Between Fantasy and Reality: Lenin as a Philosopher and a Social Scientist
[In the following essay, Feuer argues that Lenin's philosophical beliefs vacillated between sober materialism and Utopian fantasy.]
"'We ought to dream!' I wrote these words and got scared," Lenin said in his famous factional pamphlet What Is to Be Done? published in 1902. He dreamed of a centralized revolutionary organization in which "Social-Democratic Zheliabovs" would emerge; then he would dare say, a socialist Archimedes moving the social universe with an organizational lever: '"Give us an organization of revolutionists, and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!'" But inevitably, he wondered whether "a Marxist has any right at all to dream." Was his dream a fantasy like that which had moved Zheliabov to assassinate a czar? Was he enthralled by an illusion that a few bold revolutionists could open the way to a remaking of society and humanity? Was his choice of Zheliabov as a hero-model one which indicated Lenin's own fear that in his dream he was losing his hold on reality? He pondered what the connection between dream and reality should be, and this problem never left him all his life. He wrote that he would conceal himself "behind the back of Pisarev: 'There are differences and differences,' wrote Pisarev concerning the question of the difference between dreams and reality. 'My dream may run ahead of the natural progress of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction to which no natural progress of events will ever succeed. … Divergence between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, … and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well!'"
More than a decade later, living in exile in Switzerland, with the world at war, his own movement shattered, Lenin was moved to think again: had fantasy penetrated his Marxist science? He immersed himself in the study of Hegelian texts and classical philosophy, seeking an answer to his life-problem. Then he confided boldly to his notebook that all human thought partakes of fantasy:
The approach of the (human) mind to be a particular thing, the taking of a copy (equal a concept) of it is not a simple, immediate act, a dead mirroring, but one which is complex, split into two, zig-zag-like, which includes in it the possibility of the flight of fantasy from life; more than that: the possibility of the transformation (moreover, an unnoticeable transformation, of which man is unaware) of the abstract concept, idea, into a fantasy (in letzter Instanz equal God). For even the simplest generalisation, in the most elementary general idea ('table' in general) there is a certain bit of fantasy. (Vice versa: it would be stupid to deny the role of fantasy, even in the strictest science: cf. Pisarev on useful dreaming, as an impulse to work, and on empty day-dreaming).
This tension between fantasy and reality is probably the underlying theme of Lenin's work as a philosopher as well as his approach to social science. A man's philosophy and methodology are the outcome of his deepest strivings and anxieties. Lenin, as we shall see, in his lifetime alternated between two philosophies. At the outset, he endeavored to cling fast to reality; he was a simple materialist, ridiculing the dialectic of Hegel as virtual nonsense, and so hardheaded toward the sentimental "flabby" intellectuals that he reveled in the prospect of an authoritarian bureaucracy. When he brooded in solitary retreat during the First World War, however, he thrust reality away from him and allowed himself to yield to the solace of Utopian fantasy. Then he wrote that he was the only Marxist alive; he professed to find a master key to existence in the Hegelian triads; he saw the apocalyptic end of imperialism as a chapter in human history, and the virtual end of all bureaucracy within twenty-four hours after the triumph of the revolution. The materialist and social factualist became the metaphysician and Utopian. This oscillation between extremes remains embedded in Lenin's legacy to the intellectual life of the Soviet Union.
Lenin's first philosophical writing was part of his first book, published in 1894, entitled What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats. Like all his writing, it was polemical in character; Lenin was never impelled to study a subject for love of it; it was all part of a fight. In this case, Lenin was replying especially to the distinguished thinker of the elder generation, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, who had criticized the so-called dialectical method of Marx and Engels. What Lenin did was to reject dialectical materialism in favor of "scientific materialism." At the age of twenty-four, as a young revolutionary agitator, Lenin found the dialectic a lot of residual verbal nonsense. Anyone who reads the description of the dialectical method given by Marx in Capital, he wrote, "will see that the Hegelian triads are not even mentioned, and that it all amounts to regarding social evolution as the development of social-economic formations as a process of natural history." When Marx described what he meant by the dialectical method, asked Lenin, was there "even a single word, about triads, trichotomies, the unimpeachableness of the dialectical process, and suchlike nonsense … ?" In effect, says Lenin, Marx's use of the word "dialectic" had become vestigial. "No other role remains for the triads than as a lid and a skin ('I coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to Hegel,' Marx says in the Preface), in which only philistines could be interested." To coquette with phrases is scarcely the mark of a serious passion, even a philosophical one. Marx derived his prediction of the downfall of the capitalist order from a study of its facts and trends, not from triadic formulae, says Lenin, and what he coquettishly called the dialectical method was "nothing more nor less than the scientific method in sociology. …"
This then was Lenin at the outset of his career, a self-confident scientific materialist, a believer in a complete "determinism, which establishes the necessity of human acts and rejects the absurd fable about free will," ridiculing the "subjective method" in sociology, rejecting any notion that psychological variables, intellectual, sexual, have any independent causal efficacy in history. The ensuing years brought a bitter party factionalism; the choice of comrades for Lenin was translated into a rejection of comrades. Peter Struve, Julius Martov, George Plekhanov; towards all of them Lenin had a strong emotional attachment, so emotional that he would be embarrassed by his own feelings. And toward all of them he disciplined himself in accordance with his avowal of the primacy of politics for a rupture of relations, disciplining himself to transmute love into hatred. It was as if Lenin had a compulsive need to turn this weakness of his into a hatred, to harden himself. When he broke with the father of Russian Marxism, George Plekhanov, whom he revered, he wrote a document ["How the Spark was Nearly Extinguished"] which was poignant in the agony of its self-revelation:
We walked, bursting with indignation. … His (Plekhanov's) behavior was insulting to such a degree that one could not help suspecting him of harboring 'unclean' thoughts about ourselves. … He tramples us underfoot, etc. … My 'infatuation' with Plekhanov disappeared as if by magic, and I felt offended and embittered to the highest degree. Never, never in my life, have I regarded any other man with such sincere respect and veneration. I have never stood before any man with such 'humility' as I stood before him, and never before have I been so brutally 'spurned'. We were actually spurned. We were scared like little children when grown-ups threaten to leave them, and when we funked (shame!) we were unceremoniously brushed aside in the most incredible manner.
Such mixed, heavy, confused feelings. It was a real drama; the complete abandonment of a thing which for years we had tended like a favorite child. … And all because we were formerly enamoured with Plekanov. … Young comrades 'court' an old comrade out of the great love they bear for him—and suddenly he injects into this love an atmosphere of intrigue! He compels us to feel not as younger brothers, but as fools to be led by the nose, pawns to be moved at will. … An enamoured youth receives from the object of his love a bitter lesson: To regard all persons 'without sentiment' to keep a stone in one's sling. Many more thoughts of an equally bitter nature did we give utterance to that night. … Blinded by our love, we had actually behaved like slaves. To be a slave is humiliating, and the sense of shame we felt was magnified a hundredfold by the fact that 'he himself had forced us to realize how humiliating our position was.'
Is it I, the fervent worshipper of Plekhanov, who am now filled with bitter thoughts about him? Is it I, with clenched teeth, and a devilish chill at the heart, hurling cold and bitter words at him in announcing what is almost our 'breaking off of relations'? Perhaps it is only an ugly dream?
Indeed, so profoundly moved was I that at times I thought I would burst into tears… On the surface everything appeared as if nothing had happened; the apparatus must continue to work as it worked before. But we felt an internal twinge—instead of friendly relations, dry, business-like relations prevailed, we were always to be on guard, on the principle: Si vis pacem, para bellum .
II
Statesmen—Balfour, Smuts, Clemenceau—have not infrequently written philosophical works, but invariably they have been written as postpolitical reflections on the meaning of things. Lenin is the only man in history who wrote an epistemological book as part of his tactical plan to defeat another faction within his party. The book has one thesis, that materialism, defined as the belief in the reality of the external physical world, is the only ideology to which a true revolutionist, scientist, or man of common sense can subscribe. Sometimes he confuses this meaning of materialism as physical realism with materialism in two other senses, one, the notion that "nature is the sole reality," that supernatural entities don't exist, and the other, an evolutionary sense, in which materialism means that physical entities preceded the existence of mental ones. The villains of Lenin's book are the philosophical idealists and their ilk, from Bishop Berkeley to the physicist Ernst Mach, who dare to affirm that we can meaningfully speak only of observable elements. The book has more invective per page than any work written in the history of philosophy, and indeed, if one were to ask what its philosophical method was, we might say: usually the method of invective. Nonetheless, Bertrand Russell wrote a comparatively benign estimate of it, in 1934, to be sure, at a time during the depression when he was more sympathetic to Bolshevism.
While I do not think that materialism can be proved, I think Lenin is right in saying that it is not disproved by modern physics. Since his time, and largely as a reaction against his success, respectable physicists have moved further and further from materialism, and it is naturally supposed, by themselves and by the general public, that it is physics which has caused this movement. I agree with Lenin that no substantially new argument has emerged since the time of Berkeley, with one exception.
This one exception Russell oddly enough found in the instrumentalist theory, which he attributed to Marx, that "truth" is a practical rather than a theoretical conception.
How shall we appraise Lenin's argument, and why was it that any departure from materialism struck him as a deviation and heresy, making its proponent a fit candidate for excommunication?
Lenin himself acknowledges: "by no proofs, or syllogisms, or definitions would it be possible to refute the solipsist." Then what shall be done with the person who says with Fichte: "the world is my sensation" (or with Wittgenstein in our time: "I am my world")? "Any healthy person," writes Lenin, "who is not an inmate of an insane asylum, or in the school of idealist philosophers" holds to "'naive realism'," a belief which "consists in this, that he believes reality, the environment and the things in it, to exist independently of his perception." The mental health, the sanity of the party, seem to Lenin to be at stake with the philosophical issue of materialism, "a problem concerning the confidence of man in the evidence of his sense-organs." Materialism, he insists, is "the instinctive viewpoint held by humanity which accepts the existence of the outer world independently of the mind." Those philosophies which purport to explicate a nonspatial, nontemporal existence are "products of a diseased mind." Nor will Lenin admit of any departure from the definition of truth as correspondence to fact. He is impatient with empiricists and pragmatists who speak of truth as an "organizing form of human experience," or who try to translate "the objective character of the physical world" as its "inter-subjectively verified" status. For, says Lenin, there are all sorts of ways for organizing human experience; every culture, as we would say, is a socially endorsed form for organizing human experience. And for the majority of mankind, Lenin observes, "house goblins and wood demons" are part of a "socially organized experience"; if so, then to say they exist is "truth," if all "truth" means is its employment to organize human experience.
What perturbs Lenin is that every definition of truth, other than as simple correspondence to fact, somehow loosens man's hold on reality. Every other definition refuses to acknowledge that the person does really get to know something about the existent world; every other definition concedes that the world given to us in perception may still be a phantom, a stage-play, an illusion. Every other definition of truth, by its very departure from the criterion of correspondence, introduces into itself an "alienation" of man from reality, as the current phrase goes. As Lenin states it, the idealist philosopher takes sensation not as a connection with the external world "but as a screen, as a wall which separates the mind from the outer world." The empiricists, Lenin protests, "do not sufficiently trust the evidence of our sense-organs." The Kantians likewise say, "that the thing exists in itself, but is unknowable." And the final test of the "absurdity" of a philosophy is that it leads one toward solipsism, toward the view that "the world is my sensation."
Lenin expounds what philosophers call a "copy theory of knowledge"; "sensations," he writes, are "the true copy of the objective world." A sound scientific theory, he holds, is "a copy, as an approximate reflection of objective reality." Scientific truth is founded on "a reality which is copied, photographed, and reflected by our sensations." Among revisionist Marxists today, especially the group of young Yugoslav philosophers associated with the magazine Praxis, Lenin's theory of sensation has been especially under attack. It is charged that Lenin's view that sensation provides a reflection of reality is the epistemological source of Stalinism. Lenin did, of course, insist that "human practice," which had eventuated in man's domination over nature, "is a result of an accurate objective 'reflection' within the mind of man." Although the science of any given historical period is only a relative approximation to the truth, still, said Lenin, each approximation does incorporate more of that absolute truth: "but it is unconditionally true that this picture reflects an objectively existing model."
The revisionist Marxists, however, seem to me to have fallen into the Leninist fallacy in reverse; their argument that Lenin's theory of reflection is the foundation for Stalinism seems to me to be based on misconceptions concerning the relation of philosophy to politics. The Praxis philosophers argue that Stalinism was founded on the notion that the correct theory in social science was a "reflection" of the inevitable line of development; therefore, it would be sound practice to compel everybody to follow that line of development; the Communist party, as scientific Marxists, would enunciate the correct line. Instead, say the Praxis philosophers, there are alternative lines of possible development, and the decision as to which will be actualized rests on the involvement, the engagement, of human actors who make their own history. The "truth" is not a "reflection" of a preexistent or predetermined reality but rather something which is created in human decision which shapes, constructs, and reconstructs reality rather than "reflects" it.
We might undertake to reply to the revisionists on Lenin's behalf. We would say: the revisionists are not really discussing the definition of truth; they are arguing against sociological determinism. The revisionists are arguing that the basic laws of sociology do not have a determinisi form but that rather they are characterized, as far as predictable outcomes of systems are concerned, by domains of indeterminacy; hence, the initial states of a given social system, together with the laws of social science, never provide one with both the necessary and sufficient conditions of the emergent social state; the unpredictable role of human involvement and choice among indeterminate alternatives must be taken into account.
Let us assume that this revisionist standpoint is true. Still, it will be clear that it in no way challenges Lenin's conception of truth as correspondence to fact, or sensation as reflection of external reality. For the objective truth will now be regarded as stated by laws which provide for indeterminate domains; a principle of sociological indeterminacy will be the objective truth rather than sociological determinism. In either case, we shall be accepting as our criterion for scientific decision the crucial status of sensations as "reflecting" the objective state of things. The sociological indeterminist defends his standpoint just as much as the determinisi by appealing to perceptions as reports or reflections of external reality. He avers, for instance, that perceived acts of human intervention are necessary to social outcomes, but he accepts the veracity, at least provisionally, of his perceptions, or sensations. There have been many naive realists who were democrats; and I do not think their democratic politics were inconsistent with their reflectional epistemology. The Yugoslav revisionists, like Lenin, like Stalin, have drawn too close a relationship between philosophy and politics, even though in their case, their concern is with an underpinning for more liberal values; they remain ideologists.
III
What strikes the reader as strange is the vehemence which possesses Lenin when he discusses this issue of the reality of the external world. He avails himself of Russian literary resources to ridicule the empiricists—Valentinov is like Gogol's Petrushka, Chernov is like Voroshilov in Turgenev's Smoke, others call forth Gogol's Inspector-General, the philosopher Avenarius is like Turgenev's rascal. For the great philosopher-physicist Ernst Mach, Lenin rises or stoops to the most demagogic invective: "The philosophy of Mach, the scientist, is to science what the kiss of Judas is to Christ. Mach betrays science into the hands of freedom. …" It would have been of no avail to point out that Mach was a stubborn anticlerical all his life. But Lenin seems himself as the Christ whom the empiricists are betraying. Nor would it have availed to observe that Mach had been, even before Lenin was born, a pioneer in the advocacy of socialistic reforms. Here was simply for Lenin a most menacing heresy, comparable to that of Judas Iscariot, subtly gnawing away at the heart of his doctrine.
The German Socialists, the French Socialists, the Italian Socialists, the American Socialists, scarcely attached any political importance to philosophical materialism. Jaurès, the great French leader, was drawn to Kantian ethical idealism, as were even such German leftists as Karl Liebknecht and Kurt Eisner. In America, the leftist organ The International Socialist Review was enthusiastic for the philosophy of Ernst Mach. And to Mach, the world owes the imperishable debt for the inspiration his philosophy gave to the young student in Züich, Albert Einstein. For Einstein, partaking much of Machian ideas, especially under the stimulus of his student friend, Friedrich Adler, who was both a Marxist and a Machian, was guided to the critique of absolute space and time as unobservable entities. The theory of relativity was largely conceived under the influence of Machian emotions and a Machian frame of mind, trying to expel from one's physical theory whatever was not translatable into an observer's experiences. To Lenin, however, the philosophy of Ernst Mach signified a veritable threat to his sanity.
Indeed it is such highly personal psychological reasons rather than anything political or sociological which explain why Lenin attached so much importance to his materialism. Often enough, Lenin gave indications that he kept guard over an unstable personality, threatened by the fear of illusion, the fear of a commitment to an unreal world. Lenin's older sister told, for instance, how shaken Lenin was when he read Chekhov's short story Ward No. 6: "'Volodya summed up its effect on him in these words: 'When I finished reading this story last night, I felt positively afraid. 1 just could not remain in my room but had to get up and go out. I had the feeling that I, too, was locked up in Ward No. 6.' That had happened late at night when we had all gone to our rooms and some were even asleep, and he had nobody to talk to. Those words lifted a veil from his state of mind. …" This was in the winter of 1892 in Samara. Chekhov's story was being published in a periodical, and Lenin was writing his first major work, What the "Friends of the People" Are; he was already a Marxist, and condescending towards the idealistic Narodniks of the older generation who were his neighbors. And in the midst of his materialistic philosophizing, the veil lifts, and he is filled with anxiety. Chekhov's story tells of an understanding reflective physician, who is in charge of a mental asylum; then through the intrigues of an assistant, he himself is declared insane. He finds himself then at the mercy of the brutal caretaker, Nikita, who beats him cruelly; the sane man has patronized the sadistic forces which misuse him, and declare him insane. He has lived in illusion; death ends his torment and insoluble problems. No wonder Lenin had the feeling that he too was locked in Ward No. 6, this strange prophetic dream was far more accurate than the Utopian declamation of The State and Revolution, for in the Soviet society the sane writers today find themselves thrust into insane asylums, a practice Stalin initiated and Nitika continued; thus the Soviet dialectic reached its new high stage, the rational transformed into the irrational.
Seeking to exorcise an inner anxiety of illusion, the fear that perhaps his Marxist learning was an exercise in fantasy, in myth, Lenin responded with an over-determination of his materialism. Leon Trotsky reports that when he first met Lenin, the latter was indeed drawn to Machian doctrines. But now he exorcised the Machian and the solipsist within himself. He especially polemicized against Dr. A. A. Bogdanov, a disciple of Mach, who together with Lenin had for a few years led the Bolshevik party. But now Bogdanov was leading a faction opposed to Lenin. Bogdanov, a remarkably exploratory and clear-thinking mind, was also given to psychoanalyzing his contemporaries' philosophical divagations. He thus exerted his art on both the idealist Berdyaev, whom Lenin scorned, and on Lenin himself. Whenever Bogdanov would see Berdyaev, the latter tells, he "kept on asking all sorts of odd questions, such as, How did I feel in the morning? How did I sleep? What was my reaction to this or that? It eventually emerged that in his view my philosophical tendencies were evidence of an impending psychic disorder, and he, being by profession a psychiatrist, wanted to discover how far the process had gone." Bogdanov similarly indicated many years later what he thought was the root-source of Lenin's materialism: "'as a doctor, I concluded that Lenin occasionally suffered from a mental condition and displayed symptoms of abnormality.'"
We might call the fear that one's avowed goals are an illusion the "revolutionary anxiety." Since he is putting himself against the established norms and values of society, the "revolutionary anxiety" arises in moments of doubt; the phrases, the clichés, the programs, the manifestoes, suddenly acquire a hollow ring. The safeguarding of his materialism was a kind of defence mechanism against the revolutionary anxiety. Otherwise Lenin could have reacted mildly against empiricist and solipsist views, regarding them as men of common sense do as rather paradoxical intellectual standpoints, but scarcely looking upon their exponents as Judases, or ideological plotters. Lenin is so eager to confute the scientific standpoint of Ernst Mach that he allows himself to embark upon a polemic against the principle of economy in scientific logic, the principle which advises us to choose the simplest hypothesis among those which conform to the facts. Lenin queries challengingly: wouldn't it then be more "economical" to accept the hypothesis that the atom is indivisible rather than that it is composed of "positive and negative electrons"? Lenin's mistake is evident: he interprets the principle of economy as asserting that the world is simple; the principle does nothing of the sort: it tells you that, no matter how simple or complex the constitution of nature may be, you as a scientist will work with the simplest hypothesis which explains the facts. The hypothesis that the atom is indivisible was dropped not because it was simple but because it couldn't explain the experimental facts which such scientists as J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford had adduced. Lenin's materialist defence mechanism, however, struck out wildly against whatever awakened his revolutionary anxiety. He struck out against the principle of relativity: "Another cause of 'idealistic physics' is the principle of relativity, the relativity of science, a principle which in a period of bankruptcy of old theories, imposes itself with special force upon physicists. …" No wonder that when Einstein's friend, Friedrich Adler, read Lenin's book, he said all that Lenin had proved, apart from his patient capacity to write a big book, was that he knew nothing about the subject. Einstein himself, in later years, wrote limericks about the stupidities of dialectical materialism. But Lenin's anxiety and defence mechanism was transmitted into the psyches of generations of Soviet students.
Lenin, moreover, as a simple nineteenth-century Russian materialist misconceived the relation of philosophy to the sciences, indeed, we should rather say, the relation of philosophies to the sciences. For this relationship is not unlike that between the philosophies and the arts. As Lenin wrote Gorky in 1908: "an artist can draw much that is useful to him from any philosophy." Similarly, different scientists have drawn inspiration in their work, models, analogues and motivations from the most diverse philosophies. In one mood, Einstein drew inspiration and guidance from Mach's empiricism; in another mood, he was doing work in the spirit of a follower of Boltzmann's atomism. Niels Bohr was somehow guided in his philosophy as a scientist, in his principle of complementarity, by a devotion to Kierkegaard and the pluralistic conciliation of his teacher Höffding. Heisenberg drew sustenance from Plato's Timaeus. Different philosophies are indications of different themes in the universe; none of them is controlling; and part of the life of science, the source of its vitality, is their unending alternation.
Many pages of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism are strewn with invective against educators and professors. These reactionaries, he writes, aim "to implant in the high school students the spirit of idealism"; the opponent of materialism is a "police officer in a professorial chair"; "the bourgeois professors have a right to receive their salaries from reactionary governments," because they defend medieval, transcendental absurdities. "Not a single professor," he writes, even the most eminent physicists and chemists, "can be trusted even so far as a single word when it comes to philosophy. … [T]he professors of philosophy are scientific salesmen of theology." Why was Lenin's materialism so polemically oriented against these academics? The answer suggests itself in the facts of Lenin's own evolution from religion to materialism. Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich, as Krupskaya tells us, "even though he was a teacher of physics and a meteorologist, believed in God until the end of his life. The fact that his sons had abandoned religion caused him anxiety." When the father complained to a friend "that his children were bad church attenders," the friend suggested: "Give them the stick, don't spare it." "Upon hearing this Ilyich, burning with indignation, decided to break with religion; he rushed into the garden, took off the cross that he wore around his neck, and threw it away." All this happened when Lenin was fourteen or fifteen years old.
From Lenin's standpoint, his father, the teacher of physics, the director of primary schools, the religious believer, was another police officer in the guise of an educator. The curious bitterness against academics seems to have been a recurring reenactment of Lenin's rebellion against his father's authority and religious devotion. Throughout his life he was tearing the cross from around his neck; his materialism always retained the polemical cast because it was for him less a scientific standpoint than the projection of a fixated emotion of generational rebellion.
Lenin's materialism always remained invested with emotions for overcoming feminine, or unmanly, weakness, for proving his toughness. The reactionary professors, he wrote, were succumbing to "the kisses" of the idealists and pragmatists, and were allowing themselves to be "nailed" to a pillory; these were "shameful things"; the professors in advanced capitalist countries were living in "concubinage"; the empiricists entwined all the idealistic weaknesses into a "chinese braid," this symbol of femininity, which Feuerbach had once cut off. Mach's "elements" were a "fig-leaf" for his idealism; kisses, concubines, fig-leaves, and Chinese braids, such were the metaphors for the emotional determinants of Lenin's materialism.
If Lenin indeed had followed his own suggestions that solipsism and idealism cannot be logically refuted but only psychologically analyzed, he would then have been led as well to examine the psychological basis of his own doctrine. But he could never engage in such self-scrutiny. His notion that philosophies have political consequences would have largely collapsed, for the basis of philosophies lies much more in temperament, as William James saw, than in political affiliation. But just as Lenin shrank from the subjectivist ingredient in sociology, he suppressed the suggestion of its relevance in philosophical decision. For what Lenin would have feared above all was self-knowledge of the unconscious determinants of his own materialistic dogmatism. Then the neurotic anxieties, fears, and cruelties which led to his materialistic over-affirmation would have come to view.
IV
Meanwhile, Lenin struggled with his neurosis. His nerves for years previously used to afflict him with physical inflammations and complete sleeplessness. The later years of emigration were especially hard; comrades became insane and committed suicide. "Another year or two of life in this atmosphere of squabbling and emigrant tragedy would have meant heading for a breakdown," wrote Lenin's wife. Fortunately for his sanity, the years of reaction were followed by revolutionary upsurge. Years earlier, after a series of squabbles which had led to the suicide of a famous student leader, Lenin wrote to his sister: "You'd better not wish any comrades from the intellectuals on me. …" "The worst thing about exile is these 'exile episodes. '" He had shaped and fashioned his personality to stamp out affections. "Friendship is friendship and work is work," Lenin would say, "and on this account the necessity for war will not disappear," as he would obliterate a friendship from his life. From the time of his adolescence he regarded Turgenev's short story Andrei Kolosov as the last word on love and sincerity. "He felt that Turgenev showed here, absolutely correctly and in a few lines, how to understand properly what is rather pompously called the 'sanctity' of love. He often told me that his views on this question were exactly the same as those expressed by Turgenev in Andrei Kolosov. 'These', he used to say, 'are not vulgar bourgeois views on the relations between men and women, but real, revolutionary ones. '" The story deals with a rather cold, calculating young man who without any compunction breaks with a girl who no longer pleases him. Evidently what pleased Lenin in the story was the hero's refusal to allow considerations of personal loyalty to sway him. When he saw Tolstoi's The Living Corpse, the rest of the audience sympathized with the character of the deserted wife in the play; Lenin sympathized with the deserting husband, and wanted to see the play again. Lenin tried to emulate such models, but the effort in his case involved terrific emotional strains. Krupskaya, his wife, was, according to Bernard Shaw, one of the two ugliest women in Europe. Lenin evidently could not bring himself to leave her when he loved another woman. But in more trivial matters he could more successfully fashion his character to ideological requirements. He found chess tremendously absorbing, but it impinged on the revolution; he gave it up. Skating, hunting, the study of Latin—all were eliminated from the revolutionist's life. He feared that music might deprive him of his capacity to be ruthless.
Such was Lenin's project for self-formation, to repress whatever spontaneous impulses and affections seemed inconsistent with the revolutionist's calling. When so much aggression is directed against one's self, the unconscious protests; a perpetual frustration of impulse and emotion always brings in its train a feeling of unreality; life loses its savor, and consists of a rehearsal of assigned lines in a play rather than a spontaneous partaking of life. The vehement reiteration of his materialism as a party tenet was proportional to his own feelings of unreality; he had to assure himself philosophically of an existence which his self-punitive actions were negating into nonexistence.
During the years of the World War, according to his closest coworker at that time, Gregory Zinoview, Lenin "seemed to have changed even in his appearance." Living in the poorest quarter of Zurich, "in the house of a shoemaker, in a sort of garret, his hatred of the bourgeoisie became sharp like a dagger." "Many, who knew him before," wrote Zinoview, "were surprised at the change which had taken place in him since the war." The shock of the collapse of the Second International had taken its toll. "The honor of the proletariat demanded that a war against this war be fought to a finish," and the "imperialist bandits" forever destroyed.
v
During the miserable years of exile, the temptation of the total absorption into dreams waxed stronger. Krupskaya tells: "During those very hard years of emigration, concerning which Ilyich always spoke with a feeling of sadness…, during those years he dreamed and dreamed," taking heart as a desperate person does from the chance good cheer of others more prosaically miserable, from a French charwoman singing: "Mais votre coeur—vous ne l'ayez jamais," or from a Parisian café singer, with whom one evening he dreamed together of world revolution, or during sleepless nights reading the poems of Verhaeren. When Inessa Armand and her daughter would visit him, Krupskaya narrates, "Ilyich liked to indulge in day-dreaming in their presence." The dream always beckoned to a dialectical logic in which there were qualitative leaps to a reality transfigured. But it was precisely this dialectical logic which could tempt one into a qualitative leap beyond reality to the unreal, to fantasies in which one lost one's last moorings with the physical and social worlds. During the distress and isolation of the World War years, Lenin was converted to dialectical materialism.
From the triads and trichotomies which he had ridiculed in 1892 as a young scientific Marxist, Lenin in sombre isolation derived instead now a curious consolation, like an old believer falling back on new readings of sacred texts. He even wrote an "aphorism" in which he exulted in his solitary devotion: "It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!" At last he was the ultimate sectarian, the only one in the world in half a century who had divined the master's message; the mantle was his. Marx had in his maturity playfully belittled his coquetterie with Hegelian phrases; for Lenin the coquetterie became a passionate obsession: "Hegel actually proved that logical forms and laws are not an empty shell, but the reflection of the objective world," he wrote, then perturbed by his own flight to fantasy, he qualified it to "a brilliant guess." He invented more dialectical aphorisms: "Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical… ." It was a Freudian dream world in which negation ceases to exist, the fantasy projected into a "logic" all its own. Without the Hegelian dialectic, the conception of development would be "lifeless, pale and dry"; the dialectic would make it "living," full of "self-movement," with "leaps." The vocabulary of this Hegelian conversion had the peculiar accents of a man of declining virility finding in the Hegelian words a kind of metaphysical restorative. And then he found in the Hegelian idealism itself the ultimate justification of revolution; the subjective will would create its own world, would posit the revolution itself. What was the meaning of "practice in the theory of knowledge"? Lenin said: "Alias: Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it." He indeed now preferred Hegel's theology to Huxley's agnosticism: "this philosophical idealism, openly, 'seriously' leading to God is more honest than modern agnosticism with its hypocrisy and cowardice. He called, in his loneliness, for a metaphysics to sustain his fantasy, to give assurance to his will to revolution. A few years before he had berated Gorky for venturing even to think of God as a class-name for human ethical strivings. "Is not God-building the worst form of selfcastigation? Everyone engaged in building God… castigates himself in the worst possible way, because instead of occupying himself with 'deeds' he indulges in self-contemplation." The God-builder was then for Lenin a philosophical masochist of the worst kind. Now however, in 1916, it was the scientific agnostic, with his perpetual demand for evidence, who most aroused Lenin's ire.
VI
It was during the war years, when Lenin's immersion in Hegelian dialectic was deepest, that he wrote the two works of social science for which he is most famous, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and The State and Revolution. Here the power of fantasy was superimposed on the facts; the fantasy, which Lenin regarded as inherent in every generalization, took possession; dialectic indeed became the logic of projected fantasy. There were no longer realistic studies such as his youthful The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Instead, Lenin found himself borne not by scientific prediction but by dialectical prophecy.
Lenin's thesis was imperialism in its economic nature was "moribund capitalism." The "destructive characteristics of imperialism" he wrote "compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism"; it was capitalism at "its highest historical stage of development," on "the eve of the socialist revolution." Now here was dialectical method at its highest. For imperialism, as historians have documented, has been a universal theme in the world's history. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans had their imperialism; feudal Europe had its imperialism in the Crusades; the Arabs had their Moslem imperialism; the nomadic Tartars had their imperial state, while the sea-faring Scandinavians went forth in their Viking imperialism. The French Revolution brought into being a revolutionary imperialism. Far from imperialism today being the last stage of capitalism, it seems today to be a second or third stage of socialism. The Czechs today complain of a Soviet military and economic exploitation, while Fidel Castro charged in 1966 that Communist China was exhibiting toward his country "the worst methods of piracy, oppression, and filibusterism" that had characterized "the imperialist states." He said it all came down to the "fundamental question for the peoples: whether in the world of tomorrow the powerful nations can assume the right to blackmail, extort, pressure, attack, and strangle small peoples. …"
Lenin, of course, was well aware that imperialism had been a recurrent, cross-systemic phenomenon. He was determined, however, to look at reality dialectically, to see all that he hated perish with capitalist society, and to see humanity making a qualitative leap into a new society in which imperialism would vanish together with the state and bureaucracy. He therefore was under an emotional compulsion to define imperialism in such a way so that it would end with capitalism. Nothing is so certain as a tautology, and Lenin was removing the question of imperialism in postcapitalist and pre-capitalist societies from the empirical domain simply by linking it through a definition necessarily to capitalism. So Lenin wrote:
[I]mperialism existed before this latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and achieved imperialism. But 'general' arguments about imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background the fundamental difference of social-economic systems, inevitably degenerate into absolutely empty banalities, or into grandiloquent expressions like 'Greater Rome and Greater Britain'.
Thus Lenin defends his definition of imperialism as specific to modern capitalism, his well-known definition of imperialism as involving the dominance of monopolies in production, the merger of bank capital with industrial capital, the export of capital, the formation of international monopolies, and the territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers.
There are considerable doubts concerning the actuality of the specific traits which Lenin insisted were characteristic of imperialism. Foreign investment was in Britain and the United States primarily financed through a re-investment of profits, and involved a very small net outflow of capital. Tsarist Russia embarked on imperialist ventures though it had no surplus capital for export; the French colonies as a whole imported more in their trade than they exported; the average annual return on the invested capital in such major imperialist ventures as the Witwatersrand mines did not exceed 4. 1 percent; British economy was not characterized by a merger between financial and industrial capital; critics in the colonies complained that imperialist countries didn't export enough capital to make for the development of industry. But all such specific criticisms, however, are minor when compared to the major methodological distortion in Lenin's perspective on imperialism.
For Lenin argues that "general" arguments about imperialism must degenerate into banalities. By the same token, one might have argued that Newton's general arguments about the gravitational attraction of all masses, or Einstein's arguments concerning all frames of reference, all observers, were "banalities" or "tautologies." A Leninist would have held that the specific differences between the moon's motion and that of the planets were the only kinds of subjects that could be fruitfully studied. Indeed, the Aristotelian resistance to Galileo's logic of mechanics had precisely something of this character. Lenin, in other words, failed utterly to appreciate the significance of general laws of science. And the reason why he so failed is that the element of fantasy possessed him when he confronted basic social realities. His emotions wanted to decree the end of imperialism as the consequence of the end of capitalism; his imperious revolutionary will wanted to annihilate imperialism; therefore, by a verbal sleight-of-hand he stipulated that imperialism could exist only under modern capitalism. He projected a whole evolutionary sequence of historical stages into a choice in the use of words obedient to his emotions. When Yugoslav, Polish, Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban Marxists, therefore, have tried to speak about the imperialist activities of Communist countries, they have found themselves stammering because of their Leninist inhibitions. To talk plainly of a Soviet or Communist or Socialist imperialism violated the binding rules of their Leninist political grammar; they struggled vainly with all sorts of equivalents. But to speak of "great-power chauvinism" is even more grandiloquent than the expressions such as "Greater Rome" which Lenin disliked. The dialectical tenet with its qualitative leap into the end of imperialism was a fantasy which simply could not be translated into reality.
Lenin wrote his Imperialism in Zürich, Switzerland, in the spring of 1916. Then came the March Revolution of 1917. The time for transposing fantasy into reality had come, and he dared not miss it. All sorts of fantastic schemes rushed through his mind. His sister Marya writes: "But how to get back? One fantastic plan after another was conceived by Lenin, but they were all impracticable. He spent sleepless nights worrying how to get away from Switzerland. In desperation he decided to act the part of a deaf-mute who had a Swedish passport. …" He asked an intermediary "to find a Swede who looked like Lenin." The intermediary, Ganetsky, wrote: "When I read the letter, I realized how depressed Lenin was, but all the same I had to laugh at this grotesque plan." Even Krupskaya acknowledges: "His nights were spent building the most improbable plans. We could fly over by plane. But such an idea could only be thought of in a waking dream. Put into words, its unreality became at once obvious." Then a proposal of his former friend Martov that they secure passage through Germany brought Lenin back to Russia.
During the months of August and September, 1917, while in hiding, and awaiting with growing impatience the seizure of power by his party, Lenin wrote his celebrated pamphlet The State and Revolution. It is a Utopia written in the language of social science, a melange of impassioned, unrestrained projective dreams together with harsh insistence on the necessity for violence in revolution. He never completed the pamphlet, for the October events intervened: "It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it." Again dialectical logic, with its schema of qualitative leap into the new world, with its negation of all that was repressive in the bourgeois society, provided Lenin with the formalism appropriate to his fantasy. Given the economic groundwork prepared by capitalism, universal literacy, the discipline of the workers, then, wrote Lenin, "it is perfectly possible, within twenty-four hours after the overthrow of the capitalists and bureaucrats, to replace them, in the control of production and distribution, in the business of control of labor and products, by the armed workers, by the whole people in arms." This was a prophecy which never fulfilled itself; the "twenty-four hours" have been dilated into more than a half-century, but the time-coefficient is always expanded with added clauses and auxiliary variables. Accounting and control, predicted Lenin, will have been so simplified by capitalism so that its techniques will be "within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic." Then, said Lenin, bureaucracy will begin to "wither away." The antagonism between mental and physical labor will vanish, and with it, the economic basis of the state. While denying that Bolsheviks are Utopians, indulging in "dreams" of how to eliminate all administration, still Lenin insists, "within twenty-four hours" after the revolution, the managerial functions will be taken over by average city dwellers and performed for workingmen's wages.
Were Lenin's predictions ever founded on more than projective fantasy? Had he made any study of the procedures of accounting and management? Had he made any effort to learn the facts of industrial psychology, or to come to terms with the views of elites and the distribution of abilities enunciated by such sociologists as Michels and Pareto? The amazing thing is that Lenin, for all his training as a statistical sociologist, simply yielded to fantasy. If, as Lenin said in 1916, every generalization contains an element of fantasy, then we might say that some generalizations contain far more fantasy than others; we might even devise a "fantasy-fact" ratio for generalizations, and state the proportion of fantasy-projection in relation to verifiable fact in the construction of hypotheses. And Lenin would now have rated very high indeed in his "fantasy-fact ratio."
Curiously, in his early manhood, in 1902, Lenin had ridiculed those who raised an outcry against bureaucracy. In those days he thought that only flabby intellectuals wanted to dispense with bureaucracy. The average worker, Lenin insisted, realized that bureaucracy is a technological necessity. The proletarian who has gone through the school of the factory, wrote Lenin, who knows the function of "the factory as a means of organization" can teach the unstable, bourgeois intellectuals the necessity of bureaucracy. Those who railed "against people being transformed into 'wheels and cogs'" were raising a "tragi-comical outcry" against the workings of the division of labor. The distinction between orthodoxy and revisionism, wrote Lenin, is the counterpart of that between bureaucracy versus democracy. He chose bureaucracy; those who rejected it, he argued, suffered from some psychological ailment: "There is a close psychological connection between this hatred of discipline and that incessant nagging note of injury which is to be detected in all the writings of all opportunists today." Whatever this psychological ailment, Lenin himself in 1917 wrote pages of fantasy which went far beyond the ones written by those whom he had derided in 1902. The dialectical fantasy had superseded the method of social science.
VII
Persons who dwell in a world of political fantasy are apt to be characterized by great cruelty. For the very component which impels one to reject reality and to reach for a surrogate world is one of some deep, underlying frustration; and frustration, if it expresses itself in fantasy, is also laden with aggression against whomever seems to counterpose himself against that fantasy. Indeed, the fantasy itself can provide the formula needed for justifying aggression and presenting one's cruelties as historically justified. Certainly, the greatest of Lenin's contemporaries, among those who knew him, felt this ingredient of cruelty in Lenin's personality. Bertrand Russell in 1920 found him "dictatorial," and "embodied theory," with a "rather grim" laugh, lacking in "psychological imagination," and despising many people. Lenin, he wrote retrospectively, was a "narrow-minded fanatic and cheap cynic." "When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. … His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold." Maxim Gorky, who had known Lenin for many years, wrote from St. Petersburg in the midst of the revolution that Lenin "has no pity for the mass of the people… Lenin does not know the people… The working classes are to Lenin what minerals are to the metallurgist." Lenin, according to Gorky, was a Russian nobleman with his distinctive psychological traits, prepared to incite the working class to outrages against innocent people, and deeming himself as authorized "in performing with the Russian people a cruel experiment." Leon Trotsky in 1903 said that Lenin was a "party disorganizer," a would-be "dictator" whose conception of socialism was that of a "barracks regime." The gifted and idealistic Rosa Luxemburg thought there was a "Tartar-Mongolian savagery" about Lenin and his followers. The Utopian fantasy and the materialist harshness were a curious joint product, the two polarities of a personality racked with aggressions, toward self, toward others.
Lenin's materialist doctrine was absorbed into the official Soviet ideology, and its absolutism became an official tenet. The famous Short History of the Communist Party, to which Stalin lent his name, enunciated as canonical text: "Marxist philosophical materialism holds that the world and its laws are fully knowable,… and that there are no things in the world which are unknowable. …" This is a large philosophical commitment to demand of every Bolshevik. A more reflective, or post-ideological philosopher would say: Consider the two contradictory propositions, first: there are no things in the world which are unknowable, and second: there are some things in the world which are unknowable.
The postideological philosopher would say further: how could we possibly verify either of these two alternative contradictory propositions? For even if it happened that all things in the world taken distributively were knowable, we should still never be able to know whether we had sampled or enumerated all things; and if, on the other hand, there were something in the world which was unknowable, how would we possibly know it? When Lenin writes: "beyond the 'physical,' beyond the external world, with which everyone is familiar, there can be nothing," the agnostic responds: what manner of proof can there possibly be for such a proposition? It lies in the indeterminate domain.
In short, unless some emotion weights the scale, and inclines us to one alternative or the other, the philosopher without ideology acknowledges that we have here a pair of indeterminate alternatives, and that under such circumstances, an agnostic standpoint is justified. Lenin, on the other hand, endeavoring to contain his own propensity to fantasy, does so by overdetermining the indeterminate; he proclaims a materialism which is hard, dogmatic, and mandatory. That is why the new generation of dissidents in the Soviet Union, looking for a liberation from the thought-ways and emotional patterns of institutionalized harshness, of socialized sadism, have begun to turn toward philosophical idealism.
As the centenary of Lenin's birth is observed, the estimate of his life and work will be largely influenced by the pronouncement of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party: "Lenin was the first thinker of the century who saw the achievements of natural science in his time as the beginning of an immense scientific revolution, who was able to disclose and to generalize in philosophical terms the revolutionary meaning of the fundamental discoveries made by the great explorers of nature." This is precisely the kind of statement which places fetters on the minds of the Soviet people, their students, their scientists. For Lenin more than any other thinker in this century contributed to the retardation of scientific inquiry. In the name of his narrow-minded materialism he rejected both Einstein's principle of relativity and Freud's psychoanalysis. His writings on imperialism and the state have deprived Soviet students of the intellectual tools which they need for analyzing their own society. In the measure in which his name is exalted as the first scientist of the century, in that proportion the society which he founded shows that its thinking still remains infantile, enthralled by ideology rather than guided by science. The Russian intellectual liberation is only now beginning.
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