherents of anarchism always were its most

convinced followers. Socialist workers embraced the social doctrines of

Marx and the materialism of natural science with equal interest The

practice of labour under capitalism, their daily experience and their

awakening understanding of social forces contributed greatly towards

undermining traditional religion. Then, to solve their doubts, the need

for scientific knowledge grew, and the workers became the most zealous

readers of the works of Büchner and Haeckel. Whilst Marxist doctrine

determined the practical, political and social ideology of the workers,

a deeper understanding asserted itself only gradually; few became aware

of the fact that middle-class materialism had long since been outdated

and surpassed by Historical Materialism. This, by the way, concurs with

the fact that the working-class movement had not yet reached beyond

capitalism, that in practice the class struggle only tended to secure

its place within capitalist society, and that the democratic solutions

of the early middle class movements were accepted as valid for the

working class also. The full comprehension of revolutionary Marxist

theory is possible only in connection with revolutionary practice.

Wherein then, do middle-class materialism and Historical Materialism

stand opposed to one another?

Both agree insofar as they are materialist philosophies, that is, both

recognise the primacy of the experienced material world; both recognise

that spiritual phenomena, sensation, consciousness, ideas, are derived

from the former. They are opposite in that middle-class materialism

bases itself upon natural science, whereas Historical Materialism is

primarily the science of society. Bourgeois scientists observe man only

as an object of nature, the highest of the animals, determined by

natural Laws. For an explanation of man’s life and action, they have

only general biological Laws, and in a wider sense, the laws of

chemistry, physics, and mechanics. With these means little can be

accomplished in the way of understanding social phenomena and ideas.

Historical Materialism, on the other hand, lays bare the specific

evolutionary laws of human society and shows the interconnection between

ideas and society.

The axiom of materialism that the spiritual is determined by the

material world, has therefore entirely different meanings for the two

doctrines. For middle-class materialism it means that ideas are products

of the brain, are to be explained out of the structure and the changes

of the brain substance, finally out of the dynamics of the atoms of the

brain. For Historical Materialism, it means that the ideas of man are

determined by his social conditions; society is his environment which

acts upon him through his sense organs. This postulates an entirely

different kind of problem, a different approach, a different line of

thought, hence, also a different theory of knowledge.

For middle class materialism the problem of the meaning of knowledge is

a question of the relationship of spiritual phenomena to the

physico-chemical-biological phenomena of the brain matter. For

Historical Materialism it is a question of the relationship of our

thoughts to the phenomena which we experience as the external world. Now

man’s position in society is not simply that of an observing being: he

is a dynamic force which reacts upon his environment and changes it.

Society is nature transformed through labour. To the scientist, nature

is the objectively given reality which he observes, which acts on him

through the medium of his senses. To him the external world is the

active and dynamic element, whilst the mind is the receptive element.

Thus it is emphasised that the mind is only a reflection, an image of

the external world, as Engels expressed it when he pointed out the

contradiction between the materialist and idealist philosophies. But the

science of the scientist is only part of the whole of human activity,

only a means to a greater end. It is the preceding, passive part of his

activity which is followed by the active part; the technical

elaboration, the production, the transformation of the world by man.

Man is in the first place an active being. In the Labour process he

utilises his organs and aptitudes in order to constantly build and

remake his environment. In this procedure he not only invented the

artificial organs we call tools, but also trained his physical and

mental aptitudes so that they might react effectively to his natural

environment as instruments in the preservation of life. His main organ

is the brain whose function, thinking, is as good a physical activity as

any other. The most important product of brain activity, of the

efficient action of the mind upon the world is science, which stands as

a mental tool next to the material tools and, itself a productive power,

constitutes the basis of technology and so an essential part of the

productive apparatus.

Hence Historical Materialism looks upon the works of science, the

concepts, substances, natural Laws, and forces, although formed out of

the stuff of nature, primarily as the creations of the mental Labour of

man. Middle-class materialism, on the other hand, from the point of view

of the scientific investigator, sees all this as an element of nature

itself which has been discovered and brought to light by science.

Natural scientists consider the immutable substances, matter, energy,

electricity, gravity, the Law of entropy, etc., as the basic elements of

the world, as the reality that has to be discovered. From the viewpoint

of Historical Materialism they are products which creative mental

activity forms out of the substance of natural phenomena.

This is one fundamental difference in the method of thinking. Another

difference lies in dialectics which Historical Materialism inherited

from Hegel. Engels has pointed out that the materialist philosophy of

the 18th-century disregarded evolution; it is evolution that makes

dialectic thinking indispensable. Evolution and dialectics since have

often been regarded as synonymous; and the dialectic character of

Historical Materialism is supposed to be rendered by saying that it is

the theory of evolution. Evolution, however, was well known in the

natural science of the 19th century. Scientists were well acquainted

with the growth of the cell into a complete organism, with the evolution

of animal species as expressed in Darwinism, and with the theory of

evolution of the physical world known as the law of entropy. Yet their

method of reasoning was undialectic. They believed the concepts they

handled to be fixed objects, and considered their identities and

opposites as absolutes. So the evolution of the world as well as the

progress of science brought out contradictions, of which many examples

have been quoted by Engels in his Anti-Dühring. Understanding in general

and science in particular segregate and systematise into fixed concepts

and rigid laws what in the real world of phenomena occurs in all degrees

of flux and transition. Because language separates and defines groups of

phenomena by means of names, all items falling into a group, as

specimens of the concept, are considered similar and unchangeable. As

abstract concepts, they differ sharply, whereas in reality they

transform and merge into one another. The colours blue and green are

distinct from each other but in the intermediary nuances no one can say

where one colour ends and the other begins. It cannot be stated at what

point during its life cycle a flower begins or ceases to be a flower.

That in practical life good and evil are not absolute opposites is

acknowledged every day, just as that extreme justice may become extreme

injustice. Judicial freedom in capitalist development manifests itself

as actual slavery. Dialectic thinking is adequate to reality in that in

handling the concepts it is aware that the finite cannot fully render

the infinite, nor the static the dynamic, and that every concept has to

develop into new concepts, even into its opposite. Metaphysical,

undialectical thinking, on the other hand, leads to dogmatic assertions

and contradictions because it views conceptions formulated by thought as

fixed, independent entities that make up the reality of the world.

Natural science proper, surely, does not suffer much from this

shortcoming. It surmounts difficulties and contradictions in practice

insofar as it continually revises its formulations, increases their

richness by going into finer details, improves the qualitative

distinctions by mathematical formulas, completes them by additions and

corrections, thereby bringing the picture ever closer to the original,

the world of phenomena. The lack of dialectic reasoning becomes

disturbing only when the scientist passes from his special field of

knowledge towards general philosophical reasonings, as is the case with

middle-class materialism.

Thus, for instance, the theory of the origin of species often leads to

the notion that the human mind, having evolved from the animal mind, is

qualitatively identical with the latter and has only increased in

quantity. On the other hand, the qualitative difference between the

human and the animal mind, a fact of common experience, was raised by

theological doctrine, in enunciating the immortality of the soul, into

an absolute anti-thesis. In both cases there is a lack of dialectic

thinking according to which a similarity in original character, when

through the process of growth the increasing quantitative difference

turns into qualitative difference – the so-called inversion of quantity

into quality – requires new names and characteristics, without leading

to complete antithesis and loss of affinity.

It is the same metaphysical, non dialectic thinking to compare thought,

because it is the product of brain processes with such products of other

organs as bile; or to assume that mind, because it is a quality of some

material substance, must be a characteristic quality of all matter. And

especially, to think that because mind is something other than matter,

it must belong to an absolutely and totally different world without any

transition, so that a dualism of mind and matter, reaching down to the

atoms, remains sharp and unbridgeable. To dialectic thinking mind simply

is a concept incorporating all those phenomena we call spiritual, which,

thus, cannot reach beyond their actual appearance in the lowest living

animals. There the term mind becomes questionable, because the spiritual

phenomena disappear gradually into mere sensibility, into the more

simple forms of life. “Mind” as a characteristic existing quality, a

separate something, which either is or is not there, does not exist in

nature; mind is just a name we attach to a number of definite phenomena,

some perceived clearly, others uncertainly, as spiritual.

Life itself offers a close analogy. Proceeding from the smallest

microscopic organisms to still smaller invisible bacteria and viruses,

we finally come to highly complicated albuminous molecules that fall

within the sphere of chemistry. Where in this succession living matter

ceases to exist and dead matter begins cannot be determined; phenomena

change gradually, become simplified, are still analogous and yet already

different. This does not mean that we are unable to ascertain

demarcation lines; it is simply the fact that nature knows of no

boundaries. A condition of quality “life”, which either is or is not

present, does not exist in nature: again life is a mere name, a concept

we form in order to comprehend the endless variety of gradations in life

phenomena. Because middle-class materialism deals with life and death,

matter and mind, as if they were genuine realities existing in

themselves, it is compelled to work with hard and sharp opposites,

whereas nature offers an immense variety of more or less gradual

transitions.

Thus the difference between middle-class materialism and Historical

Materialism reaches down to basic philosophical views. The former, in

contradiction to the comprehensive and perfectly realistic Historical

Materialism is illusionary and imperfect – just as the bourgeois class

movement, of which it was the theory, represented an imperfect and

illusionary emancipation, in contrast to the complete and real

emancipation by way of the proletarian class struggle.

The difference between the two systems of thought shows itself

practically in their position towards religion. Middle-class materialism

intended to overcome religion. However, a certain view arisen out of

social life cannot be vanquished and destroyed merely by refuting it

with argumentation; this means posing one point of view against another:

and every argument finds a counter-argument. Only when it is shown why,

and under what circumstances such a view was necessary, can it be

defeated by establishing the transient character of these conditions.

Thus the disproof of religion by natural science was effective only

insofar as the primitive religious beliefs were concerned, where

ignorance about natural laws, about thunder and lightning, about matter

and energy, led to all kinds of superstition. The theory of bourgeois

society was able to destroy the ideologies of primitive agricultural

economy. But religion in bourgeois society is anchored in its unknown

and uncontrollable social forces; middle-class materialism was unable to

deal with them. Only the theory of the workers’ revolution can destroy

the ideologies of bourgeois economy. Historical Materialism explains the

social basis of religion and shows why for certain times and classes it

was a necessary way of thought. Only thus was its spell broken.

Historical Materialism does not fight religion directly; from its higher

vantage point it understands and explains religion as a natural

phenomenon under definite conditions. But through this very insight it

undermines religion and foresees that with the rise of a new society

religion will disappear. In the same way Historical Materialism is able

to explain the temporary appearance of materialist thought among the

bourgeoisie, as well as the relapse of this class into mysticism and

religious trends. In the same way, too, it explains the growth of

materialist thought among the working class as being not due to any

anti-religious argument but to the growing recognition of the real

forces in capitalist society.

Chapter 3. Dietzgen

Middle-class materialism, when it came up in Western Europe in

connection with the fight of the middle class for emancipation, was

inevitable in practice; but as theory it was a retrogression compared

with Historical Materialism. Marx and Engels were so far ahead that they

saw it only as a backsliding into obsolete ideas of the 18th-century

enlightenment. Because they saw so very clearly the weaknesses of the

bourgeois political fight in Germany – while underrating the vitality of

the capitalist system – they did not give much attention to the

accompanying theory. Only occasionally they directed at it some

contemptuous words, to refute any identification of the two kinds of

materialism. During their entire lifetime their attention was

concentrated upon the antithesis of their theory to the idealist systems

of German philosophy, especially Hegel. Middle-class materialism,

however, was somewhat more than a mere repetition of 18th-century ideas;

the enormous progress of the science of nature in the 19th century was

its basis and was a source of vigour. A criticism of its foundations had

to tackle problems quite different from those of post-Hegelian

philosophy. What was needed was a critical examination of the

fundamental ideas and axioms which were universally accepted as the

results of natural science and which were in part accepted by Marx and

Engels too.

Here lies the importance of the writings of Joseph Dietzgen. Dietzgen,

an artisan, a tanner living in Rhineland, who afterwards went to America

and there took some part in the working-class movement, was a self-made

socialist philosopher and author. In social and economic matters he

considered himself a pupil of Marx, whose theory of value and capital he

entirely comprehended. In philosophy he was an independent original

thinker, who set forth the philosophical consequences of the new world

view. Marx and Engels, though they honourably mentioned him as “the

philosopher of the proletariat” did not agree with everything he wrote;

they blamed his repetitions, often judged him confused, and it is

doubtful whether they ever understood the essence of his arguments, far

removed from their own mode of thinking. Indeed, whereas Marx expresses

the new truth of his views as precise statements and sharp logical

arguments, Dietzgen sees his chief aim in stimulating his readers to

think for themselves on the problem of thinking. For this purpose he

repeats his arguments in many forms, exposes the reverse of what he

stated before, and assigns to every truth the limits of its truth,

fearing above all that the reader should accept any statement as a

dogma. Thus he teaches practical dialectics. Whereas in his later

writings he is often vague, his first work The nature of human brain

work (1869), and his later A socialist’s excursions into the field of

epistemology (1877), as well as some smaller pamphlets are brilliant

contributions to the theory of knowledge. They form an essential part in

the entirety of the world-view that we denote by the name of Marxism.

The first problem in the science of human knowledge: the origin of

ideas, was answered by Marx in the demonstration that they are produced

by the surrounding world. The second, adjoining problem, how the

impressions of the surrounding world are transformed into ideas, was

answered by Dietzgen. Marx stated what realities determine thought;

Dietzgen established the relation between reality and thought. Or, in

the words of Herman Gorter, Marx pointed out what the world does to the

mind, Dietzgen pointed out what the mind does itself.

Dietzgen proceeds from the experiences of daily life, and especially

from the practice of natural science. “Systematisation is the essence,

is the general expression of all activity of science. Science seeks only

by our understanding to bring the objects of the world into order and

system.” Human mind takes from a group of phenomena what is common to

them (e.g. from a rose, a cherry, a setting sun their colour), leaves

out their specific differences, and fixes their general character (red)

in a concept; or it expresses as a rule what repeats itself (e.g. stones

fall to the earth). The object is concrete, the spiritual concept is

abstract. “By means of our thinking we have, potentially, the world

twofold, outside as reality, inside, in our head, as thoughts, as ideas,

as an image. Our brains do not grasp the things themselves but only

their concept, their general image. The endless variety of things, the

infinite wealth of their characters, finds no room in our mind”. For our

practical life indeed, in order to foresee events and make predictions,

we do not want all the special cases but only the general rule. The

antithesis of mind and matter, of thought and reality, of spiritual and

material, is the antithesis of abstract and concrete, of general and

special.

This, however, is not an absolute antithesis. The entire world, the

spiritual as well as the visible and tangible world, is object to our

thinking. Things spiritual do exist, they too are really existing, as

thoughts; thus they too are materials for our brain activity of forming

concepts. The spiritual phenomena are assembled in the concept of mind.

The spiritual and the material phenomena, mind and matter together,

constitute the entire real world, a coherent entity in which matter

determines mind and mind, through human activity, determines matter.

That we call this total world a unity means that each part exists only

as a part of the whole, is entirely determined by the action of the

whole, that, hence, its qualities and its special character consists in

its relations to the rest of the world. Thus also mind, i.e. all things

spiritual, is a part of the world’s totality, and its nature consists in

the totality of its relations to the world’s whole, which we then, as

the object of thinking, oppose to it under the name material, outer, or

real world. If now we call this material world primary and the mind

dependent, it means for Dietzgen simply that the entirety is primary and

the part secondary. Such a doctrine where spiritual and material things,

entirely interdependent, form one united world, may rightly be called

monism.

This distinction between the real world of phenomena and the spiritual

world of concepts produced by our thinking is especially suitable to

clear up the nature of scientific conceptions. Physics has discovered

that the phenomena of light can be explained by rapid vibrations

propagated through space, or, as the physicists said, through

space-filling ether. Dietzgen quotes a physicist stating that these

waves are the real nature of light whereas all that we see as light and

colour is only an appearance. “The superstition of philosophical

speculation here” Dietzgen remarks “has led us astray from the path of

scientific induction, in that waves rushing through the ether with a

velocity of 40,000 (German) miles per second, and constituting the true

nature of light are opposed to the real phenomena of light and colour.

The perversion becomes manifest where the visible world is denoted as a

product of the human mind, and the ether vibrations, disclosed by the

intellect of the most acute thinkers, as the corporeal reality.” It is

quite the reverse, Dietzgen says: the coloured world of phenomena is the

real world, and the ether waves are the picture constructed by the human

mind out of these phenomena.

It is clear that in this antagonism we have to do with different

meanings about the terms truth and reality. The only test to decide

whether our thoughts are truth is always found in experiment, practice,

experience. The most direct of experiences is experience itself; the

experienced world of phenomena is the surest of all things, the most

indubitable reality. Surely we know phenomena that are only appearances.

This means that the evidences of different senses are not in accordance

and have to be fitted in a different way in order to get a harmonious

world-picture. Should we assume the image behind the mirror, which we

can see but cannot touch, as a common reality, then such a confused

knowledge would bring practical failure. The idea that the entire world

of phenomena should be nothing but appearance could make sense only if

we assumed another source of knowledge – e.g. a divine voice speaking in

us – to be brought in harmony with the other experiences.

Applying now the same test of practice to the physicist we see that his

thinking is correct also. By means of his vibrating ether he not only

explained known phenomena but even predicted in the right way a number

of unsuspected new phenomena. So his theory is a good, a true theory. It

is truth because it expresses what is common to all these experiences in

a short formula that allows of easy deduction of their endless

diversity. Thus the ether ways must be considered a true picture of

reality. The ether itself of course cannot be observed in any way;

observation shows only phenomena of light.

How is it then, that the physicists spoke of the ether and its

vibrations as a reality? Firstly as a model, conceived by analogy. From

experience we know of waves in water and in the air. If now we assume

such waves in another, finer substance filling the universe, we may

transfer to it a number of well-known wave phenomena, and we find these

confirmed. So we find our world of reality growing wider. With our

spiritual eyes we see new substances, new particles moving, invisibly

because they are beyond the power of our best microscopes, but

conceivable after the model of our visible coarser substances and

particles.

In this way, however, with ether as a new invisible reality, the

physicists landed into difficulties. The analogy was not perfect: the

world-filling ether had to be assigned qualities entirely different from

water or air; though called a substance it deviated so completely from

all known substances that an English physicist once compared it somehow

to pitch. When it was discovered that light waves were electromagnetic

vibrations, it ensued that the ether had to transmit electric and

magnetic phenomena too. For this role, a complicated structure had to be

devised, a system of moving, straining, and spinning contrivances, that

might be used as a coarse model, but which nobody would call the true

reality of this finest of fluids filling space between the atoms. The

thing became worse when in the beginning of the 20th century the theory

of relativity came up and denied the existence of ether altogether.

Physicists then grew accustomed to deal with a void space, equipped

however with qualities expressed in mathematical formulas and equations.

With the formulas the phenomena could be computed in the right way; the

mathematical symbols were the only thing remaining. The models and

images were non-essential, and the truth of a theory does not mean

anything more than that the formulas are exact.

Things became worse still when phenomena were discovered that could be

represented only by light consisting of a stream of so called quanta,

separated particles hurrying through space. At the same time the theory

of vibrations held the field too, so that according to needs one theory

or the other had to be applied. Thus two strictly contradictory theories

both were true, each to be used within its group of phenomena. Now at

last physicists began to suspect that their physical entities, formerly

considered the reality behind the phenomena, were only images, abstract

concepts, models more easily to comprehend the phenomena. When Dietzgen

half a century before wrote down his views which were simply a

consequence of Historical Materialism, there was no physicist who did

not firmly believe in the reality of world ether. The voice of a

socialist artisan did not penetrate into the university lecture rooms.

Nowadays it is precisely the physicists who assert that they are dealing

with models and images only, who are continually discussing the

philosophical basis of their science, and who emphasise that science

aims solely at relations and formulas through which future phenomena may

be predicted from former ones.

In the word phenomenon “that which appears”, there is contained an

oppositeness to the reality of things; if we speak of “appearings” there

must be something else that appears. Not at all, says Dietzgen;

phenomena appear (or occur), that is all. In this play of words we must

not think, of course, of what appears to me or to another observer; all

that happens, whether man sees it or not, is a phenomenon, and all these

happenings form the totality of the world, the real world of phenomena.

“Sense perception shows an endless transformation of matter ... The

sensual world, the universe at any place and any time is a new thing

that did not exist before. It arises and passes away, passes and arises

under our hands. Nothing remains the same, lasting is only perpetual

change, and even the change varies ... The (middle class) materialist,

surely, asserts the permanency, eternity, indestructibility of matter

... Where do we find such eternal, imperishable formless matter? In the

real world of phenomena we meet only with forms of perishable matter ...

Eternal and imperishable matter exists practically, in reality, only as

the sum total of its perishable phenomena.” In short, matter is an

abstraction.

Whereas philosophers spoke of the essence of things, physicists spoke of

matter, the lasting background behind the changing phenomena. Reality,

they say, is matter; the world is the totality of matter. This matter

consists of atoms, the invariable ultimate building stones of the

universe, that by their various combinations impose the impression of

endless change. On the model of surrounding hard objects, as an

extension of the visible world of stones, grams, and dust, these still

smaller particles were assumed to be the constituents of the entire

world, of the fluid water as well as of the formless air. The truth of

the atomic theory has stood the test of a century of experience, in an

endless number of good explanations and successful predictions. Atoms of

course are not observed phenomena themselves: they are inferences of our

thinking. As such they share the nature of all products of our thinking

their sharp limitation and distinction, their precise equality belongs

to their abstract character. As abstractions they express what is

general and common in the phenomena, what is necessary for predictions.

To the physicist, of course, atoms were no abstractions but real small

invisible particles, sharply limited, exactly alike for every chemical

element, with precise qualities and precise mass. But modern science

destroyed also this illusion. Atoms, firstly, have been dissolved into

still smaller particles, electrons, protons, neutrons, forming

complicated systems, some of them inaccessible to any experiment, mere

products of the application of logic. And these smallest elements of the

world cannot be considered as precisely defined particles finding

themselves at definite points in space. Modern physical theory assigns

to each of them the character of a wave motion extending over infinite

space. When you ask the physicist what it is that moves in such waves

his answer consists in pointing to a mathematical equation. The waves

are no waves of matter, of course; that which moves cannot even be

called a substance, but is rendered most truly by the concept of

probability; the electrons are probability-waves. Formerly a particle of

matter in its invariable weight presented a precisely defined quantity,

its mass. Now mass changes with the state of motion and cannot be

separated accurately from energy; energy and mass change into one

another. Whereas formerly these concepts were neatly separated and the

physical world was a clear system without contradiction, proudly

proclaimed the real world, physics nowadays, when it assumes its

fundamental concepts matter, mass, energy as fixed, well separated

entities, is plunged into a crowd of unsolvable contradictions. The

contradiction is cleared up when we simply consider them as what they

are: abstractions serviceable to render the ever extending world of

phenomena.

The same holds for the forces and laws of nature. Here Dietzgen’s

expositions are not adequate and somewhat confused, probably because at

the time the German physicists used the word “Kraft” indiscriminately

for force and for energy. A simple practical case, such as gravity, may

easily clear up the matter. Gravity, physicists said, is the cause of

falling. Here cause is not something preceding the effects and different

from it; cause and effect are simultaneous and express the same thing in

different words. Gravity is a name that does not contain anything more

than the phenomena themselves; in denoting them by this word we express

the general, the common character of all the phenomena of falling

bodies. More essential than the name is the law; in all free movements

on earth there is a constant downward acceleration. Writing the law as a

mathematical formula we are able to compute the motions of all falling

or thrown bodies It is not necessary now to keep the phenomena all in

our head; to know future cases it is sufficient to know the law, the

formula. The law is the abstract concept our mind constructed out of the

phenomena. As a law it is a precise statement that is assumed to hold

good absolutely and universally, whereas the phenomena are diversified

and always show deviations which we then ascribe to other, accessory,

causes.

Newton extended the law of gravity to the celestial motions. The orbit

of the moon was “explained” by showing that it was pulled by the same

force that made stones fall onto earth; so the unknown was reduced to

the known. His law of universal gravitation is expressed by a

mathematical formula through which astronomers are able to compute and

predict the celestial phenomena; and the result of countless predictions

shows the truth of the law. Scientists now called the gravitation the

“cause” of all these motions; they saw it as a reality floating in

space, a kind of mysterious imp, a spiritual being called a “force”

directing the planets in their course; the law was a command somehow

present in nature which the bodies had to obey. In reality there is

nothing of the sort; “cause” means the short summary or compendium,

“effect” means the diverse multitude of phenomena. The formula binding

the acceleration of each particle to its distance from the other ones,

expresses in a short form exactly the same course of things as does a

lengthy description of the actual motions. Gravitation as a separate

something pulling and steering the bodies does not exist in nature but

only in our head. As a mysterious command permeating space it has no

more real existence than has Snell’s law of refraction as a command to

the light rays on how they have to go. The course of the light rays is a

direct mathematical consequence of the different velocity of light in

different substances; instead of by the command of a law it can equally

well be represented by the principle that light, as it were an

intelligent being, chooses the quickest route to reach the aim. Modern

science, in an analogous way, in the theory of relativity renders the

motions in space not by gravitational force, but by prescribing the

shortest road (the “geodesic”) in the distorted four-dimensional

space-time. Now again physicists came to consider this warped space as a

“reality” behind the phenomena. And again it must be stated that, like

Newton’s gravitation, it is only a mental abstraction, a set of

formulas, better than the former, hence more true, because it represents

more phenomena which the old law could not explain.

What is called “causality” in nature, the reign of natural

laws-sometimes one even speaks of the “law of causality,” i.e. in nature

the law holds that laws hold – simply comes down to the fact that the

regularities we find in the phenomena are expressed in the form of

prescripts absolutely valid. If there are limitations, exceptions,

conditions, they are expressly stated as such, and we try to represent

them by correcting the law; this shows that its character is meant to be

absolute. We are confident that it holds for future use; and if it

fails, as often happens, or does not hold precisely, we represent this

by additional “causes.”

We often speak of the inexorable course of events, or of the necessity

in nature; or we speak of “determinism,” as if this course had been

determined and fixed by somebody in advance. All these human names

chosen to express the antithesis to the arbitrariness and free choice in

human actions, denoting a kind of compulsion, are a source of much

confusion and cannot render exactly the character of nature. Rather we

say that the entire nature at this moment depends entirely on what it

was a moment before. Or perhaps better still: that nature in its

totality and history is a unity, remaining identically itself in all its

variations. All parts are interrelated as parts of one whole, and the

laws of nature are the humanly imperfect expressions of these

interrelations. Necessity can be ascribed to them solely in a partial

imperfect degree; absolute necessity may be affirmed for the entirety of

nature only. Phenomena may be imperfectly rendered by our laws; but we

are convinced that they go on in a way which can be ultimately reduced

to simple description, and could not be otherwise than they are.

The significance of Marxism is often expressed, by saying that it

presents, for the first time, a natural science of society. Hence

society, just as nature, is determined by natural laws; society develops

not by chance or incidentally but according to an overall necessity. And

since society is human activity, then human action and choice and will

are not arbitrary, not chance, but determined by social causes. What

this means will now be clear. The totality of the world, consisting of

nature and society, is a unity, at any moment determined by what it was

before, each part entirely determined by the action of the rest. It

remains the same identical world, in which the happenings of one part,

of mankind or part of it, depend entirely on the surrounding world,

nature and society together. Here too we try to find regularities, rules

and laws, and we devise names and concepts; but seldom do we ascribe to

them a separate reality. Whereas a physicist easily believes in

gravitation as a real something floating in space around the sun and the

planets, it is more difficult to believe in “progress” or “liberty”

hovering round us and floating over society as real beings that conduct

man like a ruling fate. They too are abstractions constructed by the

mind out of partial relations and dependencies. With their “necessity”

it is as with all necessity in nature. Its basis is the necessity that

man must eat to live. In this popular saying the fundamental connection

of man with the entirety of the world is expressed.

Through the immense complication of social relations “laws” of society

are much more difficult to discern, and they cannot now be put into the

form of exact formulas. Still more than in nature they may be said to

express not the future but our expectation about the future. It is

already a great thing that, whereas former thinkers were groping in the

dark, now some main lines of development have been discovered. The

importance of Marxism as a science of society is not so much the truth

of the rules and expectations it formulated, but rather what is called

its method: the fundamental conviction that everything in the world of

mankind is directly connected with the rest. Hence for every social

phenomenon we have to look for the material and social factors of

reality on which it depends.

Chapter 4. Mach

In the later part of the 19th century, middle-class society turned away

more and more from materialism. The bourgeoisie, through the development

of capitalism, asserted its social mastery; but the rise of the

working-class movements proclaiming as its aim the annihilation of

capitalism, led to misgivings as to the durability of the existing

social system. World and future appeared full of unsolvable problems.

Since the visible, material forces threatened mischief, the ruling

class, to quiet its apprehensions and assure its self-reliance, turned

to the belief in the superior rule of spiritual powers. Mysticism and

religion gained the upper hand, and still more so in the 20th century,

after the First World War.

Natural scientists form a part of middle-class society; they are in

continual contact with the bourgeoisie and are influenced by its

spiritual trends. At the same time, through the progress of science,

they have to deal with new problems and contradictions appearing in

their concepts. It is not clear philosophical insight that inspires the

criticism of their theories, but rather the immediate needs of their

practical study of nature. This criticism then takes its form and colour

from the anti-materialist trends in the ruling class. Thus modern

natural philosophy exhibits two characters: critical reflection over the

principles of science, and a critical mood towards materialism. Just as

in the time of Hegel, valuable progress in the theory of knowledge is

garbed in mystical and idealistic forms.

Critics of the prevailing theories came forward, in the last part of the

19th century, in different countries: e.g. Karl Pearson in England,

Gustav Kirchhoff and Ernst Mach in Germany, Henri Poincaré in France,

all exhibiting, though in different ways, the same general trend of

thought. Among them the writings of Mach have doubtless exerted the

greatest influence upon the ideas of the next generation.

Physics, he says, should not proceed from matter, from the atoms, from

the objects; these are all derived concepts. The only thing we know

directly is experience, and all experience consists in sensations, sense

impressions (Empfindungen). By means of our world of concepts, in

consequence of education and intuitive custom, we express every

sensation as the action of an object upon ourselves as subject: I see a

stone. But freeing ourselves from this custom we perceive that a

sensation is a unit in itself, given directly without the distinction of

subject and object. Through a number of similar sensations I come to the

distinction of an object, and I know of myself too only by a totality of

such sensations. Since object and subject are built up of sensations it

is better not to use a name that points to a person experiencing them.

So we prefer the neutral name of “elements”, as the simplest basis of

all knowledge.

Ordinary thinking here finds the paradox that the hard immutable stone,

the prototype of the solid “thing” should be formed by, should “consist

of” such transient subjective stuff as sensations. On closer

examination, however, we see that what constitutes the thing, its

qualities, are simply this and nothing else. First its hardness is

nothing but the totality of a number of often painful sensations; and

secondly its immutability is the sum total of our experiences that on

our returning to the same spot the same sensations repeat themselves. So

we expect them as a fixed interconnection in our sensations. In our

knowledge of the thing there is nothing that has not somehow the

character of a sensation. The object is the sum total of all sensations

at different times that, through a certain constancy of place and

surroundings considered as related, are combined and denoted by a name.

It is no more; there is no reason to assume with Kant a “thing in

itself” (Ding an sich) beyond this sensation-mass; we cannot even

express in words what we would have to think of it. So the object is

formed entirely by sensations; it consists merely of sensations. Mach

opposes his views to the current physical theory by the words:

“Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes

(sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist

considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the ‘elements’ as the

transient appearance, he does not realise that all ‘bodies’ are only

mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes)” (Analyse der

Empfindungen, p.23).

The same holds for the subject. What we denote by “I myself” is a

complex of recollections and feelings, former and present sensations and

thoughts connected by continuity of memory, bound to a special body, but

only partly permanent.

“What is primary is not myself but the elements ... The elements

constitute the myself ... The elements of consciousness of one person

are strongly connected, those of different persons are only weakly and

passingly connected. Hence everybody thinks he knows only of himself as

an indivisible and independent unity” (Analyse der Empfindungen, p.19).

In his work Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (1883) (The Development of

Mechanics) he writes along the same lines:

“Nature consists of the elements given by the senses. Primitive man

first takes out of them certain complexes of these elements that present

themselves with a certain stability and are most important to him. The

first and oldest words are names for ‘things’. Here abstraction is made

from the surroundings, from the continual small changes of these

complexes, which are not heeded because they are not important. In

nature there is no invariable thing. The thing is an abstraction, the

name is a symbol for a complex of elements of which we neglect the

changes. That we denote the entire complex by one word, one symbol, is

done because we want to awaken at once all impressions that belong

together.... The sensations are no ‘symbols of things’. On the contrary

the ‘thing’ is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative

stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures,

times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the

world. The entire process has an economical meaning. In picturing facts

we begin with the ordinary more stable and habitual complexes, and

afterwards for correction add what is unusual” (p.454).

In this treatment of the historical development of the science of

mechanics he comes close to the method of Historical Materialism. To him

the history of science is not a sequence of geniuses producing

marvellous discoveries. He shows how the practical problems are first

solved by the mental methods of common life, until at last they acquire

their most simple and adequate theoretical expression. Ever again the

economic function of science is emphasised.

“The aim of all science is to substitute and to save experiences through

the picturing and the forecastings of facts by thoughts, because these

pictures are more easily at hand than the experiences themselves and in

many respects may stand for them” (p. 452). “When we depict facts by

thoughts we never imitate them exactly, but only figure those sides that

are important for us; we have an aim that directly or indirectly arose

out of practical interests. Our pictures are always abstractions. This

again shows am economic trend” (p.454).

Here we see science, specialised as well as common knowledge, connected

with the necessities of life, as an implement of existence.

“The biological task of science is to offer a most perfect orientation

to man in the full possession of his senses” (Analyse der Empfindungen,

p.29).

For man, in order to react efficiently to the impressions of his

surroundings in each situation, it is not necessary to remember all

former cases of analogous situations with their results. He has only to

know what results generally, as a rule, and this determines his actions.

The rule, the abstract concept is the instrument ready at hand that

saves the mental consideration of all former cases. What natural law

states is not what will happen and must happen in nature, but what we

expect will happen; and that is the very purpose they have to serve.

The formation of abstract concepts, of rules and laws of nature, in

common life as well as in science, is an intuitive process, intended to

save brain work, aiming at economy of thinking. Mach shows in a number

of examples in the history of science how every progress consists in

greater economy, in that a larger field of experiences is compiled in a

shorter way, so that in the predictions a repetition of the same brain

operations is avoided. “With the short lifetime of man and ms limited

memory, notably knowledge is only attainable by the utmost economy of

thinking.” So the task of science consists in “representing facts as

completely as possible by a minimum of brainwork” (Die Mechanik in ihrer

Entwicklung, p.461).

According to Mach the principle of economy of thinking determines the

character of scientific investigation. What science states as properties

of things and laws about atoms are in reality relations between

sensations. The phenomena between which the law of gravitation

establishes relations, consist in a number of visual auditory or tactile

impressions; the law says that they occur not by chance, and predicts

how we may expect them. Of course we cannot express the law in this

form; it would be inappropriate, unsuitable to practice because of its

complexity. But as a principle, it is important to state that every law

of nature deals with relations between phenomena. If now contradictions

appear in our conceptions about atoms and world ether, they lie not in

nature but in the forms we choose for our abstractions in order to have

them available in the most tractable way. The contradiction disappears

when we express the results of our research as relations between

observed quantities, ultimately between sensations.

The unconcerned scientific view is easily obscured if a point of view

fit for a limited aim is made the basis of all considerations. This is

the case, says Mach, “when all experiences are considered as the effects

of an outer world upon our consciousness. An apparently inextricable

tangle of metaphysical difficulties results. The phantom disappears

directly if we take matters in their mathematical form, and make it

clear to ourselves that the establishment of functions and relations

alone avails, and that the mutual dependence of experiences is the only

thing we wish to know” (Analyse der Empfindungen, p.28). It might seem

that Mach here expresses some doubts about the existence of an outer

world independent of man. In countless other sentences, however, he

speaks in a clear way of surrounding nature in which we have to live and

which we have to investigate. It means that such an outer world as is

accepted by physics and by ordinary opinion, the world of matter and

forces as producing the phenomena, leads us into contradictions. The

contradictions can be removed only if we return to the phenomena and

instead of speaking words and abstract terms express our results as

relations between observations. This is what was afterwards called

Mach’s principle: if we ask whether a statement has a meaning and what

is its meaning, we have to look for what experiments may test it. It has

shown its importance in modern times, first in discussions on time and

space in the theory of relativity, and then in the understanding of

atomic and radiation phenomena. Mach’s aim was to find a broader field

of interpretation for physical phenomena. In daily life the solid bodies

are most adequate sensation-complexes, and mechanics, the science of

their motions, was the first well developed part of physics. But this

reason does not justify our establishing the form and science of atoms

as the pattern for the entire world. Instead of explaining heat, light,

electricity, chemistry, biology, all in terms of such small particles,

every realm should develop its own adequate concepts.

Yet there is a certain ambiguity in Mach’s expressions on the outer

world, revealing a manifest propensity towards subjectivism,

corresponding to the general mystical trend in the capitalist world.

Especially in later years he liked to discover cognate trends

everywhere, and gave praise to idealistic philosophies that deny the

reality of matter. Mach did not elaborate his views into a concise

coherent system of philosophy with all consequences well developed. His

aim was to give critical thoughts, to stimulate new ideas, often in

paradoxes sharply pointed against prevailing opinions, without caring

whether all his statements were mutually consistent and all problems

solved. His was not a philosopher’s mind constructing a system, but a

scientist’s mind, presenting his ideas as a partial contribution to the

whole, feeling as part of a collectivity of investigators, sure that

others will correct his errors and will complete what he left

unachieved. “The supreme philosophy of a natural scientist” he says

elsewhere “is to be content with an incomplete world view and to prefer

it to an apparently complete but unsatisfactory system” (Die Mechanik in

ihrer Entwicklung, p.437).

Mach’s tendency to emphasise the subjective side of experience appears

in that the immediately given elements of the world, which we call

phenomena, are denoted as sensations. Surely this means at the same time

a deeper analysis of the phenomena; in the phenomenon that a stone falls

are contained a number of visual sensations combined with the memory of

former visual and spatial sensations. Mach’s elements, the sensations,

may be called the simplest constituents of the phenomena. But when he

says: “Thus it is true that the world consists of our sensations”

(Analyse der Empfindungen, p.10) he means to point to the subjective

character of the elements of the world. He does not say “my” sensations;

solipsism (the doctrine that I myself only am existing) is entirely

foreign to him and is expressly refuted; “I myself” is itself a complex

of sensations. But where he speaks of fellow-men in relation to the

world of sensations, he is not entirely clear.

“Just as little as I consider red and green as belonging to an

individual body, so little I make an essential difference – from this

point of view of general orientation – between my sensations and

another’s sensations. The same elements are mutually connected in many

‘myselfs’ as their nodal points. These nodal points, however, are

nothing perennial, they arise and disappear and change continually”

(Analyse der Empfindungen, p.294).

Here it must be objected that “red” and “green” as belonging to more

bodies are not the simple sensational elements of experience, but

themselves already abstract concepts. It seems that Mach here replaces

the abstract concepts body and matter by other abstract concepts,

qualities and colours, that as realities appear in my and in another’s

sensations. And when he calls my sensation and another’s analogous

sensation the same element, this word is taken in another sense.

Mach’s thesis that the world consists of our sensations, expresses the

truth that we knew of the world only through our sensations; they are

the materials out of which we build our world; in this sense the world,

including myself, “consists” of sensations only. At the same time, the

emphasis upon the subjective character of sensations reveals the same

middle-class trend of thought that we mind in other contemporary

philosophies. It is even more evident when he points out that these

views may tend to overcome dualism, this eternal philosophical

antithesis of the two worlds of matter and mind. The physical and the

psychical world for Mach consist of the same elements, only in a

different arrangement. The sensation green in seeing a leaf, with other

sensations is an element of the material leaf; the same sensation, with

others of my body, my eye, my reminiscences, is an element of “myself,”

of my psyche.

“Thus I see no antithesis of the physical and the psychical, but I see a

simple identity relative to these elements. In the sensual realm of my

consciousness every object is physical and psychical at the same time”

(Analyse der Empfindungen, p36). “Not the stuff is different in both

realms, but the tendency of the research” (p.14).

Thus dualism has disappeared; the entire world is a unity, consisting of

the self-same elements; and these elements are not atoms but sensations.

And in Erkenntnis und Irrtum he adds in a footnote

“There is no difficulty in building up every physical happening out of

sensations, i.e. psychical elements; but there is no possibility of

seeing how out of the usual physical elements, masses and motions, any

psychical happening might be constructed ... We have to consider that

nothing can be object of experience or science that cannot be in some

way a part of consciousness” (p.12).

Here, in this footnote added later, in 1905, the well considered

equivalence of both worlds, physical and psychical, the careful neutral

characterising of the elements, is given up by calling them psychical,

and the anti-materialistic spirit of the bourgeoisie breaks through.

Since it is not our aim to criticise and to contest but only to set

forth Mach’s views we shall not enter into the tautology of the last

sentence, that only what is in consciousness can be conscious and that

hence the world is spiritual.

The new insight that the world is built up out of sensations as its

elements, meets with difficulties, Mach says, because in our uncritical

youth we took over a world view that had grown intuitively in the

thousands of years of human development. We may break its spell by

critically repeating the process through conscious philosophic

reasoning. Starting with the most simple experiences, the elementary

sensations, we construct the world step by step: ourselves, the outer

world, our body as part of the outer world, connected with our own

feeling, actions and reminiscences. Thus, by analogy, we recognise

fellow-men as kindred, and so their sensations, disclosed by their

sayings, may be used as additional material in constructing the world.

Here Mach stops; further steps toward an objective world are not made.

That this is no accidental incompleteness is shown by the fact that we

find the same thing with Carnap, one of the leading thinkers in modern

philosophy of science. In his work Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The

logical construction of the world) he sets himself the same task, but

more thoroughly: if we start with knowing nothing, having however our

full capacity of thinking, how can we establish (“constitute”) the world

with all its contents? I start with “my sensations” and make them into a

system of “sayings” and “objects” (“object” is the name given to

everything about which we may utter a saying); thus I establish physical

and psychical “objects” and construct “the world” as an ordered system

of my sensations. The problem of dualism of body and mind, of material

and spiritual, finds here the same answer as with Mach: both consist of

the same materials, the sensations, only ordered in a different way. The

sensations of fellow-men, according to their statements, lead to a

physical world exactly corresponding to mine. So we call it the

“intersubjective world,” common to all subjects; this is the world of

natural science. Here Carnap stops, satisfied that dualism has been

removed, and that any quest about the reality of the world is now shown

to be meaningless, because “reality” cannot be tested in another way

than by our experience, our sensations. So the chain of progressive

constitutings is broken off here.

It is easy to see the limitedness of this world structure. It is not

finished. The world thus constituted by Mach and by Carnap is a

momentary world supposed unchanging. The fact that the world is in

continuous evolution is disregarded. So we must go on past where Carnap

stopped. According to our experience people are born and die; their

sensations arise and disappear, but the world remains. When my

sensations out of which the world was constituted, cease with my death,

the world continues to exist. From acknowledged scientific facts I know

that long ago there was a world without man, without any living being.

The facts of evolution, founded on our sensations condensed into

science, establish a previous world without any sensations. Thus from an

intersubjective world common to all mankind, constituted as a world of

phenomena by science, we proceed to the constitution of an objective

world. Then the entire world view changes. Once the objective world is

constituted, all phenomena become independent of observing man, as

relations between parts of the world, The world is the totality of an

infinite number of parts acting upon another; every part consists in the

totality of its actions and reactions with the rest, and all these

mutual actions are the phenomena, the object of science.

Man also is part of the world; we too are the totality of our mutual

interactions with the rest, the outer world. Our sensations are now seen

in a new light; they are the actions of the world upon us, only a small

part of all happenings in the world but, of course, the only ones

immediately given to us. When now man is building up the world out of

his sensations, it is a reconstruction in the mind of an already

objectively existing world. Again we have the world twofold, with all

the problems of epistemology, the theory of knowledge. How they may be

solved without metaphysics is shown by Historical Materialism.

If one asks why two such prominent philosophers of science omitted this

obvious step toward the constitution of an objective world, the answer

can only be found in their middle-class world view. Their instinctive

tenet is anti-materialistic. By adhering to the intersubjective world

they have won a monistic world system, the physical world consisting of

psychical elements, so that materialism is refuted. We have here an

instructive example how class views determine science and philosophy.

Summarising Mach’s ideas we distinguish two steps. First the phenomena

are reduced to sensations expressing their subjective character. Through

the desire to find direct reality only in the sensations as psychical

entities, he does not proceed by precise deductions to an objective

world that obviously is matter of fact, though in a mystical vague way.

Then comes a second step from the world of phenomena to the physical

world. What physics, and by the popular dispersion of science also

common opinion, assumes as the reality of the world – matter, atoms,

energy, natural laws, the forms of space and time. myself – are all

abstractions from groups of phenomena. Mach combines both steps into one

by saying that things are sensation-complexes.

The second step corresponds to Dietzgen; the similarity here is

manifest. The differences are accounted for by their different class

views. Dietzgen stood on the basis of dialectic materialism, and his

expositions were a direct consequence of Marxism. Mach, borne by the

incipient reaction of the bourgeoisie, saw his task in a fundamental

criticism of physical materialism by asserting dominance to some

spiritual principle. There is a difference, moreover, in personality and

aims. Dietzgen was a comprehensive philosopher, eager to find out how

our brains work; the practice of life and science was to him material

for the knowledge of knowledge. Mach was a physicist who by his

criticisms tries to improve the ways in which brains worked in

scientific investigations. Dietzgen’s aim was to give clear insight into

the role of knowledge in social development, for the use of the

proletarian struggle. Mach’s aim was an amelioration of the practice of

physical research, for the use of natural science.

Speaking of practice, Mach expresses himself in different ways. At one

time he sees no utility in employing the ordinary abstractions: “We know

only of sensations, and the assumption of those nuclei (particles of

matter) and their mutual actions as the assigned origins of sensations,

shows itself entirely futile and superfluous” (Analyse der Empfindungen,

p.10). Another time he does not wish to discredit the common view of

unsophisticated “naive realism,” because it renders great services to

mankind in their common life. It has grown as a product of nature,

whereas every philosophical system is an ephemeral product of art, for

temporary aims. So we have to see “why and to what purposes we usually

take one point of view, and why and to what purpose we temporarily give

it up. No point of view holds absolutely; each imports for special aims

only” (Analyse der Empfindungen, p.30).

In the practical application of his views upon physics Mach met with

little success. His campaign was chiefly directed against matter and

atoms dominating physical science. Not simply because they are and

should be acknowledged as abstractions: “Atoms we can observe nowhere,

they are as every substance products of thought” (Die Mechanik in ihrer

Entwicklung, p.463). But because they are impractical abstractions. They

mean an attempt to reduce all physics to mechanics, to the motion of

small particles, “and it is easy to see that by mechanical hypotheses a

real economy of scientific thought cannot be achieved” (Die Mechanik in

ihrer Entwicklung, p.469). But his criticism of heat as a form of motion

of small particles, already in 1873, and of electricity as a streaming

fluid, found no echo among physicists. On the contrary these

explanations developed in ever wider applications, and their

consequences were confirmed ever again; atomic theory could boast of

ever more results and was extended even to electricity in the theory of

electrons. Hence the generation of physicists that followed him, while

sympathising with his general views and accepting them, did not follow

him in ms special applications. Only in the new century, when atomic and

electronic theory had progressed in a brilliant display, and when the

theory of relativity arose, there appeared a host of glaring

contradictions in which Mach’s principles showed themselves the best

guides in clearing up the difficulties.

Chapter 5. Avenarius

The title of Lenin’s work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism imposes the

necessity to treat here the Zürich philosopher Richard Avenarius,

because empirio-criticism was the name he gave to his doctrine, in many

parts touching upon Mach’s views. In his chief work Kritik der reinen

Erfahrung (Criticism of pure experience) he starts from simple

experience, considers carefully what is certain about it, and then tests

critically what man derived and assumed about the world and himself,

what is tenable and justifiable in it and what is not.

In the natural world view, he explains, I find the following things. I

find myself with thoughts and feelings within a surrounding world; to

these surroundings belong fellow-men acting and speaking as I do, whom

therefore I assume to be similar to myself. Strictly speaking, the

interpretation of the movements and sounds connected with fellow-man as

having a meaning just as mine is an assumption, not a real experience.

But it is a necessary assumption without which a reasonable world view

would be impossible: “the empiriocritical basic assumption of human

equality.” Then this is my world: first my own statements, e.g. “I see

(or touch) a tree” (I call this an observation); I find it, repeatedly,

back at the same spot, I describe it as an object in space; I call it

“world,” distinct from myself, or “outer world.” Moreover I have

remembrances (I call them ideas), somehow analogous to observations.

Secondly there are fellow-men as part of the world. Thirdly there are

statements of the fellow-men dealing with the same world; he speaks to

me of the tree he, too, is seeing; what he says clearly depends on the

“world.” So far all is simple and natural, there is nothing more to have

thoughts about, nothing of inner and outer, of soul and body.

Now, however, I say: my world is object of the observation of my

fellow-man; he is the bearer of the observation, it is part of hmm; I

put it into him, and so I do with his other experiences, thoughts,

feelings, of which I know through his sayings. I say that he has an

“impression” of the tree, that he makes himself a “conception” of the

tree. An impression, a conception, a sensation of another person,

however, is imperceptible to me; it finds no place in my world of

experience. By so doing I introduce something that has a new character,

that can never be experience to me, that is entirely foreign to all that

so far was present. Thus my fellow-man has now got an inner world of

observations, feelings, knowledge, and an outer world that he observes

and knows. Since I stand to him as he stands to me I too have an inner

world of sensations and feelings opposite to that which I call the

“outer” world. The tree I saw and know is split into a knowledge and an

object. This process is called “introjection” by Avenarius; something is

introduced, introjected into man that was not present in the original

simple empirical world conception.

Introjection has made a cleavage in the world. It is the philosophical

fall of man. Before the fall he was in a state of philosophical

innocence; he took the world as simple, single, as the senses show it;

he did not know of body and soul, of mind and matter, of good and evil.

The introjection brought dualism with all its problems and

contradictions. Let us look at its consequences already at the lowest

state of civilisation. On the basis of experience introjection takes

place not only into fellow-man but also into fellow-animals, into

fellow-things, into trees, rocks, etc: this is animism. We see a man

sleeping; awakened he says he was elsewhere; so part of him rested here,

part left the body temporarily. If it does not return, the first part is

rotting away, but the other part appears in dreams, ghostly. So man

consists of a perishable body and a non-perishing spirit. Such spirits

also live in trees, in the air, in heaven. At a higher stage of

civilisation the direct experience of spirits disappears; what is

experienced is the outer world of senses; the inner spiritual world is

super-sensual. “Experience as things and experience as knowledge now

stand against one another, incomparable as a material and a spiritual

world” (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, p.110).

In this short summary of Avenarius’s exposure of his views we omitted

one thing that to him is an essential link in the chain. To the sayings

of the fellow-man belongs not only himself and his body, but belongs in

particular his brain. In my experience, Avenarius says, I have three

dependencies: between the sayings of man and his outer world, between

his brain and the outer world, and between his brain and his sayings.

The second is a physical relation, part of the law of energy; the other

two belong to logic.

Avenarius now proceeds first to criticise and then to eliminate

introjection. That actions and sayings of fellow-men are related to the

outer world is my experience. When I introduce it as ideas into him, it

is into his brain that I introduce them. But no anatomical section can

disclose them. “We cannot find any characteristic in the thought or in

the brain to show that thought is a part or character of the brain”

(Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, p.125). Man can say truly: I have brain;

i.e. to the complex called “myself” brain belongs as a part; he can say

truly: I have thoughts, i.e. to the complex “myself” thoughts belong as

a part. But that does not imply that my brain have these thoughts.

“Thought is thought of myself, but not therefore thought of my brain”

(Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, p.131) “Brain is no lodging or site, no

producer, no instrument or organ, no bearer or substratum, etc., of

thinking ... Thinking is no resident or commander, no other side, no

product either, not even a physiological function of the brain” (Kritik

der reinen Erfahrung, p.132).

This imposing enumeration of usual psychological statements discloses

why the brain was introduced. To refute our introjection of a mental

world into fellow-man, Avenarius emphasises that its place would then be

the brain, and the brain when anatomically dissected does not show it.

Elsewhere he says: introjection means that my thinking puts itself at

the place of fellow-man, hence my thinking combines with his brain,

which can be done only in fantasy, not really. As arguments to serve as

the basis of a philosophical system they are rather artificial and

unconvincing. What is true and important is the disclosure of the fact

of introjection, the demonstration that in our assumption that the world

of fellow-man is the same kind of thing as my own, I introduce a second

world of fantasy of another character, entirely outside my experience.

It corresponds point for point with my own; its introduction is

necessary; but it means a doubling of the world, or rather a

multiplication of worlds not directly accessible to me, no possible part

of my world of experience.

Now Avenarius sees as his task the building up of a world-structure free

from introjection, by means of the simple data of experience. In his

exposition he finds it necessary to introduce a special system of new

names, characters and figures with algebraic expressions to designate

our ordinary concepts. The laudable intention is this; not to be led

astray by instinctive associations and meanings connected with ordinary

language. But the result is an appearance of profoundness with an

abstruse terminology that needs to be back-translated into our usual

terms if we want to understand its meanings, and is a source of easy

misunderstandings. His argument expressed thus by himself in a far more

intricate way, may be summarised as follows:

We find ourselves, a relative constant, amidst a changing multitude of

units denoted as “trees,” “fellow-men,” etc., which show many mutual

relations, “Myself” and “surroundings” are found both at the same time

in the same experience; we call them “central-part” and “counter-part”

(Zentralglied und Gegenglied). That my fellow-man has thoughts,

experiences and a world just as I have, is expressed in the statement

that part of my surroundings is central-part itself. When in his brain

variations take place (they belong to my world of experience), then

phenomena occur in his world; his sayings about them are determined by

processes in his brains. In my world of experience the outer world

determines the change in his brain (a neurological fact); not my

observed tree determines his observation (situated in another world),

but the changes caused by the tree in his brain (both belonging to my

world) determine his observation. Now my scientific experience declares

my brain and his brain to change in the same way through impressions of

the outer world; hence the resulting “his world” and my world must be of

the same stuff. So the natural world conception is restored without the

need of introjection. The argument comes down to this that our practice

of assuming similar thoughts and conceptions as our own in fellow-men,

which should be illicit notwithstanding our spiritual intercourse,

should become valid as soon as we make a detour along the material

brains. To which must be remarked that neurology may assume as a valid

theory that the outer world produces the same changes in my brain and in

another man’s; but that, strictly keeping to my experience, I have never

observed it and never can observe it.

Avenarius’s ideas have nothing in common with Dietzgen; they do not deal

with the connection between knowledge and experience. They are cognate

to Mach’s in that both proceed from experience, dissolve the entire

world into experience and believe thus to have done away with dualism.

“If we keep ‘complete experience’ free from all adulteration, our

world-conception will be free from all metaphysical dualism. To these

eliminated dualisms belong the absolute antithesis of ‘body’ and ‘mind,’

of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit,’ in short of physical and psychical” (p.118).

“Things physical, matter in its metaphysical absolute sense finds no

place in purified ‘complete experience,’ because ‘matter’ in this

conception is only an abstractum, indicating the entirety of

counter-parts when abstraction is made of all ‘central-parts’”

(Bemerkungen zum Begriff des Gegenstandes der Psychologie, p.119).

This is analogous to Mach; but it is different from Mach in being built

out into a finished and closed system. The equality of the experience of

fellow-man, settled by Mach in a few words, is a most difficult piece of

work to Avenarius. The neutral character of the elements of experience

is pointed out with more precision by Avenarius; they are not

sensations, nothing psychical, but simply something “found present”

(Vorgefundenes).

So he opposes prevailing psychology, that formerly dealt with the

“soul,” afterwards with “psychic functions,” because it proceeds from

the assumption that the observed world is an image within us. This, he

says, is not a “thing found present,” and neither can it be disclosed

from what is “found present.”

“Whereas I leave the tree before me as something seen in the same

relation to me, as a thing ‘found present’ to me, prevailing psychology

puts the tree as ‘something seen’ into man, especially into his brain”

(Bemerkungen zum Begriff des Gegenstandes der Psychologie, p.45 Note).

Introjection created this false object of psychology; it changed “before

me” into “in me,” what is “found present” into what is “imagined “ it

made “part of (real) surroundings” into “part of (ideal) thinking.”

For Avenarius, instead, the material changes in the brain are the basis

of psychology. He proceeds from the thesis taken over from the special

science of physiology that all action of the surroundings produces

changes in the brain and that these produce thoughts and sayings – and

this certainly lies outside direct experience. It is a curious fact that

Mach and Carnap too speak of observing (ideally, not really) the brain

(by physical or chemical methods, or by a “brain-mirror”) to see what

happens there in connection with sensations and thoughts. It seems that

middle-class theory of knowledge cannot do without having recourse to

this materialist conception. Avenarius is the most radical in this

respect; for him psychology is the science of the dependence of

behaviour upon the brain; what belongs to the actions of man is not

psychical but physiological, mere brain processes. When we speak of

ideas and ideologies, empirio-criticism speaks of changes in the central

nervous system. The study of the great world-moving ideas in the history

of mankind turns into the study of their nervous systems. Thus

empirio-criticism stands close to middle-class materialism that also, in

the problem of the determination of ideas by the surrounding world,

appeals to brain-matter, In comparing Avenarius with Haeckel we should

rather call him Haeckel reversed. Both can understand mind only as an

attribute of the brain; since mind and matter, however, are

fundamentally disparate, Haeckel attributes a particle of mind to every

atom, whereas Avenarius entirely dispenses with the mind as a special

something. But therefore the world for him takes instead the somewhat

shadowy character – frightening to materialists and opening the gate to

ideological interpretations – of consisting of “my experience” only.

Right as Avenarius may be that it is not strictly expedence, the

equalisation of fellow-men with ourselves and the identity of their

world with ours is an inevitably natural affair, whatever kind of

spiritual or material terms are used to express it. The point is again

that middle-class philosophy wants to criticise and correct human

thinking instead of trying to understand it as a natural process.

In this context a general remark must be made. The essential character

in Mach and Avenarius, as in most modern philosophers of science, is

that they start from personal experience. It is their only basis of

certainly; to it they go back when asked what is true. When fellow-men

enter into the play, a kind of theoretical uncertainty appears, and with

difficult reasonings their experience must be reduced to ours. We have

here an effect of the strong individualism of the middle-class world.

The middle-class individual in his strong feeling of personality has

lost social consciousness; he does not know how entirely he is a social

being. In everything of himself, in his body, his mind, his life, his

thoughts, his feeling, in his most simple experiences he is a product of

society, human society made them all what they are. What is considered a

purely personal sensation: I see a tree – can enter into consciousness

only through the distinctness given to it by names. Without the

inherited words to indicate things and species, actions and concepts,

the sensation could not be expressed and conceived. Out of the

indistinctive mass of the world of impressions the important parts come

forward only when they are denoted by sounds and thus become separated

from the unimportant mass. When Carnap constructs the world with out

using the old names, he still makes use of his capacity of abstract

thinking. Abstract thinking, however, by means of concepts, is not

possible without speech; speech and abstract thinking developed together

as a product of society.

Speech could never have originated without human society for which it is

an organ of mutual communication. It could develop in a society only, as

an instrument in the practical activity of man. This activity is a

social process that as the deepest foundation underlies all my

experiences. The activity of fellow-man, inclusive his speaking, I

experience as co-natural with my activity because they are parts of one

common activity; thus we know our similarity. Man is first an active

being, a worker, To live he must eat, i.e. he must seize and assimilate

other things; he must search, fight, conquer. This action upon the

world, a life-necessity, determines his thinking and feeling, because it

is his chief life content and forms the most essential part of his

experiences. It was from the first a collective activity, a social

labour process. Speech originated as part of this collective process, as

an indispensable mediator in the common work, and at the same time as an

instrument of reflexive thinking needed in the handling of tools,

themselves products of collective working. In such a way the entire

world of experience of man bears a social character. The simple “natural

world view” taken by Avenarius and other philosophers as their starting

point, is not the spontaneous view of a primitive single man but, in

philosophical garb, the outcome of a highly developed society.

Social development has, through the increasing division of labour,

dissected and separated what before was a unit. Scientists and

philosophers have the special task of investigating and reasoning so

that their science and their conceptions may play their role in the

total process of production-now the role chiefly of supporting and

strengthening the existing social system. Cut off from the root of life,

the social process of labour, they hang in the air and have to resort to

artificial reasonings to find a basis. Thus the philosopher starts with

imagining himself the only being on earth and suspiciously asks whether

he can demonstrate his own existence; till he is happily reassured by

Descartes “I think, so I exist.” Then along a chain of logical

deductions he proceeds to ascertain the existence of the world and of

fellow-men; and so the self-evident comes out along a wide detour – if

it comes out. For the middle-class philosopher does not feel the

necessity to follow up to the last consequences, to materialism, and he

prefers to stay somewhere in-between, expressing the world in

ideological terms.

So this is the difference: middle-class philosophy looks for the source

of knowledge in personal meditation, Marxism finds it in social labour.

All consciousness, all spiritual life of man, even of the most lonely

hermit, is a collective product, has been made and shaped by the working

community of mankind. Though in the form of personal consciousness –

because man is a biological individual – it can exist only as part of

the whole. People can have experiences only as social beings; though the

contents are personally different, in their essence experiences are

super-personal, society being their self-evident basis. Thus the

objective world of phenomena which logical thought constructs out of the

data of experience, is first and foremost, by its origin already,

collective experience of mankind.

Chapter 6. Lenin

How Mach’s idea could acquire importance in the Russian socialist

movement, may be understood from social conditions. The young Russian

intelligentsia, owing to the barbarous pre-capitalist conditions, had

not yet, as in Western Europe, found its social function in the service

of a bourgeoisie. So it had to aspire for the downfall of Czarism, and

to join the socialist party. At the same time it stood in spiritual

intercourse with the Western intellectuals and so took part in the

spiritual trends of the Western world. Thus it was inevitable that

efforts should be made to combine them with Marxism.

Of course Lenin had to oppose these tendencies. Marxian theory, indeed,

can gain nothing essential from Mach. Insofar as a better understanding

of human thinking is needed for socialists, this can be found in

Dietzgen’s work. Mach was significant because he deduced analogous ideas

out of the practices of natural science, for the use of scientists. In

what he has in common with Dietzgen, the reduction of the world to

experience, he stopped midway and gave, imbued with the anti-materialist

trends of his time, a vague idealistic form to his news. This could not

be grafted upon Marxism. Here Marxist criticism was needed.

The Criticism

Lenin, however in attacking Mach, from the start presents the antagonism

in a wrong way. Proceeding from a quotation of Engels, he says:

“But the question here is not of this or that formulation of

materialism, but of the opposition of materialism to idealism, of the

difference between the two fundamental lines in philosophy. Are we to

proceed from things to sensation and thought? Or are we to proceed from

thought and sensation to things? The first line, i.e., the materialist

line, is adopted by Engels. The second line, i.e., the idealist line, is

adopted by Mach” (33-4).

It is at once clear that this is not the true expression of the

antithesis. According to materialism the material world produces

thought, consciousness, mind, all things spiritual. That, on the

contrary, the spiritual produces the material world, is taught by

religion, is found with Hegel, but is not Mach’s opinion. The expression

“to proceed from ... to” is used to intermix two quite different

meanings. Proceeding from things to sensations and thought means: things

create thoughts. Proceeding – not from thoughts to things, as Lenin

wrongly imputes to Mach but – from sensations to things, means that only

through sensations we arrive at the knowledge of things. Their entire

existence is built up out of sensations; to emphasise this truth Mach

says: they consist of sensations.

Here the method followed by Lenin in his controversy makes its

appearance he tries to assign to Mach opinions different from the real

ones. Especially the doctrine of solipsism. Thus he continues:

“No evasions, no sophisms (a multitude of which we shall yet encounter)

can remove the clear and indisputable fact that Ernst Mach’s doctrine of

things as complexes of sensations in subjective idealism and a simple

rehash of Berkeleianism. If bodies are ‘complexes of sensations,’ as

Mach says, or ‘combinations of sensations,’ as Berkeley said, it

inevitably follows that the whole world is but my idea. Starting from

such a premise it is impossible to arrive at the existence of other

people besides oneself: it is the purest solipsism. Much as Mach,

Avenarius, Petzoldt and the others may abjure solipsism, they cannot in

fact escape solipsism without falling into howling logical absurdities.”

(34)

Now, if anything can be asserted beyond any doubt about Mach and

Avenarius, it is that their opinions are not solipsism fellow-men

similar to myself, deduced with more or less stringent logic, are the

basis of their world conception. Lenin, however, manifestly does not

care about what Mach really thinks, but about what he should think if

his logic were identical with Lenin’s.

“From which there is only one possible inference, namely that the ‘world

consists only of my sensations.’ The word ‘our’ employed by Mach instead

of ‘my’ is employed illegitimately.” (36)

That indeed is an easy way of arguing: what I write down as the opinion

of my adversary he replaces unjustifiably by what he wrote down himself.

Lenin, moreover, knows quite well that Mach speaks of the objective

reality of the world, and himself gives numerous quotations to that

effect. But he does not let himself be deceived as so many others were

deceived by Mach.

“Similarly, even Mach ... frequently strays into a materialist

interpretation of the word experience ... (171). Here nature is taken as

primary and sensation and experience as products. Had Mach consistently

adhered to his point of view in the mental questions of epistemology ...

Mach’s special ‘philosophy’ is here thrown overboard, and the author

instinctively accepts the customary standpoint of the scientists.” (172)

Would it not have been better if he had tried to understand in what

sense it was that Mach assumes that things consist of sensations?

The “elements” also are an object of difficulty to Lenin. He summarises

Mach’s opinion on the elements in six theses, among which we find, in

numbers 3 and 4:

“Elements are divided into the physical and the psychical: the latter is

that which depends on the human nerves and the human organism generally;

the former does not depend on them: the connection of physical elements

and the connection of psychical elements, it is declared, do not exist

separately from each other they exist only in conjunction.” (49)

Anybody, even if acquainted only superficially with Mach, can see how he

is rendered here in an entirely wrong and meaningless way. What Mach

really says is this: every element, though described in many words, is

an inseparable unity, which can be part of a complex that we call

physical, but which combined with different other elements can form a

complex that we call psychical. When I feel the heat of a flame, this

sensation together with others on heat and thermometers and with visible

phenomena combines into the complex “flame” or “heat,” treated in

physics. Combined with other sensations of pain and pleasure, with

remembrances and with observations on nerves, the context belongs to

physiology or psychology. “None (of these connections) is the only

existing one, both are present at the same time” says Mach. For they are

the same elements in different combinations. Lenin makes of this that

the connections are not independent and only exist together. Mach does

not separate the elements themselves as physical and psychical ones, nor

does he distinguish a physical and psychical part in them the same

element is physical in one context, psychical in another. If Lenin

renders these ideas in such a sloppy and unintelligible way it is no

wonder that he cannot make any sense out of it, and speaks of “an

incoherent jumble of antithetical philosophical points of view.” (49) If

one does not take the pains or is unable to unravel the real opinions of

his adversary and only snatches up some sentences to interpret them from

one’s own point of view, he should not wonder that nonsense comes out.

This cannot be called a marxian criticism of Mach.

In the same faulty way he renders Avenarius. He reproduces a small

summary by Avenarius of a first division of the elements: what I find

present I partly call outer world (e.g. I see a tree), partly not (I

remember a tree, trunk of a tree). Avenarius denotes them as thing-like

(sachhaft) and thoughtlike (gedankenhaft) elements. Thereupon Lenin

indignantly exclaims:

“At first we are assured that the ‘elements’ are something new, both

physical and psychical at the same time then a little correction is

surreptitiously inserted: instead of the crude, materialist

differentiation of matter (bodies, things) and the psychical

(sensations, recollections, fantasies) we are presented with the

doctrine of ‘recent positivism’ regarding elements substantial and

elements mental.” (53)

Clearly he does not suspect how completely he misses the point.

In a chapter superscribed with the ironical title Does man think with

his brain? Lenin quotes Avenarius’s statement that the brain is not the

lodging, the site, etc. of thinking; thinking is no resident, no

product, etc. of the brain. Hence: man does not think with his brain.

Lenin has not perceived that Avenarius further on expresses clearly

enough, though garbled in his artificial terminology, that the action of

the outer world upon the brain produces what we call thoughts;

manifestly Lenin had not the patience to unravel Avenarius’s intricate

language. But to combat an opponent you have to know his point ignorance

is no argument. What Avenarius contradicts is not the role of the brain

but that we call the product thought when we assign to it, as a

spiritual being, a site in the brain and say it is living in the brain,

is commanding the brain, or is a function of the brain. The material

brain, as we saw, occupies precisely the central place of his

philosophy. Lenin, however, considers this only as a “mystification”:

“Avenarius here acts on the advice of the charlatan in Turgenev:

denounce most of all those vices which you yourself possess. Avenarius

tries to pretend that he is combating idealism.... While distracting the

attention of the reader by attacking idealism, Avenarius is in fact

defending idealism, albeit in slightly different words; thought is not a

function of the brain: the brain is not the organ of thought; sensations

are – not functions of the nervous system, oh, no: sensations are –

‘elements’ .” (92-3)

The critic rages here against a self-mystification without any basis. He

finds “idealism” in that Avenarius, proceeds from elements, and elements

are sensations. Avenarius, however, does not proceed from sensations but

from what simple unsophisticated man finds present; things,

surroundings, a world, fellow-men, remembrances. Man does not find

present sensations, be finds present a world. Avenarius tries to

construct a description of the world without the common language of

matter and mind and its contradictions. He finds trees present, and

human brains, and – so he believes – changes in the brains produced by

the trees, and actions and talk of fellow-men determined by these

changes. Of all this Lenin manifestly has no inkling. He tries to make

“idealism” of Avenarius’s system by considering Avenarius’s starting

point, experience, to be sensations, something psychical, according to

his own materialist view. His error is that he takes the

contradistinction materialism-idealism in the sense of middle-class

materialism, with physical matter as its basis. Thus he shuts himself

off completely from any understanding of modern views that proceed from

experience and phenomena as the given reality.

Lenin now brings forward an array of witnesses to declare that the

doctrines of Mach and Avenarius are idealism or solipsism. It is natural

that the host of professional philosophers, in compliance with the

tendency of bourgeois thinking to proclaim the rule of mind over matter,

try to interpret and emphasise the anti-materialist side of their ideas;

they too know materialism only as the doctrine of physical matter. What,

we may ask, is the use of such witnesses? When disputed facts have to be

ascertained, witnesses are necessary. When, however, we deal with the

understanding of somebody’s opinions and theories, we have to read and

render carefully what he himself has written to expound them; this is

the only way to find out similarities and differences, truth and error.

For Lenin, however, matters were different. His book was part of a

law-suit, an act of impeachment; as such it required an array of

witnesses. An important political issue was at stake; Machism threatened

to corrupt the fundamental doctrines, the theoretical unity of the

Party; so its spokesmen had to do away with them. Mach and Avenarius

formed a danger for the Party; hence what mattered was not to find out

what was true and valuable in their teachings in order to widen our own

views. What mattered was to discredit them, to destroy their reputation,

to reveal them as muddle-heads contradicting themselves, speaking

confused fudge, trying to hide their real opinions and not believing

their own assertions.

All the middle-class philosophical writers, standing before the newness

of these ideas, look for analogies and relationships of Mach and

Avenarius with former philosophic systems; one welcomes Mach as fitting

in with Kant, another sees a likeness to Hume, or Berkeley, or Fichte.

In this multitude and variety of systems it is easy to find out

connections and similarities everywhere. Lenin registers all such

contradictory judgements and in this way demonstrates Mach’s confusion.

The like with Avenarius. For instance:

“And it is difficult to say who more rudely unmasks Avenarius the

mystifier – Smith by his straightforward and clear refutation, or

Schuppe by his enthusiastic opinion of Avenarius’s crowning work. The

kiss of Wilhelm Schuppe in philopsophy is no better than the kiss of

Peter Struve or Menshikov in politics.” (73)

If we now read Schuppe’s Open Letter to Avenarius, in which in

flattering words he expresses his agreement, we find that he did not at

all grasp the essence of Avenarius’s opinion; he takes the “myself” as

the starting point instead of the elements found present, out of which

Avenarius constructs the “myself”. He misrepresents Avenarius in the

same way as Lenin does, with this difference, that what displeased Lenin

pleased him. In his answer Avenarius, in the courteous words usual among

scholars, testifies to his satisfaction at the assent of such a famous

thinker, but then again expounds the real contents of his doctrine.

Lenin neglects the contents of these explanations which refute his

conclusions, and quotes only the compromising courtesies.

Natural Science

Over against Mach’s ideas Lenin puts the materialistic views, the

objective reality of the material world, of matter, light ether, laws of

nature, such as natural science and human common sense accept. These

last are two respectable authorities; but in this case their weight is

not very great. Lenin sneeringly quotes Mach’s own confession that he

found little consent among his colleagues. A critic, however, who brings

new ideas cannot be refuted by the statement that it is the old

criticised ideas that are generally accepted. And as to common sense,

i.e. the totality of opinions of uninstructed people: they usually

represent the dicta of science of a former period, that gradually, by

teaching and popular books, seeped down the masses. That the earth

revolves around the sun, that the world consists of indestructible

matter, that matter consists of atoms, that the world is eternal and

infinite – all this has gradually penetrated into the minds, first of

the educated classes, then of the masses. When science proceeds to newer

and better views, all this old knowledge can, as “common sense,” be

brought forward against them.

How unsuspectingly Lenin leans upon these two authorities – and even in

a wrong way – is seen when he says:

“For every scientist who has not been led astray by professorial

philosophy, as well as for every materialist, sensation is indeed the

direct connection between consciousness and the external world: it is

the transformation of the energy of external excitation into a state of

consciousness. This transformation has been, and is, observed by each of

us a million times on every hand.” (45)

This “observing” is of the same kind as when one should say: we see a

thousand times that our eye sees and that light falls upon the retina.

In reality we do not see our seeing and our retina; we see objects and

infer the retina and the seeing. We do not observe energy and its

transitions we observe phenomena, and out of these phenomena physicists

have abstracted the concept of energy. The transformation of energy is a

summarised physical expression for the many phenomena in which one

measured quantity decreased, another increased. They are all good

expedient concepts and inferences, reliable in the prediction of future

phenomena, and so we call them true. Lenin takes this truth in such an

absolute way that he thinks he expresses an observed fact “adopted by

every materialist,” when he pronounces what is actually a physical

theory. Moreover his exposition is wrong. That energy of the

light-impression is converted into consciousness may have been the

belief of middle-class materialists, but science does not know of it.

Physical science says that energy transforms exclusively, and

completely, into other energy; the energy of the light-impression is

transformed into other forms: chemical, electrical, heat-energy; but

consciousness is not known in physics as a form of energy.

This confounding of the real, observed world and the physical concepts

permeates Lenin’s work on every page. Engels denoted materialists as

those who considered nature the original thing. Lenin speaks of a

“materialism which regards nature, matter, as primary” (38). And in

another place: “matter is the objective reality given to us in

sensations” (144-5). To Lenin nature and physical matter are identical;

the name matter has the same meaning as objective world. In this he

agrees with middle-class materialism that in the same way considers

matter as the real substance of the world. Thus his angry polemics

against Mach can be easily understood. To Mach matter is an abstract

concept formed out of the phenomena – or more strictly: sensations. So

Lenin, now finding the denial of the reality of matter, then reading the

simple statement of the reality of the world, sees only confusion; and

he pretends, now, that Mach is a solipsist and denies the existence of

the world, and then scornfully remarks that Mach throws his own

philosophy to the winds and returns to scientific views.

With the laws of nature the case is analogous. Mach’s opinion that cause

and effect as well as natural laws do not factually exist in nature, but

are man-made expressions of observed regularities, is asserted by Lenin

to be identical with Kant’s doctrine.

“... It is man who dictates laws to nature and not nature that dictates

laws to man! The important thing is not the repetition of Kant’s

doctrine of apriorism ... but the fact that reason, mind, consciousness

are here primary, and nature secondary. It is not reason that is a part

of nature, one of its highest products, the reflection of its processes,

but nature that is a part of reason, which ‘thereby is stretched from

the ordinary, simple human reason known to us all to a ‘stupendous,’ as

Dietzgen puts it, mysterious, divine reason. The Kantian-Machian

formula, that ‘man gives laws to nature,’ is a fideist formula.” (185)

This confused tirade, entirely missing the point, can only be understood

if we consider that for Lenin “nature” consists not only in matter but

also in natural laws directing its behaviour, floating somehow in the

world as commanders who must be obeyed by the things. Hence to deny the

objective existence of these laws means to him the denial of nature

itself; to make man the creator of natural laws means to him to make

human mind the creator of the world. How then the logical salto is made

to the deity as the creator must remain an enigma to the unsophisticated

reader.

Two pages earlier he writes:

“The really important epistemological question that divides the

philosophical trends is ... whether the source of our knowledge of these

connections is objective natural law or properties of our mind, its

innate faculty of apprehending certain a priori truths, and so forth.

This is what so irrevocably divides the materialists Feuerbach, Marx and

Engels from the agnostic (Humeans) Avenarius and Mach.” (183)

That Mach should ascribe to the human mind the power to disclose certain

aprioristic truths is a new discovery or rather fantasy of Lenin. Where

Mach deals with the practice of the mind to abstract general rules from

experience and to assign to them unlimited validity, Lenin, captivated

by traditional philosophical ideas, thinks of disclosing aprioristic

truths. Then he continues:

“In certain parts of his works, Mach ... frequently ‘forgets’ his

agreement with Hume and his own subjectivist theory of causality and

argues ‘simply’ as a scientist, i.e., from the instinctive materialist

standpoint. For instance, in his Mechanik, we read of the ‘uniformity

... which natures teaches us to mind in its phenomena.’ But if we do

find uniformity in the phenomena of nature, does this mean mat

uniformity exists objectively outside our mind? No. On the question of

the uniformity of nature Mach also delivers himself thus: ... ‘That we

consider ourselves capable of making predictions with the help of such a

law only proves that there is sufficient uniformity in our environment,

but it does not prove the necessity of the success of our predictions’

(Wärmelehre, p.383). It follows that we may and ought to look for a

necessity apart from the uniformity of our environment, i.e., of

nature.” (183)

The embroilment in this tangle of sentences, further embellished by

courtesies here omitted is understandable only when conformity of nature

is identical for Lenin with the necessity of success of our prophecies;

when, hence, he cannot distinguish between regularities as they occur in

various degrees of clearness in nature, and the apodictic expression of

exact natural law. And he proceeds:

“Where to look for it is the secret of idealist philosophy which is

afraid to recognise man’s perceptive faculty as a simple reflection of

nature.” (184)

In reality there is no necessity, except in our formulation of natural

law; and then in practice ever again we find deviations, which, again,

we express in the form of additional laws. Natural law does not

determine what nature necessarily will do, but what we expect her to do.

The silly remark that our mind should simply reflect nature we may leave

undiscussed now. His concluding remark:

“In his last work, Erkenntnis und Irrtum, Mach even defines a law of

nature as a ‘limitation of expectation’ (2.Auflage, S.450ff.)! Solipsism

claims its own.” (184)

This lacks all sense since the determination of our expectation by

natural law is a common affair of all scientists. The embodiment of a

number of phenomena in a short formula, a natural law, is denoted by

Mach as “economy of thinking”; he exalts it into a principle of

research. We might expect that such a reducing of abstract theory to the

practice of (scientific) labour should find sympathy among Marxists. In

Lenin, however, it meets with no response, and he exposes his lack of

understanding in some drolleries:

“That it is more ‘economical’ to ‘think’ that only I and my sensations

exist is unquestionable, provided we want to introduce such an absurd

conception into epistemology. Is it ‘more economical’ to ‘think’ of the

atom as indivisible, or as composed of positive and negative electrons?

Is it ‘more economical’ to think of the Russian bourgeois revolution as

being conducted by the liberals or as being conducted against the

liberals? One has only to put the question in order to see the

absurdity, the subjectivism of applying the category of ‘the economy of

thought’ here.” (196-7)

And he opposes to it his own view:

“Human thought is ‘economical’ only when it correctly reflects objective

truth, and the criterion of this correctness is practice, experiment and

industry. Only by denying objective reality, that is, by denying the

foundations of Marxism, can one seriously speak of economy of thought in

the theory of knowledge.” (197)

How simple and evident that looks. Let us take an example. The old,

ptolemaic world-system placed the earth as resting in the centre of the

world, with the sun and the planets revolving around it, the latter in

epicycles, a combination of two circles. Copernicus placed the sun in

the centre and had the earth and the planets revolving around it in

simple circles. The visible phenomena are exactly the same after both

theories, because we can observe the relative motions only, and they are

absolutely identical. Which, then, pictures the objective world in the

right way? Practical experience cannot distinguish between them; the

predictions are identical. Copernicus pointed to the fixed stars which

by the parallax could give a decision; but in the old theory we could

have the stars making a yearly circle just as the planets did; and again

both theories give identical results. But then everybody will say: it is

absurd to have all those thousands of bodies describe similar circles,

simply to keep the earth at rest. Why absurd? Because it makes our

world-picture needlessly complicated. Here we have it – the Copernican

system is chosen and stated to be true because it gives the most simply

world system. This example may suffice to show the naïvité of the idea

that we choose a theory because after the criterion of experience it

pictures reality rightly.

Kirchhoff has formulated the real character of scientific theory in the

same way by his well-known statements that mechanics, instead of

“explaining” motions by means of the “forces” producing them, has the

task “to describe the motions in nature in the most complete and simple

way.” Thus the fetishism of forces as causes, as a kind of working imps,

was removed; they are a short form of description only. Mach of course

pointed to the analogy of Kirchhoff’s views and his own. Lenin, to show

that he does not understand anything of it, because he is entirely

captivated in this fetishism, calls out in an indignant tone: “Economy

of thought, from which Mach in 1872 inferred that sensations alone exist

... is declared to be ... equivalent to the simplest description (of an

objective reality, the existence of which it never occurred to Kirchhoff

to doubt!)” (198)

It must be remarked, besides, that thinking never can picture reality

completely; theory is an approximate picture that renders only the main

features, the general traits of a group of phenomena.

After having considered Lenin’s ideas on matter and natural laws, we

take as a third instance space and time.

“Behold now the ‘teachings’ of ‘recent positivism’ on this subject. We

read in Mach: ‘Space and time are well ordered (wohlgeordnete) systems

of series of sensations’ (Mechanik, 3. Auflage, p.498). This is palpable

idealist nonsense, such as inevitably follows from the doctrine that

bodies are complexes of sensations. According to Mach, it is not man

with his sensations that exists in space and time, but space and time

that exist in man, that depend upon man and are generated by man. He

feels that he is falling into idealism, and ‘resists’ by making a host

of reservations and ... burying the question under lengthy disquisitions

... on the mutability of our conceptions of space and time. But this

does not save him, and cannot save him, for one can really overcome the

idealist position on this question only by recognising the objective

reality of space and time. And this Mach will not do at any price. He

constructs his epistemological theory of time and space on the principle

of relativism, and that is all. Resisting the idealist conclusions which

inevitably follow from his premises, Mach argues against Kant and

insists that our conception of space is derived from experience

(Erkenntnis und Irrtum, 2. Auflage, p.530, 385). But if objective

reality is not given us in experience (as Mach teaches) ...” (206)

What is the use of going on quoting? It is all a sham battle, because we

know that Mach assumes the reality of the world; and all phenomena,

constituting the world, take place in space and time. And Lenin could

have been warned that he was on a false track, by a number of sentences

he knows and partly quotes, where Mach discusses the mathematical

investigations on multi-dimensional spaces. There Mach says: “That which

we call space is a special real case among more general imagined cases

... The space of vision and touch is a threefold manifold, it has three

dimensions ... The properties of given space appear directly as objects

of experience ... About the given space only experience can teach us

whether it is finite, whether parallel lines intersect, etc.... To many

divines who do not know where to place hell, and to spiritists, a fourth

dimension might be very convenient.” But “such a fourth dimension would

still remain a thing of imagination.” These quotations may suffice. What

has Lenin to say to all this, besides a number of groundless squibs and

invectives?

“But how does he (Mach) dissociate himself from them in his theory of

knowledge? By stating that three-dimensional space alone is real! But

what sort of defence is it against the theologians and their like when

you deny objective reality to space and time?” (211)

What difference might there be between real space and objective reality

of space? At any rate he sticks to his error.

What, then, is that sentence of Mach that was the basis of this fantasy?

In the last chapter of his Mechanik, Mach discusses the relation between

different branches of science. There he says: “First we perceive that in

all experiences on spatial and temporal relations we have more

confidence, and a more objective and real character is ascribed to them,

than to experiences on colour, heat or sound ... Yet, looking more

exactly, we cannot fail to see that sensations of space and time are

sensations just as those of colour, sound or smell; only, in the former

we are more trained and clear than in the latter. Space and time are

well-ordered systems of series of sensations ...” Mach proceeds here

from experience; our sensations are the only source of knowledge; our

entire world, including all we know about space and time, is built up

out of them. The question of what is the meaning of absolute space and

time is to Mach a meaningless question; the only sensible question is

how space and time appear in our experience. Just as with bodies and

matter we can form a scientific conception of time and space only

through abstraction out of the totality of our experiences. With the

space-and-time pattern in which we insert these experiences we are

versed, as most simple and natural, from early youth. How it then

appears in experimental science cannot be expressed in a better way than

by the words of Mach: well-ordered systems of series of experiences.

What, contrariwise, Lenin thinks of space and time, transpires from the

following quotation:

“In modern physics, he says, Newton’s idea of absolute time and space

prevails (pp.442-4), of time and space as such. This idea seems ‘to us’

senseless, Mach continues – apparently not suspecting the existence of

materialists and of a materialist theory of knowledge. But in practice,

he claims, this view was harmless (unschädlich, p.442) and therefore for

a long time escaped criticism.” (208)

Hence, according to Lenin, “materialism” accepts Newton’s doctrine, the

basis of which is that there exists an absolute space and an absolute

time. This means that the place in space is fixed absolutely without

regard to other things, and can be ascertained without any doubt. When

Mach says that this is the point of view of contemporary physicists he

surely represents his colleagues as too old-fashioned; in his time

already it was rather generally accepted that motion and rest were

relative conceptions, that the place of a body is always the place

relative to other bodies, and that the idea of absolute position has no

sense.

Still there was a certain doubt whether or not space-filling world ether

did not offer a frame for absolute space; motion or rest relative to

world-ether could be rightly called then absolute motion or rest. When,

however, physicists tried to determine it by means of the propagation of

light, they could find nothing but relativity. Such was the case with

Michelson’s famous experiment in 1889, arranged in such a way that in

its result nature should indicate the motion of our earth relative to

the ether. But nothing was found; nature remained mute. It was as if she

said: your query has no sense. To explain the negative result it was

assumed that there always occurred additional phenomena that just

cancelled the expected effect – until Einstein in 1905 in his theory of

relativity combined all facts in such a way that the result was

self-evident. Also within the world-occupying ether – absolute position

was shown to be a word without meaning. So gradually the idea of ether

itself was dropped, and all thought of absolute space disappeared from

science.

With time it seemed to be different; a moment in time was assumed to be

absolute. But it was the very ideas of Mach that brought about a change

here. In the place of talk of abstract conceptions, Einstein introduced

the practice of experiment. What are we doing when we fix a moment in

time? We look at a clock, and we compare the different clocks, there is

no other way. In following this line of argument Einstein succeeded in

refuting absolute time and demonstrating the relativity of time.

Einstein’s theory was soon universally adopted by scientists, with the

exception of some anti-semitic physicists in Germany who consequently

were proclaimed luminaries of national-socialist “German” physics.

The latter development could not yet be known to Lenin when he wrote his

book. But it illustrates the character of such expositions as where he

writes:

“The materialist view of space and time has remained ‘harmless,’ i.e.,

compatible, as heretofore, with science, while the contrary view of Mach

and Co. was a ‘harmful’ capitulation to the position of fideism.” (210)

Thus he denotes as materialist the belief that the concepts of absolute

space and absolute time, which science once wanted as its theory but had

to drop afterwards, are the true reality of the world. Because Mach

opposes their reality and asserts for space and time the same as for

every concept, viz. that we can deduce them only from experience, Lenin

imputes to him “idealism leading to ‘fideism’.”

Materialism

Our direct concern here is not with Mach but with Lenin. Mach occupies

considerable space here because Lenin’s criticism of Mach discloses his

own philosophical views. From the side of Marxism there is enough to

criticise in Mach; but Lenin takes up the matter from the wrong end. As

we have seen he appeals to the old forms of physical theory, diffused

into popular opinion, so as to oppose them against the modern critique

of their own foundations. We found, moreover, that he identifies the

real objective world with physical matter, as middle class materialism

did formerly. He tries to demonstrate it by the following arguments:

“If you hold that it is given, a philosophical concept is needed for

this objective reality, and this concept has been worked out long, long

ago. This concept is matter. Matter is a philosophical category

designating the objective reality which is given to man by his

sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our

sensations, while existing independently of them.” (144)

Fine; with the first sentence we all can agree. When then, however, we

would restrict the character of reality to physical matter, we

contradict the first given definition. Electricity too is objective

reality; is it physical matter? Our sensations show us light; it is

reality but not matter, and the concepts introduced by the physicists to

explain its phenomena, first the world ether, then the photons, can not

easily be denoted as a kind of matter. Is not energy quite as real as is

physical matter? More directly than the material things, it is their

energy that shows itself in all experience and produces our sensations.

For that reason Ostwald, half a century ago, proclaimed energy the only

real substance of the world; and he called this “the end of scientific

materialism,” And finally, what is given to us in our sensations, when

fellow-men speak to us, is not only sound coming from lips and throat,

not only energy of air vibrations, but besides, more essentially, their

thoughts, their ideas. Man’s ideas quite as certainly belong to

objective reality as the tangible objects; things spiritual constitute

the real world just as things called material in physics. If in our

science, needed to direct our activity, we wish to render the entire

world of experience, the concept of physical matter does not suffice; we

need more and other concepts; energy, mind, consciousness.

If according to the above definition matter is taken as the name for the

philosophical concept denoting objective reality, it embraces far more

than physical matter. Then we come to the view repeatedly expressed in

former chapters, where the material world was spoken of as the name for

the entire observed reality. This is the meaning of the word material,

matter in Historical Materialism, the designation of all that is really

existing in the world, “including mind and fancies,” as Dietzgen said.

It is not, therefore, that the modern theories of the structure of

matter provoke criticism of his ideas, as Lenin indicates above on the

same page, but the fact that he identifies physical matter at all with

the real world.

The meaning of the word matter in Historical Materialism, as pointed out

here, is of course entirely foreign to Lenin; contrary to his first

definition he will restrict it to physical matter. Hence his attack on

Dietzgen’s “confusion”:

“Thinking is a function of the brain, says Dietzgen. ‘My desk as a

picture in my mind is identical with my idea of it But my desk outside

of my brain is a separate object and distinct from my idea.’ These

perfectly clear materialistic propositions are, however, supplemented by

Dietzgen thus: ‘Nevertheless, the non-sensible idea is also sensible,

material, i.e., real....’ This is obviously false. That both thought and

matter are ‘real,’ i.e., exist, is true. But to say that thought is

material is to make a false step, a step towards confusing materialism

and idealism. As a matter of fact this is only an inexact expression of

Dietzgen.” (290)

Here Lenin repudiates his own definition of matter as the philosophical

expression of objective reality. Or is perhaps objective reality

something different from really existing? What he tries to express but

cannot without “inexactness of expression” – is this: that thought may

really exist, but the true genuine reality is only found in physical

matter.

Middle-class materialism, identifying objective reality with physical

matter, had to make every other reality, such as all things spiritual,

an attribute or property of this matter. We cannot wonder, therefore,

that we find with Lenin similar ideas. To Pearson’s sentence: “It is

illogical to assert that all matter has consciousness” he remarks:

“It is illogical to assert that all matter is conscious but it is

logical to assert that all matter possesses a property which is

essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection.” (98)

And still more distinctly he avers against Mach:

“As regards materialism, ... we have already seen in the case of Diderot

what the real views of the materialists are. These views do not consist

in deriving sensation from the movement of matter or in reducing

sensation to the movement of matter, but in recognising sensation as one

of the properties of matter in motion. On this question Engels shared

the standpoint of Diderot.” (40)

Where Engels may have said so, is not indicated. We may doubt whether

Lenin’s conviction that Engels on this point agreed with him and

Diderot, rests on precise statements. In his Anti-Dühring Engels

expressed himself in another way: “Life is the form of existence of

albuminous substances”; i.e. life is not a property of all matter but

appears only in such complicated molecular structures as albumen. So it

is not probable that he should have considered sensitiveness, which we

know as a property of living matter only, a property of all matter, Such

generalisations of properties observed only in special cases, to matter

in general, belong to the undialectic middle-class frame of mind.

The remark may be inserted here that Plechanov exhibits ideas analogous

to Lenin’s. In his Grundprobleme des Marxismus he criticises the

botanist France on the subject of the “spirituality of matter,” the

“doctrine that matter in general and organic matter especially always

has a certain sensitivity.” Plechanov then expresses his own view in the

words: “France considers this contradictory to materialism. In reality

it is the transfer of Feuerbach’s materialistic doctrine. We may assert

with certainty that Marx and Engels would have given attention to this

trend of thought with the greatest interest.” This is a cautious

assertion testifying that Marx and Engels in their writings never showed

any interest in this trend of thought. France as a limited-minded

naturalist knows only the antithesis of views in middle-class thinking;

he assumes that materialists believe in matter only, hence the doctrine

that in all matter there is something spiritual is, to him, no

materialism at all. Plechanov, on the other hand, considers it a small

modification of materialism that makes it more resistant.

Lenin was quite well aware of the concordance of his views with

middle-class materialism of the 19th century. For him “materialism” is

the common basis of Marxism and middle-class materialism. After having

expounded that Engels in his booklet on Feuerbach charged these

materialists with three things – that they remained with the materialist

doctrine of the 18th century, that their materialism was mechanical, and

that in the realm of social science, they held fast to idealism and did

not understand Historical Materialism – he proceeds:

“Exclusively for these three things and exclusively within these limits,

does Engels refute both the materialism of the eighteenth century and

the doctrines of Büchner and Co.! On all other, more elementary,

questions of materialism (questions distorted by the Machians) there is

and can be no difference between Marx and Engels on the one hand and all

these old materialists on the other.” (286)

That this is an illusion of Lenin’s has been demonstrated in the

preceding pages these three things carry along as their consequences an

utter difference in the fundamental epistemological ideas. And in the

same way, Lenin continues, Engels was in accordance with Dühring in his

materialism:

“For Engels ... Dühring was not a sufficiently steadfast, clear and

consistent materialist.” (288)

Compare this with the way Engels finished Dühring off in words of

scornful contempt.

Lenin’s concordance with middle-class materialism and his ensuing

discordance with Historical Materialism is manifest in many

consequences. The former waged its main war against religion; and the

chief reproach Lenin raises against Mach and his followers is that they

sustain fideism. We met with it in several quotations already; in

hundreds of places all through the book we find fideism as the opposite

of materialism. Marx and Engels did not know of fideism; they drew the

line between materialism and idealism. In the name fideism emphasis is

laid upon religion. Lenin explains whence he took the word. “In France,

those who put faith above reason are called fideists (from the Latin

fides, faith).” (306)

This oppositeness of religion to reason is a reminiscence from

pre-marxian times, from the emancipation of the middle-class, appealing

to “reason” in order to attack religious faith as the chief enemy in the

social struggle; “free thinking” was opposed to “obscurantism.” Lenin,

in continually pointing to fideism as the consequence of the contested

doctrines indicates that also to him in the world of ideas religion is

the chief enemy.

Thus he scolds Mach for saying that the problem of determinism cannot be

settled empirically: in research, Mach says every scientist must be

determinist but in practical affairs he remains indeterminist.

“Is this not obscurantism ... when determinism is confined to the field

of ‘investigation,’ while in the field of morality, social activity, and

all fields other than ‘investigation’ the question is left to a

‘subjective estimate’.” (223) ... “And so things have been amicably

divided: theory for the professors, practice for the theologians!” (224)

Thus every subject is seen from the point of view of religion.

Manifestly it was unknown to Lenin that the deeply religious Calvinism

was a rigidly deterministic doctrine, whereas the materialist middle

class of the 19th century put their faith into free will, hence

proclaimed indeterminism. At this point a real Marxian thinker would not

have missed the opportunity of explaining to the Russian Machists that

it was Historical Materialism that opened the way for determinism in the

field of society; we have shown above that the theoretical conviction

that rules and laws hold in a realm – this means determinism – can find

a foundation only when we succeed in establishing practically such laws

and connections. Further, that Mach because he belonged to the middle

class and was bound to its fundamental line of thought, by necessity was

indeterminist in his social views; and that in this way his ideas were

backward and incompatible with Marxism. But nothing of the sort is found

in Lenin; that ideas are determined by class is not mentioned; the

theoretical differences hang in the air. Of course theoretical ideas

must be criticised by theoretical arguments. When, however, the social

consequences are emphasised with such vehemence, the social origins of

the contested ideas should not have been left out of consideration. This

most essential character of Marxism does not seem to exist for Lenin.

So we are not astonished that among former authors it is especially

Ernst Haeckel who is esteemed and praised by Lenin. In a final chapter

inscribed “Ernst Haeckel and Ernst Mach” he compares and opposes them.

“Mach ... betrays science into the hands of fideism by virtually

deserting to the camp of philosophical idealism” (422). But “every page”

in Haeckel’s work “is a slap in the face of the ‘sacred’ teachings of

all official philosophy and theology.” Haeckel “instantly, easily and

simply revealed ... that there is a foundation. This foundation is

natural-scientific materialism.” (423).

In his praise it does not disturb him that the writings of Haeckel

combine, as generally recognised, popular science with a most

superficial philosophy – Lenin himself speaks of his “philosophical

naïvité” and says “that he does not enter into an investigation of

philosophical fundamentals.” What is essential to him is that Haeckel

was a dauntless fighter against prominent religious doctrines.

“The storm provoked by Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe in

every civilised country strikingly brought out, on the one hand, the

partisan character of philosophy in modern society and, on the other,

the true social significance of the struggle of materialism against

idealism and agnosticism. The fact that the book was sold in hundreds of

thousands of copies, that it was immediately translated into all

languages and that it appeared in special cheap editions, clearly

demonstrates that the book ‘has found its way to the masses’, that there

are numbers of readers whom Ernst Haeckel at once won over to his side.

This popular little book became a weapon in the class struggle. The

professors of philosophy and theology in every country of the world set

about denouncing and annihilating Haeckel in every possible way.” (423)

What class-fight was this? Which class was here represented by Haeckel

against which other class? Lenin is silent on this point. Should his

words be taken to imply that Haeckel, unwittingly, acted as a spokesman

of the working class against the bourgeoisie? Then it must be remarked

that Haeckel was a vehement opponent to socialism, and that in his

defence of Darwinism he tried to recommend it to the ruling class by

pointing out that it was an aristocratic theory, the doctrine of the

selection of the best, most fit to refute “the utter nonsense of

socialist levelling”. What Lenin calls a tempest raised by the

Weltraetsel was in reality only a breeze within the middle class, the

last episode of its conversion from materialism to idealistic world

conception. Haeckel’s Weltraetsel was the last flare up, in a weakened

form, of middle-class materialism, and the idealist, mystic, and

religious tendencies were so strong already among the bourgeoisie and

the intellectuals that from all sides they could pounce upon Haeckel’s

book and show up its deficiencies. What was the importance of the book

for the mass of its readers among the working class we have indicated

above. When Lenin speaks here of a class fight he demonstrates how

little he knew of the class fight in countries of developed capitalism,

and saw it only as a fight for and against religion.

Plechanov’s Views

The kinship with middle-class materialism revealed in Lenin’s book is

not simply a personal deviation from Marxism. Analogous views are found

in Plechanov, at the time the acknowledged first and prominent theorist

of Russian socialism. In his book Grundprobleme des Marxismus

(Fundamental Problems of Marxism), first written in Russian, with a

German translation in 1910, he begins by broadly treating the

concordance between Marx and Feuerbach. What usually is called

Feuerbach’s Humanism, he explains, means that Feuerbach proceeds from

man to matter. “The words of Feuerbach quoted above on the ‘human head’

show that the question of ‘brain matter’ was answered at the time in a

materialist sense. And this point of view was also accepted by Marx and

Engels. It became the basis of their philosophy.” Of course Marx and

Engels assumed that human thoughts are produced in the brain, just as

they assumed that the earth revolved around the sun. Plechanov, however,

proceeds: “When we deal with this thesis of Feuerbach, we get acquainted

at the same time with the philosophical side of Marxism.” He then quotes

the sentences of Feuerbach: ‘Thinking comes from being, but being comes

not from thinking. Being exists in itself and by itself, existence has

its basis in itself;” and he concludes by adding “Marx and Engels made

this opinion on the relation between being and thinking the basis of

their materialist conception of history.” Surely; but the question is

what they mean by “being”. In this colourless word many opposing

concepts of later times are contained undistinguished. All that is

perceptible to us we call being; from the side of natural science it can

mean matter, from the side of social science the same word can mean the

entire society. To Feuerbach it was the material substance of man: “man

is what he eats”; to Marx it is social reality, i.e. a society of

people, tools, production-relations, that determines consciousness.

Plechanov then speaks of the first of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach; he

says that Marx here “completes and deepens Feuerbach’s ideas”; he

explains that Feuerbach took man in his passive relations, Marx in his

active relation to nature. He points to the later statement in Das

Kapital: “Whilst man works upon outside nature and changes it, he

changes at the same time his own nature,” and he adds: “The profundity

of this thought becomes clear in the light of Marx’s theory of knowledge

... It must be admitted, though, that Marx’s theory of knowledge is a

direct offspring of Feuerbach’s or, more rightly, represents Feuerbach’s

theory of knowledge which, then, has been deepened by Marx in a masterly

way.” And again, on the next page, he speaks of “modern materialism, the

materialism of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels.” What must be admitted,

rather, is that the ambiguous sentence: being determines thought, is

common to them, and that the materialist doctrine that brain produces

thought is the most unessential part of Marxism and contains no trace

yet of a real theory of knowledge.

The essential side of Marxism is what distinguished it from other

materialist theories and what makes them the expression of different

class struggles. Feuerbach’s theory of knowledge, belonging to the fight

for emancipation of the middle class, has its basis in the lack of

science of society as the most powerful reality determining human

thinking. Marxian theory of knowledge proceeds from the action of

society, this self-made material world of man, upon the mind, and so

belongs to the proletarian class struggle. Certainly Marx’s theory of

knowledge descended, historically, from Hegel and Feuerbach; but equally

certainly it grew into something entirely different from Hegel and

Feuerbach. It is a significant indication of the point of view of

Plechanov that he does not see this antagonism and that he assigns the

main importance to the trivial community of opinion – which is

unimportant for the real issue – that thoughts are produced by the

brain.

Chapter 7. The Russian Revolution

The concordance of Lenin and Plechanov in their basic philosophical

views and their common divergence from Marxism points to their common

origin out of the Russian social conditions. The name and garb of a

doctrine or theory depend on its spiritual descent; they indicate the

earlier thinker to whom we feel most indebted and whom we think we

follow. The real content, however, depends on its material origin and is

determined by the social conditions under which it developed and has to

work. Marxism itself says that the main social ideas and spiritual

trends express the aims of the classes, i.e. the needs of social

development, and change with the class struggles themselves. So they

cannot be understood isolated from society and class struggle. This

holds for Marxism itself.

In their early days Marx and Engels stood in the first ranks of the

middle-class opposition, not yet disjoined into its different social

trends, against absolutism in Germany. Their development towards

Historical Materialism, then, was the theoretical reflex of the

development of the working class towards independent action against the

bourgeoisie. The practical class-antagonism found its expression in the

theoretical antagonism. The fight of the bourgeoisie against feudal

dominance was expressed by middle-class materialism, cognate to

Feuerbach’s doctrine, which used natural science to fight religion as

the consecration of the old powers. The working class in its own fight

has little use for natural science, the instrument of its foe: its

theoretical weapon in social science, the science of social development.

To fight religion by means of natural science has no significance for

the workers; they know, moreover, that its roots will be cut off anyhow

first by capitalist development, then by their own class struggle.

Neither have they any use for the obvious fact that thoughts are

produced by the brain. They have to understand how ideas are produced by

society. This is the content of Marxism, as it grows among the workers

as a living and stirring power, as the theory expressing their growing

power of organisation and knowledge. When in the second half of the 19th

century capitalism gained complete mastery in Western and Central Europe

as well as in America, middle-class materialism disappeared. Marxism was

the only materialist class-view remaining.

In Russia, however, matters were different. Here the fight against

Czarism was analogous to the former fight against absolutism in Europe.

In Russia too church and religion were the strongest supports of the

system of government: they held the rural masses, engaged in primitive

agrarian production, in complete ignorance and superstition. The

struggle against religion was here a prime social necessity. Since in

Russia there was no significant bourgeoisie that as a future ruling

class could take up the fight, the task fell to the intelligentsia

during scores of years it waged a strenuous fight for enlightenment of

the masses against Czarism. Among the Western bourgeoisie, now

reactionary and anti-materialist, it could find no support whatever in

this struggle. It had to appeal to the socialist workers, who alone

sympathised with it, and it took over their acknowledged theory,

Marxism. Thus it came about that even intellectuals who were spokesmen

of the first rudiments of a Russian bourgeoisie, such as Peter Struve

and Tugan Baranovski, presented themselves as Marxists. They had nothing

in common with the proletarian Marxism of the West: what they learned

from Marx was the doctrine of social development with capitalism as the

next phase. A power for revolution came up in Russia for the first time

when the workers took up the fight, first by strikes only, then in

combination with political demands. Now the intellectuals found a

revolutionary class to join up with, in order to become its spokesmen in

a socialist party.

Thus the proletarian class struggle in Russia was at the same time a

struggle against Czarist absolutism, under the banner of socialism. So

Marxism in Russia, developing as the theory of those engaged in the

social conflict, necessarily assumed another character than in Western

Europe. It was still the theory of a fighting working class, but this

class had to fight first and foremost for what in Western Europe had

been the function and work of the bourgeoisie, with the intellectuals as

its associates. So the Russian intellectuals, in adapting the theory to

this local task, had to find a form of Marxism in which criticism of

religion stood in the forefront. They found it in an approach to earlier

forms of materialism, and in the first writings of Marx from the time

when in Germany the fight of the bourgeoisie and the workers against

absolutism was still undivided.

This appears most clearly in Plechanov, the “father of Russian Marxism.”

At the time that in Western countries theorists occupied themselves with

political problems, he turned his attention to the older materialists.

In his Beiträge zur Geschichte des Materialismus (Contributions to the

History of Materialism) he treats the French materialists of the 18th

century, Helvetius, Lamettrie, and compares them with Marx, to show how

many valuable and important ideas were already contained in their works.

Hence we understand why in his Grundprobleme des Marxismus he stresses

the concordance between Marx and Feuerbach and emphasises the viewpoints

of middle-class materialism.

Yet Plechanov was strongly influenced by the Western, especially the

German workers’, movement. He was known as the herald of the Russian

working-class struggle, which he predicted theoretically at a time when

practically there was hardly any trace. He was esteemed as one of the

very few who occupied themselves with philosophy; he played an

international role and took part in the discussions on Marxism and

reformism. Western socialists studied his writings without perceiving at

the time the differences hidden within them. Thus he was determined by

Russian conditions less exclusively than Lenin.

Lenin was the practical leader of the Russian revolutionary movement.

Hence in his theoretical ideas its practical conditions and political

aims are shown more clearly. The conditions of the fight against Czarism

determined the basic views exposed in his book. Theoretical, especially

philosophic views are not determined by abstract studies and chance

reading in philosophical literature, but by the great life-tasks which,

imposed by the needs of practical activity, direct the will and thought

of man. To Lenin and the Bolshevist party the first life-task was the

annihilation of Czarism and of the backward barbarous social system of

Russia. Church and religion were the theoretical foundations of that

system, the ideology and glorification of absolutism, expression and

symbol of the slavery of the masses. Hence a relentless fight against

them was needed; the struggle against religion stood in the centre of

Lenin’s theoretical thought; any concession however small to “fideism”

was an attack on the life-nerve of the movement. As a fight against

absolutism, landed property, and clergy, the fight in Russia was very

similar to the former fight of bourgeoisie and intellectuals in Western

Europe; so the thoughts and fundamental ideas of Lenin must be similar

to what had been propagated in middle-class materialism, and his

sympathies went to its spokesmen. In Russia, however, it was the working

class who had to wage the fight; so the fighting organisation had to be

a socialist party, proclaiming Marxism as its creed, and taking from

Marxism what was necessary for the Russian Revolution: the doctrine of

social development from capitalism to socialism, and the doctrine of

class war as its moving force. Hence Lenin gave to his materialism the

name and garb of Marxism, and assumed it to be the real – i.e.

peculiarly working-class as contrasted with middle-class – Marxism.

This identification was supported by still another circumstance. In

Russia capitalism had not grown up gradually from small-scale production

in the hands of a middle class, as it had in Western Europe. Big

industry was imported from outside as a foreign element by Western

capitalism, exploiting the Russian workers. Moreover Western financial

capital, by its loans to Czarism, exploited the entire agrarian Russian

people, who were heavily taxed to pay the interests. Western capital

here assumed the character of colonial capital, with the Czar and his

officials as its agents. In countries exploited as colonies all the

classes have a common interest in throwing off the yoke of the usurious

foreign capital, to establish their own free economic development,

leading as a rule to home capitalism. This fight is waged against

world-capital, hence often under the name of socialism; and the workers

of the Western countries, who stand against the same foe, are the

natural allies. Thus in China Sun Yat-Sen was a socialist; since,

however, the Chinese bourgeoisie whose spokesman he was, was a numerous

and powerful class, his socialism was “national” and he opposed the

“errors” of Marxism.

Lenin, on the contrary, had to rely on the working class, and because

his fight had to be implacable and radical, he espoused the most radical

ideology of the Western proletariat fighting world-capitalism, viz.

Marxism. Since, however, the Russian revolution showed a mixture of two

characters, middle-class revolution in its immediate aims, proletarian

revolution in its active forces, the appropriate bolshevist theory too

had to present two characters, middle-class materialism in its basic

philosophy, proletarian evolutionism in its doctrine of class fight.

This mixture was termed Marxism. But it is clear that Lenin’s Marxism,

as determined by the special Russian attitude toward capitalism, must be

fundamentally different from the real Marxism growing as their basic

view in the workers of the countries of big capitalism. Marxism in

Western Europe is the world view of a working class confronting the task

of converting a most highly developed capitalism, its own world of life

and action, into communism. The Russian workers and intellectuals could

not make this their object; they had first to open the way for a free

development of a modern industrial society. To the Russian Marxists the

nucleus of Marxism is not contained in Marx’s thesis that social reality

determines consciousness, but in the sentence of young Marx, inscribed

in big letters in the Moscow People’s House, that religion is the opium

of the people.

It may happen that in a theoretical work there appear not the immediate

surroundings and tasks of the author, but more general and remote

influences and wider tasks. In Lenin’s book, however, nothing of the

sort is perceptible. It is a manifest and exclusive reflection of the

Russian Revolution at which he was aiming. Its character so entirely

corresponds to middle-class materialism that, if it had been known at

the time in Western Europe – but only confused rumours on the internal

strifes of Russian socialism penetrated here – and if it could have been

rightly interpreted, one could have predicted that the Russian

revolution must somehow result in a kind of capitalism based on a

workers’ struggle.

There is a widespread opinion that the bolshevist party was marxist, and

that it was only for practical reasons that Lenin, the great scholar and

leader of Marxism, gave to the revolution another direction than what

Western workers called communism – thereby showing his realistic marxian

insight. The critical opposition to the Russian and C.P. politics tries

indeed to oppose the despotic practice of the present Russian government

– termed Stalinism – to the “true” Marxist principles of Lenin and old

bolshevism. Wrongly so. Not only because in practice these politics were

inaugurated already by Lenin. But also because the alleged Marxism of

Lenin and the bolshevist party is nothing but a legend. Lenin never knew

real Marxism. Whence should he have taken it? Capitalism he knew only as

colonial capitalism; social revolution he knew only as the annihilation

of big land ownership and Czarist despotism. Russian bolshevism cannot

be reproached for having abandoned the way of Marxism: for it was never

on that way. Every page of Lenin’s philosophical work is there to prove

it; and Marxism itself, by its thesis that theoretical opinions are

determined by social relations and necessities, makes clear that it

could not be otherwise. Marxism, however, at the same time shows the

necessity of the legend; every middle-class revolution, requiring

working-class and peasant support, needs the illusion that it is

something different, larger, more universal. Here it was the illusion

that the Russian revolution was the first step of world revolution

liberating the entire proletarian class from capitalism; its theoretical

expression was the legend of Marxism.

Of course Lenin was a pupil of Marx; from Marx he had learnt what was

most essential for the Russian revolution, the uncompromising

proletarian class struggle. Just as for analogous reasons, the

social-democrats were pupils of Marx. And surely the fight of the

Russian workers, in their mass actions and their soviets, was the most

important practical example of modern proletarian warfare. That,

however, Lenin did not understand Marxism as the theory of proletarian

revolution, that he did not understand capitalism, bourgeoisie,

proletariat in their highest modern development, was shown strikingly

when from Russia, by means of the Third International, the world

revolution was to be started, and the advice and warnings of Western

Marxists were entirely disregarded. An unbroken series of blunders,

failures, and defeats, of which the present weakness of the workers’

movement was the result, showed the unavoidable shortcoming of the

Russian leadership.

Returning now to the time that Lenin wrote his book we have to ask what

then was the significance of the controversy on Machism. The Russian

revolutionary movement comprised wider circles of intellectuals than

Western socialism; so part of them came under the influence of

anti-materialist middle-class trends. It was natural that Lenin should

sharply take up the fight against such tendencies. He did not look upon

them as would a Marxist who understands them as a social phenomenon,

explaining them out of their social origin, and thus rendering them

ineffectual; nowhere in his book do we find an attempt at or a trace of

such an understanding. To Lenin materialism was the truth established by

Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, and the middle-class materialists; but then

stupidity, reaction, money-interests of the bourgeoisie and the

spiritual power of theology had brought about a revulsion in Europe. Now

this corruption threatened to assail bolshevism too; so it had to be

opposed with the utmost vigour.

In this action Lenin of course was entirely right. To be sure, it was

not a question of the truth of Marx or Mach, nor whether out of Mach’s

ideas something could be used in Marxism. It was the question whether

middle-class materialism or middle-class idealism, or some mixture,

would afford the theoretical basis for the fight against Czarism. It is

clear that the ideology of a self-contented, already declining

bourgeoisie can never fit in with a rising movement, not even with a

rising middle class itself. It would have led to weakness, where

unfolding of the utmost vigour was necessary. Only the rigour of

materialism could make the Party hard, such as was needed for a

revolution. The tendency of Machism, somehow parallel to revisionism in

Germany, was to break the radicalism of struggle and the solid unity of

the party, in theory and in practice. This was the danger that Lenin saw

quite clearly. “When I read it (Bogdanov’s book) I became exceedingly

provoked and enraged,” he wrote to Gorky, February 1908. Indeed, we

perceive this in the vehemence of his attack upon the adversary, in

every page of the work; it seems to have been written in a continuous

fury. It is not a fundamental discussion clearing the ideas, as was, for

example Engels’s book against Dühring; it is the war-pamphlet of a party

leader who has to ward off by any means the danger to his party. So it

could not be expected that he should try really to understand the

hostile doctrines; in consequence of his own unmarxian thinking he could

only misinterpret and misrepresent them. The only thing needed was to

knock them down, to destroy their scientific credit, and thus to expose

the Russian Machists as ignorant parrots of reactionary blockheads.

And he succeeded. His fundamental views were the views of the bolshevist

party at large, as determined by is historical task. As so often, Lenin

had felt exactly the practical exigencies. Machism was condemned and

expelled from the party. As a united body the party could take its

course again, in the van of the working class, towards the revolution.

The words of Deborin quoted in the beginning thus are only partially

true. We cannot speak of a victory of Marxism, when there is only

question of a so-called refutation of middle-class idealism through the

ideas of middle-class materialism. But doubtless Lenin’s book was an

important feature in the history of the Party, determining in a high

degree the further development of philosophic opinions in Russia.

Hereafter the revolution, under the new system of state capitalism – a

combination of middle class materialism and the marxian doctrine of

social development, adorned with some dialectic terminology – was, under

the name “Leninism,” proclaimed the official State-philosophy. It was

the right doctrine for the Russian intellectuals who, now that natural

science and technics formed the basis of a rapidly developing production

system under their direction, saw the future open up before them as the

ruling class of an immense empire.

Chapter 8. The Proletarian Revolution

The publication first of a German, then of an English translation of

Lenin’s work shows that it was meant to play a wider role than its

function in the old Russian party conflict. It is presented now to the

younger generation of socialists and communists in order to influence

the international workers’ movement. So we ask what can the workers in

capitalist countries learn from it? Of the refuted philosophical ideas

it gives a distorted view; and under the name of Marxism another theory,

middle class materialism is expounded. It does not aim at bringing the

reader to a clear independent judgement in philosophical questions; it

intends to instruct him that the Party is right, and that he has to

trust and to follow the party leaders. What way is it that this party

leader shows to the international proletariat? Let us read Lenin’s view

of the world-contest of the classes in his final sentences: “... behind

the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism it is impossible

not to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in

the last analysis rejects the tendencies and ideology of the

antagonistic classes in modern society ... The contending parties are

essentially ... materialism and idealism. The latter is merely a subtle,

refined form of fideism, which stands fully armed, commands vast

organisations and steadily continues to exercise influence on the

masses, turning the slightest vacillation in philosophical thought to

its own advantage. The objective class role played by empirio-criticism

entirely consists in rendering faithful service to the fideists in their

struggle against materialism in general and Historical Materialism in

particular.” (371)

Nothing here of the immense power of the foe, the bourgeoisie, master of

all the riches of the world, against which the working class hardly can

make any progress. Nothing of its spiritual power over the minds of the

workers, still strongly dominated by middle-class culture and hardly

able to overcome it in a continuous struggle for knowledge. Nothing of

the new powerful ideologies of nationalism and imperialism threatening

to gain a hold over the workers too, and indeed, soon afterwards,

dragging them along into the world war. No, the Church, the organisation

of “fideism” in full armour, that is to Lenin the most dangerous hostile

power. The fight of materialism against religious belief is to him the

theoretical fight accompanying the class struggle. The limited

theoretical opposition between the former and the later ruling class

appears to him the great world fight of ideas which he connects with the

proletarian class fight, the essence and ideas of which lie far outside

his view. Thus in Lenin’s philosophy the Russian scheme is transferred

upon Western Europe and America, the anti-religious tendency of a rising

bourgeoisie is transferred to the rise of the proletariat. Just as among

German reformists at that time the division was made between “reaction”

and “progress” and not according to class but according to political

ideology – thus confusing the workers – so here it is made according to

religious ideology, between reactionaries and free-thinkers, instead of

establishing its class-unity against bourgeoisie and State, to get

mastery over production, the Western proletarian class is invited to

take up the fight against religion. If this book and these ideas of

Lenin had been known in 1918 among Western Marxists, surely there would

have been a more critical attitude against his tactics for world

revolution.

The Third International aims at a world revolution after the model of

the Russian revolution and with the same goal. The Russian economic

system is state capitalism, there called state-socialism or even

communism, with production directed by a state bureaucracy under the

leadership of the Communist Party. The state officials, forming the new

ruling class, have the disposal over the product, hence over the

surplus-value, whereas the workers receive wages only, thus forming an

exploited class. In this way it has been possible in the short time of

some dozens of years to transform Russia from a primitive barbarous

country into a modern state of rapidly increasing industry on the basis

of advanced science and technics. According to Communist Party ideas, a

similar revolution is needed in the capitalist countries, with the

working class again as the active power, leading to the overthrow of the

bourgeoisie and the organisation of production by a state bureaucracy.

The Russian revolution could be victorious only because a

well-disciplined united bolshevist party led the masses, and because in

the party the clear insight and the unyielding assurance of Lenin and

his friends showed the right way. Thus, in the same way, in world

revolution the workers have to follow the Communist Party, leave to it

the lead and afterwards the government; and the party members have to

obey their leaders in rigid discipline. Essential are the qualified

capable party leaders, the proficient, experienced revolutionaries; what

is necessary for the masses is the belief that the party and its leaders

are right.

In reality, for the working class in the countries of developed

capitalism, in Western Europe and America, matters are entirely

different. Its task is not the overthrow of a backward absolutist

monarchy. Its task is to vanquish a ruling class commanding the

mightiest material and spiritual forces the world ever knew. Its object

cannot be to replace the domination of stockjobbers and monopolists over

a disorderly production by the domination of state officials over a

production regulated from above. Its object is to be itself master of

production and itself to regulate labour, the basis of life. Only then

is capitalism really destroyed. Such an aim cannot be attained by an

ignorant mass, confident followers of a party presenting itself as an

expert leadership. It can be attained only if the workers themselves,

the entire class, understand the conditions, ways and means of their

fight; when every man knows from his own judgement, what to do. They

must, every man of them, act themselves, decide themselves, hence think

out and know for themselves. Only in this way will a real class

organisation be built up from below, having the form of something like

workers’ councils. It is of no avail that they have been convinced that

their leaders know what is afoot and have gained the point in

theoretical discussion – an easy thing when each is acquainted with the

writings of his own party only. Out of the contest of arguments they

have to form a clear opinion themselves. There is no truth lying ready

at hand that has only to be imbibed; in every new case truth must be

contrived by exertion of one’s own brain.

This does not mean, of course, that every worker should judge on

scientific arguments in fields, that can be mastered only by

professional study. It means, first, that all workers should give

attention not only to their direct working and living conditions but

also to the great social issues connected with their class struggle and

the organisation of labour; and should know how to take decisions here.

But it implies, secondly, a certain standard of argument in propaganda

and political strife. When the views of the opponent are rendered in a

distorted way because the willingness or the capacity to understand them

is lacking, then in the eyes of the believing adherents you may score a

success; but the only result – intended indeed in party strife – is to

bind them with stronger fanaticism to the party. For the workers

however, what is of importance is not the increase of power of a party

but the increase of their own capacity to seize power and to establish

their mastery over society. Only when, in arguing and discussing, the

opponent is given his full pound, when in weighing arguments against one

another each solid opinion is understood out of social class relations,

will the participant hearers gain such well-founded insight as is

necessary for a working class to assure its freedom.

The working class needs Marxism for its liberation. Just as the results

of natural science are necessary for the technical construction of

capitalism, so the results of social science are necessary for the

organisational construction of communism. What was needed first was

political economy, that part of Marxism that expounds the structure of

capitalism, the nature of exploitation, the class-antagonism, the

tendencies of economic development. It gave, directly, a solid basis to

the spontaneously arising fight of the workers against the capitalist

masters. Then, in the further struggle, by its theory of the development

of society from primitive economy through capitalism to communism, it

gave confidence and enthusiasm through the prospect of victory and

freedom. When the not yet numerous workers took up their most difficult

fight, and the hopeless indifferent masses had to be roused, this

insight was the first thing needed.

When the working class has grown more numerous, more powerful, and

society is full of the proletarian class struggle, another part of

Marxism has to come to the forefront. That they should know that they

are exploited and have to fight, is not the main point any more; they

must know how to fight, how to overcome their weakness, how to build up

their unity and strength. Their economic position is so easy to

understand, their exploitation so manifest that their unity in struggle,

their common will to seize power over production should presumably

result at once. What hampers them is chiefly the power of the inherited

and confused ideas, the formidable spiritual power of the middle-class

world, enveloping their minds into a thick cloud of beliefs and

ideologies, dividing them, and making them uncertain and confused. The

process of enlightenment, of clearing up and vanquishing this world of

old ideas and ideologies is the essential process of building the

working-class power, is the progress of revolution. Here that part of

Marxism is needed that we call its philosophy, the relation of ideas to

reality.

Among these ideologies the least significant is religion. As the

withered husk of a system of ideas reflecting conditions of a far past,

it has only an imaginary power as a refuge for all, who are frightened

by capitalist development. Its basis has been continually undermined by

capitalism itself. Middle-class philosophy then put up in its place the

belief in all those lesser idols, deified abstractions, such as matter,

force causality in nature, liberty and progress in society. In modern

times these now forsaken idols have been replaced by new, more powerful

objects of veneration: state and nation. In the struggle of the old and

the new bourgeoisies for world power, nationalism, now the most needed

ideology, rose to such power as to carry with it even broad masses of

the workers. Most important are, besides such spiritual powers as

democracy, organisation, union, party, because they have their roots in

the working class itself as results of their life practice, their own

struggle. Just because there is connected with them the remembrance of

passionate exertion, of devoted sacrifices, of feverish concern with

victory or defeat, their merit – which is bound as a class tool to those

particular past times and conditions – is exalted to the belief in their

absolute excellence. That makes the transition to new necessities under

new conditions difficult. The conditions of life frequently compel the

workers to take up new forms of fight; but the old traditions can hamper

and retard it in a serious way. In the continuous contest between

inherited ideology and practical needs, it is essential for the workers

to understand that their ideas are not independently existing truths but

generalisations of former experiences and necessities; that human mind

always has the tendency to assign to such ideas an unlimited validity,

as absolutely good or bad, venerated or hated, and thus makes the people

slaves to superstition; but that by understanding limits and conditions,

superstition is vanquished and thought is made free. And, conversely,

what is recognised as the lasting interest, as the essential basis of

the fight for his class, must be unerringly kept in mind – though

without being deified – as the brilliant guiding star in all action.

This – besides its use as explanation of daily experience and class

struggle – is the significance of Marxian philosophy, the doctrine of

the connection of world and mind, as conceived by Marx, Engels, and

Dietzgen; this gives strength to the working class to accomplish its

great task of self-liberation.

Lenin’s book, on the other hand, tries to impose upon the readers, the

author’s belief in the reality of abstractions. So it cannot be helpful

in any way for the workers’ task. And as a matter of fact its

publication in Western languages was not meant to be that. Workers

aiming at the self-liberation of their class stand beyond the horizon of

the Communist Party. What the Communist Party can see is the competitor,

the rival party, the Second International trying to keep the leadership

over the working class. As Deborin was quoted in the Preface, the aim of

the publication was to win social-democracy, corrupted by middle class

idealistic philosophy, back to materialism – or else to browbeat it by

the more captivating radical terms of materialism – as a theoretical

contribution to the Red Front. For the rising class-movement of the

workers it matters little which of these unmarxian party-lines of

thought should get the upper hand.

But in another way Lenin’s philosophy may be of importance for their

struggle. The aim of the Communist Party – which is called

world-revolution – is to bring to power, by means of the fighting force

of the workers, a layer of leaders who then establish planned production

by means of State-Power; in its essence it coincides with the aims of

social democracy. The social ideals growing up in the minds of the

intellectual class now that it feels its increasing importance in the

process of production: a well-ordered organisation of production for use

under the direction of technical and scientific experts – are hardly

different. So the Communist Party considers this class its natural

allies which it has to draw into its circle. By an able theoretical

propaganda it tries to detach the intelligentsia from the spiritual

influences of the declining bourgeoisie and of private capitalism, and

to win them for the revolution that will put them into their proper

place as a new leading and ruling class. Or, in philosophical terms, to

win them for materialism. A revolution cannot be made with the meek,

softening ideology of a system of idealism, but only under the inspiring

daring radicalism of materialist thought. For this the foundation is

afforded by Lenin’s book. On this basis an extensive literature of

articles, reviews, and books has already been published, first in German

and then in still greater numbers in English, in Europe and in America,

with the collaboration of well-known Russian scholars and Western

scientists sympathising with the Communist Party. The contents of these

writings make clear at first sight that they are not destined for the

working class but for the intellectuals of these countries. Leninism is

here expounded before them – under the name of Marxism, or “dialectics”

– and they are told that it is the fundamental all-embracing

world-doctrine, in which the special sciences must be seen as

subordinate parts. It is clear that with real Marxism, as the theory of

the real proletarian revolution, such a propaganda would have no chance;

but with Leninism, as a theory of middle-class revolution installing a

new ruling class, it might be successful.

There is of course this difficulty, that the intellectual class is too

limited in number, too heterogeneous in social position, hence too

feeble to be able single-handed to seriously threaten capitalist

domination. Neither are the leaders of the Second and the Third

International a match for the power of the bourgeoisie, even if they

could impose themselves by strong and dear politics instead of being

rotten through opportunism, When, however, capitalism is tumbling into a

heavy economic or political crisis which rouses the masses, when the

working class has taken up the fight and succeeds in shattering

capitalism in a first victory – then their time will come. Then they

will intervene and slide themselves in as leaders of the revolution,

nominally to give their aid by taking part in the fight, in reality to

deflect the action in the direction of their party aims. Whether or not

the beaten bourgeoisie will then rally with them to save of capitalism

what can be saved, in any case their intervention comes down to cheating

the workers, leading them off from the road to freedom.

Here we see the possible significance of Lenin’s book for the future

working-class movement. The Communist Party, though it may lose ground

among the workers, tries to form with the socialists and the

intellectual class a united front, ready at the first major crisis of

capitalism to take in its hands the power over and against the workers.

Leninism and its philosophical textbook then will serve, under the name

of Marxism, to overawe the workers and to impose upon the intellectuals,

as the leading system of thought by which the reactionary spiritual

powers are beaten, Thus the fighting working class, basing itself upon

Marxism, will find Lenin’s philosophical work a stumbling-block in its

way, as the theory of a class that tries to perpetuate its serfdom.