On Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (2018)

From Historical Materialism 1/2018 (vol. IV). Reproduced according to original document’s Creative Commons license. The translation to English contains small changes made to footnote style, footnote content (English-language sources), and minor changes in phrasing. ^[1]

Contents

• Introduction
• Leaps and Breaks in Continuity
• Proportionality of Cause and Effect
• Dialectical Logic and Abstract Intellectualism
• Conclusion

Introduction

In Italy, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, situating himself within the tradition started by Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti developed an indictment against Hegel, and specifically against those elements of Hegelian philosophy that were, deliberately or not, embedded within Marxism, invalidating, in his opinion, its scientific consistency. Three speculative vices were rooted, according to the Italian scholar, in the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit:

1. The absorption of the historical framework into the ontological framework, i.e., the overall disregard for the “multiplicity of the real,” brought to nullify itself within “a generality or idea that neither refers nor relates to this or that aspect of the real, but on the contrary presents itself as the one and entire reality.” ^[2]
2. The “swap” of “genus” and “species,” to use Aristotelian terminology. ^[3]
3. The tendency to succumb repeatedly to the enticements of “hypostases” — categories incapable “of serving as hypotheses and criteria for experience” because they are not derived from scrupulous observations of the Object, but appeared as “a surreptitious introduction of immediate, unchecked content.” ^[4]

It would be quite easy to reply to Colletti that these forms of dogmatism, which include ideology as conceptualized by Marx, ^[5] [6] are already criticized as abstract intellectualism by Hegel — subdivided into the categories of “abstractness of the particular” and “abstractness of the universal.” However, we would like to focus on a different aspect of his polemic: parting from the aforementioned convictions, Colletti reproaches Lenin for his tendency to align himself “in substance” more and more “with Hegelian logic.” ^[7] In his view, this entails an alignment with the theological, conscientialist, and mystical tendencies in classical German philosophy, contaminating the Russian leader’s perspective with pernicious speculation. It is a point that he firmly insists upon: the “logic” and “Hegelian dialectic” had placed between Lenin’s eyes and the world an insidious “deforming lens.” ^[8]

How valid are these charges? Does the study of Hegel’s philosophy really vitiate the later Lenin’s understanding of the world? To answer these questions it is necessary to go back as far as 1914, to the outbreak of World War I. An incredibly large number of people died in this war, most of them poor. Meanwhile, socialist deputies in English, French, Austrian, and German parliaments, despite presenting themselves as spokesmen for the popular masses, voted in favor of war bonds. This affair aroused the indignation of Rosa Luxemburg: “The global historical appeal of the Communist Manifesto undergoes a fundamental revision and, as amended by Kautsky, now reads: proletarians of all countries, unite in peacetime and cut each other’s throats in war!” ^[9]

In this context, as workers and peasants continued to lose their lives on the battlefields, and the most distinguished representatives of the Second International defended, politically and theoretically, their decision to legitimize the bloodbath, Lenin, then in exile, took refuge in a Swiss library in order to study Hegel’s Science of Logic. This act should not be construed as a form of indifference on the part of the future Bolshevik leader to the fate of the world and the fate of his own country, nor was it a frivolous attempt to satisfy an interest in mere erudition. On closer inspection, he had his reasons: Lenin did not merely wish to condemn the war, he intended to understand its essence — and with it the core of the theoretical errors committed by the Social Democrats.

Insofar as the Marxism of the Second International was, on the philosophical plane, cobbled together from elements of vulgar materialism, evolutionism, positivism, and neo-Kantianism, Lenin could find in Hegel’s work the best weapons to combat the growth of these tendencies. In the Stuttgart philosopher’s pages, Lenin hoped to find the fundamental principles of an authentic Marxism to be set against the empiricist and positivist Marxism of the Second International; in criticism of Kant’s Phenomenology, richer and more valuable arguments than those previously found in Diderot to combat the ideas of Mach and the empirio-criticists.

In the Philosophical Notebooks we find the following passage from the Logic quoted (and elaborated upon):

“Thought appears here as a purely subjective and formal activity. Objectivity, in contrast to thought, appears as something stable and existing in itself. However, this dualism is not real. It’s foolish to conceptualize subjectivity and objectivity so simply, without inquiring into their origin […].” In reality, subjectivity is only a stage of development of Being and Essence. This subjectivity “through the dialectic breaks through this barrier” and “attains objectivity by means of the syllogism.” ^[10]

Right below this passage Lenin adds an annotation: “Very profound and clever! The laws of logic are the reflections of the objective in the subjective consciousness of man.” ^[11]

As we’re seeing, contrary to Colletti’s claims, reading the Logic turned out to be an inexhaustible source of theoretical insights for the Russian leader.

Leaps and Breaks in Continuity

In past studies we have had the opportunity to evaluate the importance that the concept of unity of opposites has for Lenin. ^[12] This is the philosophical counterpart of political arguments of a more contingent character laid down in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) and in The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments (1921). However, the main category that will draw the attention of the future statesman will be that of the leap or qualitative break. ^[13] This is a concept that has been shown to harken back to the temporal rift that originated with the outbreak of the French Revolution, already present in the Preface to 1807’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

“But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth — a qualitative leap, and now the child is born — so the spirit cultivates itself, and matures slowly and quietly into its new shape […]. This gradual crumbling, that did not hitherto alter the physiognomy of the whole, is interrupted by a sunrise which, as if by lightning, all of a sudden reveals the contours of the new world.” ^[14]

While the category of qualitative leap plays an important role in Hegel, it is anything but central in the narratives weaved by representatives of the Second International to illustrate their own theories of transformation.

Polemicizing against Rosa Luxemburg, for example, Karl Kautsky insisted particularly that, in order to give birth to a new historical order, it was necessary not to annihilate but to slowly wear out the existing system. ^[15] Thus, in The Preconditions of Socialism (1899), Bernstein will present the transition phase from the old to the new social system as a long process that was to unfold gradually and mainly through the historical intermediation of liberal democracy. The work in question then violently rails against what he calls “the pitfalls of the Hegelian dialectical method,” guilty in his eyes of leading Marx to the theories of “class struggle” and “revolution.” ^[16]

In order to clear away the ideological fog that such beliefs had helped spread, Lenin repeatedly availed himself of the category of qualitative leap. It enabled him to reformulate a philosophy of history within which revolutionary ruptures could claim their own legitimate ontological status. Indeed, the Logic teaches him that “gradualness explains nothing without leaps.” ^[17] However, this aforementioned leap, identified as causal of the historical ruptures observed, is not understood by the Russian leader as extemporaneous and incidental, but rather as the outcome of a dialectical process that is entirely subsumed within the category of necessity. The Logic had, moreover, deepened his understanding of the relationship between freedom and necessity [Freiheit und Notwendikeit]: “Necessity does not become Freedom because it vanishes, but only because its identity (as yet an inner identity) is manifested.” ^[18] That is to say, freedom does not begin at the point where the chain of necessity breaks, but at the point where it becomes noticed, when it sees itself, when it transitions — Hegel would say — from the condition of An sich [in itself] to that of Für sich [for itself]. This is, on closer inspection, a perspective inherited by Marx as well: in his view, in fact, the authentic revolutionary subject is not embodied in the working class as such, but in that section of the working class which has acquired class consciousness, which has thus demonstrated the ability to make the transition from An sich sein to Für sich sein. This aspect of the dimension of consciousness will also be greatly emphasized by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. Significant in this regard are some of his remarks about the ultimate factors that triggered the French Revolution:

“Mathiez, in his review of the history of the French Revolution, opposing the popular traditional history, which ‘found’ a priori a crisis coinciding with the great breach in the social equilibrium, asserts that around 1789 the economic situation was, on the contrary, good in the short run, and that therefore one cannot say that the catastrophe of the absolute State was due to a crisis of impoverishment. […] In any case, the breach in the equilibrium of forces did not come about through the immediate mechanical cause of the impoverishment of the social group which had an interest in breaking the equilibrium and in fact did break it; it came about within the framework of conflicts above the immediate economic world, connected with the ‘prestige’ of classes (future economic interests), with an exasperation of the feeling of independence, autonomy and power.” ^[19]

The above observations should make clear why for Lenin the concept of the leap or break in continuity constituted an important theoretical acquisition that, while breaking with the reformist evolutionism cherished by the theorists of the Second International, also kept at bay those forms of voluntarism and subjectivism that ultimately constituted the speculative core of the anarchist tradition.

Proportionality of Cause and Effect

In the Philosophical Notebooks Lenin quotes a passage from an inner section of The Doctrine of Essence (The Determinate Relation of Causality) in which Hegel provides a theoretical elucidation of the relationship between cause and effect:

“[I]nsofar as the relation of cause and effect is admitted […] effect cannot be greater than cause […]. Consequently, these arabesques of history, where a huge shape is depicted as growing from a slender stalk, are a sprightly but most superficial treatment.” ^[20]

The German philosopher’s reflections here explicitly reference historical events, and Lenin summarizes the passage almost verbatim: “Hegel says that it is customary in history to quote anecdotes as the minor ‘causes’ of major events — in fact they are only incidents, only äußere Erregung [external stresses].” ^[21]

According to his disciple and biographer Rosenkranz, Hegel “approached Thucydides with passion” ^[22] and translated “a considerable portion of his work.” ^[23] It’s also evident from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History that he read Polybius extensively. Hegel was thus well aware of the distinction they both drew between the proximate cause and the underlying cause of war. This distinction finds its own semantic correspondence, and even a certain linguistic affinity, in that drawn in the Logic between incidents and great causes. ^[24] This is a lesson from which Lenin will benefit enormously when he finds himself questioning the underlying factors behind World War I.

As the conflict broke out, narratives endorsing participation multiplied. In Italy, Cesare Battisti, a socialist deputy, presented the clash as a “fourth war of independence,” arguing that “the strength of the national-popular sentiment should be harnessed by the Left.” ^[25] In parallel, the Entente powers, with the exception of Russia, increasingly portrayed the conflict as a clash for the sake of the salvation of “democratic-liberal values” targeted by the despotism of the Central Empires. ^[26] These, for their part, blamed their enemies for promoting governmental instability and “decadence in sexual mores.” ^[27] The corruption of ethos and pathos was a theme that stirred Italian fascist theoretician and politician Giovanni Gentile, for whom war constituted “the solution to a profound spiritual crisis” as well as a great opportunity to “cement once and for all in blood the Nation,” through “one thought, one feeling.” ^[28] Along every front the battle was reconceptualized as a clash between moral and immoral forces. Not too different was the position of the Futurists, for whom war — “the world’s only hygiene” — was called upon to rejuvenate stale cultures and societies. Narratives that presented the war as a conflict between races also abounded. And there was no shortage of efforts to place the responsibility for the planetary clash on Austrian voracity or Serbian nationalism, or on the shoulders of some small group of national leaders. ^[29]

Overall, for much of the European intelligentsia, the public debate consisted of the discussion of a long series of fictions and proximate causes behind the alleged “blitzkrieg.” Though the duration of the conflict falsified commonplace predictions of a quick affair, it did not change the substance of these orientations.

More sensible was Lenin’s perspective. He understood early on that, given the scale that the conflict had assumed, its roots had to be far deeper and more remote than was suggested by the aforementioned widespread theories. The war was, on closer inspection, explainable only by “a composite picture of the world capitalist system in its international relationships at the beginning of the twentieth century.” The deep explanation offered by Imperialism, quite different to those presented by liberal narratives, shed new light on the conflict itself, which now presented in a completely different form: it was not, then, a clash between democracy and despotism, nor a struggle between tradition and subversion, nor a conflict between morality and immorality, but “imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.” ^[30]

The primary intent of the work in question was therefore to unmask the deep “contradictions” of imperialism, starting with the analysis of its “economic essence […] for unless this is studied, it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics.” ^[31] Since the approaches that dominated the public discourse were basically idealistic, Lenin’s work aimed not only to trace the big causes — the root causes behind the conflict — but also to unmask the set of fictitious causes and proximate causes — that is, the set of small causes whose propaganda hindered a correct estimation of events. In the Philosophical Notebooks Lenin transcribes yet another passage from Hegel’s Logic: “the simplicity of these determinations conceals the contradiction from imagination; but this contradiction immediately stands revealed in the determinations of relation.” On the margin he writes the following comment: “simplicity conceals.” ^[32] That “simplicity conceals” undoubtedly constitutes a recurring theme in the dynamic of historical processes, but with the outbreak of World War I the proliferation of simple causes and small causes brings this insight powerfully back to the forefront.

Dialectical Logic and Abstract Intellectualism

Elsewhere in the Notebooks Lenin transcribes a passage from the Logic in which Hegel illustrates what he considers the principle of reciprocity: “Reciprocity presents itself as a reciprocal causality of presupposed substances conditioning each other; each is, in relation to the other, at once active and passive substance.” ^[33] “Every concrete thing, every concrete something, stands in multifarious and often contradictory relations to everything else” — a “shrewd and correct” principle, in the Russian leader’s view. ^[34] In it he sees one of the aspects that distinguishes dialectical logic from intellectual logic: where the former thinks in terms of interwovenness, the latter does so in terms of eclecticism — that is, in terms of juxtaposition. ^[35]

Lenin’s 1920-1921 polemics against Trotsky and Bukharin on the question of trade unions seems to be rooted in this difference in perspective. These were the stakes: Trotsky, the commander of the Red Army, intended to intensify the militarization of labor by dissolving the trade unions into the State apparatus, viewing the latter as the real embodiment of workers’ interests. Lenin would respond by clarifying that the Russian State, at that given time, did not constitute a workers’ State at all, but rather a structure based on a delicate balance, bringing together the interests of workers and the interests of other social strata (primarily peasants and the petty bourgeoisie). This balance was especially delicate given that the Party was preparing for the end of war communism and the introduction of NEP. The supervisory task that the State apparatus was about to take on at that stage required it to delegate the pedagogical (and, on closer inspection, protective) functions to other organizations. Lenin considered trade unions suitable for this role, because they, “whichever way you look at them, are a school. They are a school of unity, solidarity, management, and administration, where you learn how to protect your interests.” ^[36]

According to Lenin, Trotsky’s main “theoretical mistakes” are twofold:

1) His “terrible confusion of ideas, a truly hopeless ‘ideological confusion’,” ^[37] is owed to the fact that “all his theses are based on ‘general principle’” and supported by “intellectualist talk or abstract reasoning, or by what may appear to be ‘theory’ but is in fact error and misapprehension of the peculiarities of transition.” ^[38] Trotsky is charged with “highbrow, abstract, ‘empty’ and theoretically incorrect general theses which ignore all that is most practical and businesslike.” ^[39] To ward off the vices of such an approach, Lenin asserts that, on the contrary, “a study must be made of practical experience” because “no theory is half so important as practice.” Abstractionism risks “acting in haste”; the impatient desire to surpass every limit produces “formulas which are theoretically false.” ^[40] In addition to the syllogism of action — a concept Lenin stumbles upon in the Science of Logic — he echoes here a principle learned from the Introduction to Lectures on the History of Philosophy: “If the truth is abstract it must be untrue. Healthy human reason goes out towards what is concrete […]. Philosophy is what is most antagonistic to abstraction, it leads back to the concrete […].” ^[41] This is the teaching that Lenin deploys against Trotsky and Bukharin: “dialectical logic,” he recalls in the course of the trade union controversy, “holds that ‘truth is always concrete, never abstract.’” ^[42]

2) In addition to failing to make dialectical logic his own insofar as the practical and concrete plane of analysis, Trotsky also fails to make use of it insofar as it concerns how to think about difference. His entire argument constitutes a “neglect of Marxism” by means of a “theoretically incorrect, eclectic definition of the relation between politics and economics.” ^[43] If already a “substitution of eclecticism for the dialectical interplay of politics and economics” is a characteristic feature of Bukharin’s thinking, so “the whole of Trotsky’s pamphlet, The Role and Tasks of the Trade Unions, December 25, reveals the same kind of mentality.” ^[44] It eclectically touches on a considerable number of issues, failing to capture a number of relationships. These include: a) the relationship “between politics and economics”; b) the “specific role” of trade unions as “‘school’ and apparatus”; ^[45] and c) the relationship between “production and consumption.” ^[46]

Lenin did not refrain from employing searing epithets against the Red Army commander, either: “The obliging Trotsky,” he wrote as early as 1914, “is more dangerous than an enemy! […] [I]t pays him to speculate on fomenting differences […]. Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism.” ^[47] And in the controversy over trade unions, after labeling Trotsky’s theses “politically harmful,” ^[48] he calls on the party to temper itself “against factionalism, a new malaise (new in the sense that after the October Revolution we had forgotten all about it).” ^[49]

The two criticisms noted above — the first of abstractionism or intellectualism, the second of mechanism or eclecticism — are the same criticisms that, in a different context, Antonio Gramsci will again address precisely to Trotsky. Writing in 1925, he recalls how “the long militancy among the Mensheviks [had] left deep traces in him” blurring his view of the complexity of the historical scenarios that had come to open up. Yes, Gramsci writes, “the old Menshevik ideology prevented Trotsky from applying” to the new political situation “the criteria of Leninism.” ^[50] And in the Prison Notebooks “Bronstein” [Trotsky] is first accused of being “the political theorist of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats” ^[51] and later of following a simple “Jacobin temperament” derived from “a literary and intellectualistic label” and not from “the new historical relations.” ^[52]

But alongside this charge of abstractionism and intellectualism, that of mechanism and eclecticism also comes up. Thus he wrote in his second letter to Togliatti in 1926:

“the Oppositions represent in Russia all the old prejudices of class corporatism and syndicalism that weigh on the traditions of the western proletariat and slow down their ideological and political development.” ^[53]

A few years later, in the Prison Notebooks, when the debate over “socialism in one country” and “socialism throughout the world” was raging, Gramsci accused Trotsky of failing to understand the national/international nexus. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was disparaged as “an anachronistic and anti-natural form of ‘Napoleonism’.” ^[54] The error comes from a mechanistic way of thinking, which Gramsci sees undergirding the framework of the Second International. Responding to Trotsky’s commentary against his fellow Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola, Gramsci writes: “It is amazing that Leo Bronstein [Trotsky] in his memoirs should speak of Labriola’s ‘dilettantism.’ This judgment is incomprehensible […] except as an unconscious reflection of the pseudoscientific pedantry of the German intellectual group that was so influential in Russia.” ^[55]

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why, in an article published in l’Unità on 27 July 1926, Gramsci calls on comrades not to waver in their support for the Soviet Union, urging “the entire International” to “rally solidly around the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR; to approve of its energy, rigor, and decisive spirit in relentlessly striking” at what he calls the “disruptive currents” (the Unified Opposition set up by Kamenev, Zinovev and Trotsky), which, by attacking “the unity of the party,” came to seriously jeopardize “not only the future of the Russian workers’ revolution, but also one of the most important conditions for the success of the proletarian revolution in other countries.” ^[56]

The battle waged by Gramsci and Lenin against Trotsky and Bukharin thus takes on the physiognomy of a struggle waged against abstract intellect (in its two variants: generality and eclecticism), and its harmful repercussions on the political level.

Conclusion

In summary, we can see how an in-depth reading of Hegel — an understanding of dialectical logic, the tendency to take into account the whole in its many aspects and concrete interrelations without falling prey to fundamentalist, one-sided and abstract ways of reasoning — combined with practical experience, enabled Lenin and Gramsci to develop a consciousness that was not only philosophically but also politically far superior to that of Trotsky and Bukharin. As for Lucio Colletti, it is not difficult to see in hindsight how the anti-Hegelian Marxism of his early years led him to political outcomes that were very distant indeed from the thought of the philosopher from Trier. ^[57]