Now a couple of points on Lenin.
In the current La Pensee, Geroges Cogniot has a long article on the 40th Anniversary of Materialism and Imp-Crit.14 Last Month they printed an article on it by SI Vavilov, Pres. of the Acad'y of Sciences of the USSR,15 the general point of which was that Lenin maintained in 1908 the necessary materiality of atoms, electrons etc., which is the basis of modern science and of dialectical materialism. This month they emphasize Lenin's insistence in 1908 on the reign of natural law, "the materiality of the world, as form of existence of matter, reality of laws of movement, the character primordial of matter and the secondary character of consciousness, the role of matter as source of sensations and representations, essence of human thought as product of matter at its highest organization and as product of social history".16 All this pre-Kantian materialism was in Lenin of 1908 at a time when world philosophic thinking had moved to Kant17 and beyond, and to the pragmatism18 of monopoly capitalism.
In March 1914, Lenin wrote a 3 page article on "The Taylor-System, the Enslaving of Men by the Machine".19 The point of the article is very simple: "all those powerful achievements are directed against the worker, because they lead to his ever greater oppression and subjugation and thereby are limited to the rational reasonable division of labor within the factory... What a mass of labor is wasted today due to the disorder the chaotic character of the whole of capitalist production... The Taylor System prepares - unconsciously and against the will of its inventor - that time when the proletariat will take the whole social production in his hands and institute his own commissions consisting of workers in order correctly to divide and regulate the whole social labor.
Large-scale production, machines, railways, the telephone - all this gives thousands of possibilities, to decrease the working time of the organized workers by a fourth and give them thereby a fourth higher well-being than today. The workers commissions will be able with the help of the trade unions to apply these principles of a reasonable division of social labor as soon as the latter is liberated from its enslavement by capital".20
They all thought this way before 1914.
There was developing efficiency's rationalization, socialization of labor in the objective world - which they empirically21 contemplated, understood, explained, just as Kant did. Like Kant, they were inconsistent empiricists because they also had a concept of freedom, an abstract concept but one which went beyond the old Theodicy. They abstractly envisaged a universal which was a concrete unity - i.e. socialism (as Kant did in his Critique of Judgement22). To describe in some way this abstractly envisaged concrete unity they abstracted for their subjective needs the character of organization, plan. And this which the bourgeoisie could only achieve incompletely, they leading the proletariat were to achieve completely. (See Lenin Notes, p. 44).23
In the final section on Essence (Causality) and the beginning of the section on Notion, Lenin breaks with this kind of inconsistent empiricism. He sees the limitations of the scientific method, [?]24 the category of causality to explain the relation between mind and matter. Freedom, subjectivity, notion - those are the categories by which we will gain knowledge of the objectively real. These constitute the eve of the transformation of objective idealism into materialism. What has to be overcome is not the personality, not the transcendental unity of apperception, but the empiricism of taking the given concrete to be the real. The latter leads to psychological idealism. Objective idealism, on the other hand, the notion, free creative power, the personality, the apparently abstract - all these lead to materialism. What Marx said of Feuerbach,25 as Hegel had previously said of Kant, Lenin is now applying to his own past. If at the period of revolution, there is in your mind any residue of an independent actuality confronting the subject, and independent substance with its own inner actuality, if you do not think "independent actuality as having all its substantiality in the passage" (Smaller Logic, Sec 15926, then in thought you will do what Kant did, "affirm as true what was pronounced to be figments of thought and declare to be superfluous... that which is recognised as truth" (LL, p. 226)27; and in practice you will restrain the proletariat from smashing up the state machine and instead simply to appropriate it, expropriating the expropriators.28
Note that in the first few pages of the notes on the Notion, Lenin keeps reminding himself that Notion came out of Essence which came out of Being. It is a higher stage. He emphasizes (p. 49) that when you have reached the stage of the Notion, you don't have to worry about the objectivity of the notion, of the universal. It is impossible that these are not objective. Not the connection but the transition (p. 48). I think that the German word for connection is Zusammenhang and the German word for transition is Ubergeben. I haven't checked. But it is as if he were saying: Don't stay in the realm of Essence, inner necessity, connections. Get into the realm of Notion, freedom, revolution. All the connections are in the subject at this stage, all the socialization is in the proletariat. Then "as the simple value form, the individual act of exchange of a given commodity with another already includes in undeveloped form all the major contradictions of capitalism - so the simplest generalization, the first and simplest forming of notions (judgements, syllogisms, etc.) signifies the ever deeper knowledge of the objective world connections. Here it is necessary to seek the real sense, significances and role of Hegelian Logic. This NB". I may be wrong but I have the feeling that he is sensing here on the one hand a certain plunge into freedom that a generalization gives you, the objectivity which is inherent in it - and on the other hand, the first act of revolution.
I am writing these notes with the Logic and with Lenin's notes on the Notion before me. In both you sense this plunge into Freedom. You have to sense it and to feel that every great step forward in philosophic cognition was made only when a new category, a new way of making the plunge into freedom became possible. It is at this point when the subject is creating freely a new category of opposites (the opposites of thought and being) that the counter-revolution imposes again a duality upon it, reducing it to indifferent particulars, or modes of the Absolute, or Monads, to be ordered or organized. Not that there is anything accidental about this counter-revolution. It is inevitable so long as the subject is not the concrete universal, containing within itself the totality.
To get to the stage of freedom, the subject has already had to go through:
Being-for-self which has organized as many onesEssence which was organized as oppositionGround which became essence and appearanceActuality which became necessitySubstance which became causality
All these stages of the self - unable to be concretely universal, and hence contemplated as immediate being, and then mediated, reflected, as essence - these which were preparation for the self - are now behind. All that objectivity is now in the self, and we come to its free creative power.
What I am trying to say here is not at all precise, but I feel quite sure that it is on the right road. The Logic moves this way: E.G.
[Text from diagram:From Quality - Determinate Being ? Being-for-Self (An Absolute for this stage)? Quantity (A Particular, indifferent particular for this stage)? Measure (Mediation in the realm of Being or Essence)
---------------------------------------
Or e.g.From Necessity ? Substance (An Absolute for this Stage)? Causality (A particular for this stage)? Reciprocity (on the threshold of the Notion as Measure was on the threshold of Essence)]
Kant is the more or less indifferent co-existence of the absolute and the particulars, of reason and understanding. That is why he can state his antinomies and paralogisms first from one side and then from the other, seeing nonetheless a dialectical relations between them instead of, like Leibniz, a pre-established harmony. That is easy because Kant, so to speak, comes before the revolution, and is therefore able to believe in infinite gradual progress, wherein they will be reconciled. Schelling29 moves to their unity abstractly, refuses to see any mediation, "and thus sinks into the condition of using extrinsic grounds of mediation, the strength of which consists in clinging to those narrow and one-sided categories of the finite, which it falsely imagined itself to have left for ever behind" (SL, 65).30
That is still in the Smaller Logic. What I want to do is try to see it in the relation of universal, particular and individual, as the dialectic of the Notion.
As ever,
G-
Editor's footnotes
1 The italicised text, in a different font colour, was a handwritten note, added by Grace Lee on the copy of the letter that she sent to Raya Dunayevskaya. The italicised text is the author's best guess at the contents of this note.
2 The previous letter in this correspondence. Dated 6th of July 1949.
3 The editor has not been able to identify the text being referred to here by Grace Lee.
4 The handwriting is not easy to decipher. This could be 'I', but looks more like 'D'. The editor has not been able to identify any JFT member who is referred to by the initial 'D'. It may have been Morris Goelman. Grace Lee, writing under the pseudonym of 'Ria Stone' co-authored, with Goelman writing under the pseudonym 'Willie Gorman', a discussion article on Germany for the Workers' Party 1946 Convention.
5 Benidicto Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch materialist philosopher. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German polymath and a contemporary critic of Spinoza.
6 The editor has been unable to identify the text that Grace Lee is referring to here. The Fifth Congress of the Third International (Comintern) was held in 1924. Bukharin gave a verbal Report on the Programme Question at the Congress. This Report does not fit the description given by Lee. The Draft Program written by Bukharin for the Fourth Congress of the Third International in 1922, however, is in a format like Lee mentions. The format and content of the 1922 Draft Program suggest that it might be this text, or a later variation on it, that Grace Lee is referring to.
7 In 1875, at a Congress in the town of Gotha, the Germany Social-Democratic Labour Party (the 'Eisenachers', with whom Marx and Engels were aligned) and the General German Workers' Union (the 'Lassalleans') agreed to unite to form the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. The Gotha Program was a text agreed as a common programme of the new Party. Marx wrote some critical notes on the Program, which were circulated to Wilhelm Bracke (1842-80), August Bebel (1840-1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900). These notes were published by Engels in 1891, in the context of the publication of the Erfurt Program, as Critique of the Gotha Program.
8 Lenin State and Revolution, (1917).
9 'RR' is 'the Russian Revolution'. 'Paris Com.' is 'the Paris Commune'.
10 Marx Critique of the Gotha Program. Engels A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891.
11 This part of the text is obscured.
12 Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 - 1864) was a leading figure in the German socialist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1862 he developed a theory (Lassallianism), in explicit opposition to Marx, in which the state was to act as an organ of justice to achieve emancipation for workers. In 1875 the Lassallian Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein (General German Workers' Association) and the Eisenacher Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (German Social-Democratic Labour Party) came together to form the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Socialist Worker's Party of Germany). The unity program of the new party, the Gotha Program, was named after the town (Gotha) where the Unity Congress was held. Marx wrote his Critique of the Gotha Program as criticism of Lassallian tendencies in both the Eisenacher and Lassallian wings of the German workers movement. For more on the Critique, Marx and Lassalle see Karl Korsch's Introduction to the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
13 'SR', in this context, is probably shorthand for 'Soviet Russia'.
14 Georges Cogniot (1901-1978) was a long-standing member of the French Communist Party (he joined in 1922). He was a leading intellectual in the Party. In 1939 he co-created, along with Paul Langevin, the Marxist journal La Pensee. He was the editor of the journal from 1944 until 1976. The editor has not be able to locate a digital copy of the article on Lenin's Empirio-Criticism that Grace Lee is referring to.
15 Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov (1891-1951) was a leading Soviet physicist and President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union from 1945 until his death.
16 This appears to be a quote from the Cogniot article.
17 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher and scientist. He was the pre-eminent German philosopher of his day, and is still more influential in mainstream philosophy and social science than Hegel. Kant tackled the key philosophical problems posed by the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. He developed a philosophy riddled with contradictions. Hegel built on Kant's work and argued that contradictions were not simply features of some philosophical dilemmas, but were a feature of all thought, and that thought developed through contradiction.
18 Pragmatism is a current of philosophy that emerged in the USA in the 1870s. It is associated with the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910) John Dewey (1859-1952), George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and Percy Bridgman (1882 - 1961). The central tenet of Pragmatism is that the meaning of a concept is given by its practical utility and nothing else.
19 Lenin, 'The Taylor System: Man's Enslavement by the Machine' (1914).
20 The quote is from Lenin's article on the Taylor system.
21 'empirically' is the editor's best guess at the word, which was typed as an amendment, in between the lines of type.
22 Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment (1790).
23 Page reference is to Dunayevskaya's translation of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel.
24 This word has been typed in after the original. It is indecipherable to the editor.
25 Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) was a German philosopher who developed a Materialist critique of Hegel. Feuerbach's critique influenced Marx in taking a critical stance on Hegel. In his Theses on Feuerbach and his essay on Hegel in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx praises Feuerbach, but also points to his limitations and to Hegel's more profound philosophical insights.
26 Hegel, Book One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830).
27 Hegel, Science of Logic, (1812-16).
28 Parts of the text are difficult to discern. The text here is the editor's best guess at the contents.
29 Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) was a German idealist philosopher and poet. Hegel and Schelling were close friends.
30 SL is an abbreviation of Shorter Logic, which is a reference to Book One of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830).