DISCUSSION J & G - May 27, 1949
There is a dialectic in thought. It moves in its own way. It was for Lenin political thought and organization to correspond. The old way previous to 1914 in which the crisis of capitalism would automatically bring the social revolution - that was henceforth dead. The question was how the socialist idea, the socialist movement, subjectively, would develop, what was its ideals etc. Henceforth enormous respect for Hegel's idealism.
Marx's critique of the Hegelian dialectic in 1844 must be brought in. Very vicious against Hegel's idealism.
The concept of practice - not the concept that the Stalinists have that the intellectual must come out of his study and act on the line. Concept of mass practice developing and testing itself. Concept of essential capacities, man's activity - the basic difference between this and bourgeois revolution. The bourgeois revolution and bourgeois ideology essentially that of conquest of nature, overcoming duality of thought and being, man and nature, development of productive forces. Third International1 still has that ideology - development of productive forces - that is bourgeois. P. 31 - Marx's Critique2 - cuts away from this opposition and shows that it is the root of positivism. Marx watches humanity - the inhuman way in which human essence materializes itself. Throughout Capital bases himself on man.
There is a sequence of dialectical development which appears in every revolutionary period. There is a conquest, a leap forward, stated first of all abstractly but in opposition to previous period. This which is an advance of the subject become rationalized - turning into on the one hand idealism and on the other positivism - the essence of both being that man is over here, nature is over there and the gap to be bridged somehow. This is always totalitarian. Finally a new synthesis is established.
For example, the great leap forward in the 17th century was the development of individuality. But what the philosophers (Hobbes) did was to take the individuals in their finitude, not as developing but as they were (war of one against all) and therefore had to set a governor over them. You have the sequence in every development of philosophy. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke (see introduction to S,S & U3 where Engels extracts from Marx on French Materialism in the Holy Family). Man had to find himself in nature - therefore at the beginning the principle of unity of knowledge and Being. Bacon's discovery is that man is active in his4 world. (See Hegel - Phenomenology - on Reason's Certainty and Reason's Truth to get this dialectic through from the initial affirmation and revolutionary advance to its degeneration into positivism). Puritans express this principle. At the beginning it is revolutionary. Then Hobbes rationalizes it, and the counter-revolution establishes itself on a new basis, the old basis having been licked. Ultimately this self-activity of the individual has to be re-instated. Locke does this for bourgeois society. What Locke fails to see in flourishing England however is the contradictions and negativity in this movement. Leibniz establishes the latter as principles and did it for the same reason that Kant did it for Rousseau, i.e. the backwardness of Germany. Leibniz's monads have more self-movement than Locke's because they contain this negativity, difference in the unity and therefore necessity for transcendence of differences.
We have the same sequence in Kant, who establishes the primacy of the human intellect as process of cognition. Fichte5 occupies himself with this process in the negativity, whereas Kant had postulated the reconciliation (infinite progress). Schelling removed the contradiction in the same way that Hobbes had, by a totalitarian ruler. Hegel then reaffirms the principle of self-acting intellect insisting on the process of mediation and the ultimate unity as a premise. As he insists continually he could only do this as contrasted with Fichte because he didn't begin with the isolated individual but with society and history.
(Rae's note of 5/26/49 establishes this same sequence for Lenin, Stalin and ourselves in 1949 - the party as principle, conscious political practice, in 1902; then in 1923 Stalin doing what Hobbes and Schelling did - finally today, Essence of Nevada document).
In Greece, first of all the Milesians getting away from pure sense-certainty. Then comes Parmenides of who the atomists are merely a variation establishing this principle of Being-for-Self in a rationalistic form. The breaking way from this rationalism to occupy themselves with the development of individuality comes in the sequence from Socrates to Aristotle. Within this broad sequence, we see the same dialectic from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle.
Working with this principle of broad sequence and then internal sequence, we can see the analytic judgement in the 17th Century with Locke and the Encyclopedists doing for society what Locke did for the individual. Then the Synthetic judgement with Kant whose inevitable result is Schelling. Dialectic reason and the speculative judgement emerges with Hegel. This has to be worked out more precisely. Hegel does it on the basis of mass movement in the French Revolution, the Enrages, the Babouvists. They try to correct Kant and then Schelling from below. Hegel, apart from his idealism and final positivism reduced their actual movement to method.
In the Realm of Being the dialectical movement is completely different from that in the Realm of Essence. The dialectical movement in the Realm of Being is constant degradation of the determinate being of the individual in his given reality to part of abstract universal. The movement is to quantity, abstract labor. The abstract principle of Being-for-Self has to become this degradation, precisely because it is abstract. The dialectical movement in the Realm of Essence is something else. Previous to 1914 the whole revolutionary movement, the 2nd International and all the rest of them were essentially in the Realm of Being. Even Lenin before 1914 was not very conscious of Essence although objective situation in Russia drove him to the Logic. The key to Lenin's notes on Logic is this relation to Essence. We today have not only to do Essence but also Notion, the dialectic of the party. The Stalinists today are still fighting Catholic humanism by rationalism. It is the Reformation all over again which with the stage that humanity and objective development have reached, is most merciless tyranny.
The movement in the Realm of Essence is the expansion of the concrete individual developing subjectivity. This is the revolutionary movement, while the other is the counter-revolutionary movement. Hegel begins by insisting on the reality of Show. He will have nothing to do with the abstract essence or being-for-self. It is almost as if he were conducting a polemic against Being-for-Self, to establish the necessity for the universal to be concrete, from the very beginning. Then he attacks this more specifically showing how identity must become difference and therefrom opposition and contradiction. Having established this as the abstract principles of the movement, he reaffirms that the contradiction is not going to without unity, by going to ground, the principle of self-transcendence of the opposing determination by the subject. But the moment he does this, he has to show again that the Ground must be concrete. It has to include all the conditions to emerge into existence. Then again he insists the essence must appear, to posit and make explicit the contradiction between the appearance and the essence. Appearance is the immediacy of this essence with the contradiction posited. The whole is constantly moving to become more concrete and comprehensive - with the end, substance which will include all accidents and be the totality. That is energising actuality.
(Note Hobbes would not have been what he was except for the Leveller movement. Stalin not what he was except for Soviets. The character of revolution establishes character of counter-revolution).
1) We have to prepare this letter for Marcuse for the general public. We cannot take anything for granted despite the fact that only professors will read it to begin with. We have to make this preliminary essay self-contained, referring it to the philosophers but also making it clear that philosophers were expressions of political currents in sense that Marx saw them.
We have to be careful also to leave way open for us to make the notion our own, as we have to work through essence very hard to make essence clear to understand Lenin before making our own jump. The only way to do that is to make extremely clear the distinction between Marx's critique of dialectic in 1844 and Engels on Feuerbach in 1888. Then we have to go from Feuerbach (1888) to Marerialism and Empirco-Criticism and What are the Friends of the People, to including Plekhanov - including stuff on party and Lenin's stuff on the party in order to make the big jump to 1914. In it should also be included the long passage against Kautsky from Lenin - masses as reason. We have to show how he was prepared by his experience in Russia for Essence. We leave reader asking what next.
Refer to Marx on Utilitarianism and Hegel on Enlightenment (Phenomenology 559ff). Rae should concentrate on how far political economy, development of capitalism form part of this "absolute substance", that we are dealing with. She should immediately work out Lenin's notes on Bukharin and she should look up references to dialectic in the volumes referred to by the Russian editors and have them all clear (Note the constant battle with Bukharin by Lenin from 1916 on - The absolute out of a pistol without the labor, patience and suffering of the negative and his final totalitarianism in 1928 - all a clear line from his position on the national question in 1916, then his fight with Lenin on the Draft Program, Brest-6, T.U. question.7 The underlying battle is between abstract universal and concrete universal).
2) Marcuse stumbled badly when he tried to show transition from capitalism to socialism was not predetermined and how politics predetermines economics. But by politics Lenin means total and comprehensive cognition. Revolutionary politics for us is the notion - the concrete determination of the universal and that is what Lenin meant by Bolshevism in Russia. The party, although it was socialism, was socialism in a bourgeois revolution. We have to leap off from the fact that Marcuse brings this up in his book.
Today it is not a question in Europe or China of whether capitalism will solve the question. The question is how new society is going to be born, what are the objective and subjective means. That is the doctrine of the Notion.
3) the third point is point on contemplation. Lenin remarks p. 16 against those people who perceive determinations and then jump to explanation. (Lenin before 1914 was fighting Narodnik nonsense and idealism. Such was the need of a revolutionary approach that by 1914 was prepared to grasp the self-movement of subject. We have to trace objective development of this in his work before 1914). Hegel keeps grumbling about explanation. Plekhanov does not take the concrete exposition by concrete writers developing a policy has past, present and future developing out of own contradictions. He constantly dips into objective situation, comes out again, dips back. Lenin is more concerned with self-movement than he is with Notion. He is concerned with the Notion and the conception of dialectic as the theory of knowledge. All his activity as a revolutionary had the idea of activity in it from 1909-1914. But activity has a dialectic of its own. For instance, his idea of activity in 1894 is the [...]8 of capitalist production. That is what he is trying to establish. By 1905 that battle is won. In 1905 he is trying to establish activity of proletariat as basis for destruction of Tsarist state. Between 1914 and 1917 he establishes principle of activity of revolutionary masses in Soviets for establishment of socialism. And he was particularly concerned with contradictions inside proletariat (proletarian dem'y and Soviet dem'y)9 and the development of these contradictions in party to power and also relation in all sorts of details between that contradiction and every conceivable aspect of the existing world. The theory on which he is working is dialectic as theory of knowledge and for him its essence is 1) contradiction and 2) validity of phenomena like philosophic idealism and labor bureaucracy. This is background of statement, "not evil or malicious intention" and it is further concretized by statement that in moments of crisis, petty-bourgeois partisan even though they don't exist will grow and grow large and to what extent we don't know.
For us dialectic in 1949 is theory of knowledge, the whole, the complete conception becomes a means by which we understand and carry on our concrete activity. In other words, what Lenin still conceived as a theoretical business, telling Marxists to study and look up, etc., has become for us regular daily method for dealing with both fundamental questions and phenomena. That was not so with Lenin. He said you can't resist unless you study up on these questions.
In the Notes Lenin keeps on saying - very important, wonderful, etc. When he sees that logic is reflection of actions of millions of men - wonderful, it sound very naive. It is a discovery to him that logic is the history of philosophy. One begins to ask himself "What was his acquaintance with these before?"
Note p. 49: Two Aphorisms - on Induction and Deduction. He says that both go together and makes particular reference to Vol. I, Chapter I. You have there use-value and value and various stages of transition which represent stages of society long past. So that Marx is working both by deduction and induction, checking one against the other, and he could not get along scientifically without doing this. For Lenin capital was the capitalism of the 19th and early 20th century, imperialism plus super-profit plus the labor bureaucracy. There was no other capitalism but you could only arrive at this by means of induction and deduction. At one and the same time he was establishing essentiality of concrete and essentiality of the subject. (We may have to develop these ideas first and then move over to concrete phenomena with which Lenin dealt).
P. 82 - logic, theory of knowledge and dialectic are not difference - one and the same. Marx left us the Logic of Capital. The others didn't understand philosophy and they didn't understand Capital. They didn't go into dialectic as a theory of knowledge. What was it they didn't understand in Capital? NB Lenin didn't have in mind concrete labor and abstract labor. We have that in mind today, we have fastened on alienation and unity of theory and practice in 1949. Lenin had self-activity for politics but not for production. What was it that he did have in mind that the Marxists hadn't understood for 50 years, since 1867?
(Rae should get exact dates, reading of Logic, writing of Imperialism, when first started, finished etc. Get necessary quotes from Imperialism and State and Revolution on objective world connections).
Get clear p. 49. What did Lenin have in mind? The 2nd Intl didn't do what it did because it was "caused". Result of objective world connections. "To reject the universal in the particular is impossible".
Lenin wrote magnificantly on vol. II. The others had an abstract conception of Captial, did not relate development of capitalism to emergence of castes, etc. That is what he means by rejecting malice or evil intention. This labor bureaucracy is capitalism today - there is not capitalism and then labor burc'y. Induction and deduction means seeing labor bur'y = cap'm. For others the collapse of capitalism was something separate from bureaucracy. He said capitalism created bur'y and apart from this interconnection and wealth of details related to the universal, the class struggle, there is no capitalism and in relating different modal stages and logical development of capitalism, you have to take every new step and relate it to previous steps by broadening and deepening it and creating a logical and necessary transition. The categories of political economy were social categories, same as logic was of philosophy.
What were the ideas of Marxists for last 50 years about Capital? This non-historic, conception? No stages, no transitions, no show?
1 The Third International, (sometimes referred to as the Communist International, which is sometimes abbreviated to the Comintern), was instigated by the Bolsheviks in early 1919. They argued that a new workers' International was needed because of the betrayals of the Second International when European Powers went to war in 1914.
2 Marx's 'Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic', from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The page reference appears to be to the translation by Grace Lee (Boggs) which was published in a JFT pamphlet published in 1947 under the title Essays by Karl Marx: Selected from the Economic-Philsophical Manuscripts.
3Frederick Engels, Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (1880).
4 This word is difficult to discern. A word is over-typed and what appears to be a three letter word is typed above the obscured text.
5 Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), was a German philosopher and supporter of the French Revolution. After the death of Kant, he was considered the pre-eminent philosopher in the German speaking world. He critiqued the dualism in Kant's thought, particularly the idea of thing-in-itself. His critique of Kant influenced Hegel's own thinking.
6The Brest-Litovsk Treaty was initiated by the newly formed Bolshevik government after the October revolution in 1917, with the aim of ending the war with Germany. Victor Serge, in Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), provides an outline of the debate, within the Bolshevik leadership, on whether or not to sign up to the punitive terms offered by the German government.
7 The "T.U. question" is a reference to a series of debates within the Communist Party of Russia, in 1920-1921, over the role of trade unions and workers democracy in the USSR. Trotsky and Bukharin argued for the trade unions to be under state control. This was the dominant position within the Party. Lenin argued against Trotsky and Bukharin (see e.g. Lenin, The Trade Unions. The Present Situation (1920), subtitled 'And Trotsky's Mistakes').
8 The word is heavily overwritten, and indecipherable.
9 Proletarian democracy and Soviet democracy.