V. I. Lenin made an outstanding contribution to the growth of materialist dialectics as a science of development. He defended and provided comprehensive validation for the Marxist theory of development, and enriched it with propositions and conclusions corresponding to the new historical epoch. In the present article we analyze a number of Lenin's ideas having tremendous importance to the further elaboration of the Marxist theory of development.

The question of peaceful and nonpeaceful paths of the socialist revolution and the building of socialism is now the subject of the lively discussion in the international Communist and workers' movement. It is sometimes asserted that V. I. Lenin raised violence to an absolute, that he saw armed insurrection and civil war as virtually the only means of carrying out the socialist revolution. Inasmuch as under today's conditions, particularly in developed capitalist countries, seizure of power by the working class (...) and toiling masses through armed insurrection is allegedly totally impossible, the conclusion is drawn that a number of basic propositions of Leninism are obsolete and that Leninism is a purely Russian phenomenon with no international significance. All such conclusions are nothing but a distortion of Leninism. (shrink)

Lenin's work "On the Significance of Militant Materialism," written in the spring of 1922, is justly regarded as the philosophical testament of our leader. In it, the tasks of the day were merged with the tasks of the entire epoch on the basis of a profound analysis of reality.

Central among the complex philosophical problems created by the development of contemporary physics is the problem of the objectivity of physical knowledge, the problem of the reflection of objective reality in our knowledge.

On the anniversary of Lenin's work of genius, the significance of this book for Marxist philosophy as a whole and, particularly, for the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge can be understood especially clearly. Turning today to the history of Marxist-Leninist thought in the twentieth century, we comprehend fully the enormous role played both by Lenin's defense of the principal propositions of dialectical materialism against revisionists and open enemies of Marxism dabbling in philosophy and his creative development of the (...) underlying foundations of Marxist theory — those foundations that, in the final analysis, determine both the manner of posing and the method of resolving all other problems in Marxism, not just those of a theoretical nature but those of a practical political nature as well. Many questions elaborated in Lenin's work of genius acquire particular timeliness for Marxist-Leninist philosophy specifically at the present stage in the development of science and under current conditions in the ideological struggle. In the present article we shall deal with the significance of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism for the interpretation of certain pressing problems of the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge. (shrink)

The second half of the 1940s left its mark on the history of Soviet scholarship [nauka] as a special period in the interrelations between scholarship and society, as a time of direct encroachment on the development of scholarship by the totalitarian state. This direct ideological diktat over the activity of scholars [uchenye] took the form of scholarly [nauchnye] discussions, as they were called. They were an expression of the striving of Party-bureaucratic structures to unify the development of knowledge and to (...) impose like-mindedness on the basic directions of scholarly activity. References to the philosophical discussion, the Lysenko session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture [VASKhNIL], the intrusion into the development of physics and chemistry, the discussions on issues of linguistics, physiology, etc., have become commonplace and have entered the textbooks, although the extent to which they have been studied varies. (shrink)

In his critique of empiriocriticism, V. I. Lenin also considered it necessary to characterize its relationship to religion in order to show more fully the social significance of this school, which was fashionable in its time. In contrast to those who took at face value the pretensions of Machism to present the scientific thought of the nineteenth century and who hastened to put it in place of "obsolete" materialist dialectics, V. I. Lenin unmasked the "completely reactionary character" of (...) this essentially subjective-idealistic current, which played into the hands of fideism despite the fact that E. Mach considered himself an atheist. (shrink)

A modern stage of globalization is a historical and logical continuation of “an economical social formation” (K.G. Marx), a civilization (L.G. Morgan). The analysis of this globalization in philosophy and social sciences has an extremely contradictory character which is law-governed in the modern society. Modern globalization has been showing itself as a qualitatively new historical process since 1991. Judging from the positions of the dialectical materialistic theory of history (K.G. Marx, F. Engels, V.I. Lenin and others) it by its (...) essence has got a postneoimperialistic, antagonistic character. It’s main features, attributes has been revealed. It doesn’t solve any sharp global problems, but only aggravated and intensifies them. This globalization has greatly increased, made inhuman the process of “cosmopolitization” which developed during the whole existence of capitalism and imperialism. A total degradation and dehumanization of a social person have been taking place, interstate and civil burst into flames, mass disturbances arise, hundreds thousands of people die, genocide and depopulation of some peoples on the planet become “normal” including the countries of the UIS. Destructive process of modern globalization with the USA as the main “player” together with corresponding international institutions (WTO, ICF, World bank, NATO and other), TNC have been resisted in a definite way by antiglobalizing andalterglobalizing movement in many countries on the planet. (shrink)

I found Shpet's article "A Work on Philosophy" [Rabota po filosofii], which we present to the reader's attention, in the Shpet archives stored in the Lenin State Library and passed it on to the editorial board of the journal Logos, where it was published by I. Chubarov. The small circulation of that journal makes it appropriate to republish this text, which is of major importance for an understanding of Shpet's philosophical position and provides a good clarification of the subsequent (...) logic of development of his conception. Although the article is unfinished, there is no reason to lament this fact, since all of its basic ideas and their logical development were realized by Shpet in subsequent publications. A whole series of his works is devoted to grounding and affirming so-called positive philosophy, the basic features of which I would like to clarify. (shrink)

A cognitive relation presumes the presence of two terms: the subject and the object. The process of cognition can be realized only in forms characteristic of the subject. However, cognition faces the task of reproducing the properties of the object "in itself," and not in its relation to any given "point of view" of the subject. Lenin singles out objectivity of examination as the first, the starting element in scientific dialectics . This is also testified to by the very (...) meaning of the concept "knowledge": one can only know something that is outside knowledge; knowledge points to some external reality. This is confirmed by the very nature of sensorily elementary forms of cognition: "The luminous effect of any thing upon the optic nerve is perceived not as the subjective stimulus of the optic nerve itself, but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye" . In activity in the realm of scientific theory, the principle of objective reproduction of an object is formulated as a conscious methodological requirement. But are there rationally formulable criteria permitting the discrimination of objective knowledge from all sorts of subjective psychological forms ? (shrink)

The present text is Letter No. 187 written for the Trialogue Project, whose first volume, containing 170 letters, was published in Moscow in 2012., Addressed to Nadežda B. Mankovskaya and Vladimir V. Ivanov, the letter uncovers the chief line of the artistic symbolism in a monumental film tetralogy by Aleksandr Sokurov, a famous Russian filmmaker. The author shows how through the artistic interpretation of such historical personalities as Lenin, Hitler, and Japanese emperor Hirohito as well as such cultural-mythological characters (...) as Faust and Mephistopheles, the film director reveals varying aspects of the social display of an irrational element of Power. (shrink)

A hundred years have passed since publication of the first edition of Engels's book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which Lenin regarded as "one of the basic works of modern socialism." Engels's interest in the remote past of mankind and Lenin's evaluation of his work were, of course, not coincidental. They may be explained by the tremendous role played by the concept of primitive history in a general materialist understanding of the universal historical (...) process. What was the nature of this very first term in the sequence of socioeconomic formations, this cornerstone of the Marxist concept of universal history? When did private property, antagonistic social classes, and state power, separate from the people, emerge, and what were they, original and permanent institutions, or historically determined institutions of human communal life? These problems are clearly of great philosophical importance. They were, and continue to be, the arena of a bitter ideological struggle, and inevitably attracted the most conscientious attention of the founders of scientific communism. (shrink)

The Soviet authorities applied the most rigid model of state–confessional relations—segregation—to the Russian Orthodox Church. They emphasized the complete exclusion of the church from public life and its subsequent liquidation. By 1919 the Church was already publicly avoiding conflict with the Soviet authorities; its attempts at adaptation, however, were unsuccessful. By 1939, the church organization in the Soviet Union was practically eliminated, though the majority of the population still believed in God. This fact, as well as foreign-policy interests and the (...) loyalty to the state exhibited by the majority of believers during the war, led to a softening of the segregation model and to the church’s adaptation to operating within the Soviet state. (shrink)

The study examines the original work An Attempt to Get Lenin Back on His Feet (Berlin, 1974) by Rudi Dutschke, the well-known German political philosopher and leader of the youth movement in 1968, as well as the influence of the famous Hungarian philosopher György Lukács on the ideas of Dutschke. Dutschke revealed the reasons for the impossibility of socialist ideals being feasible in the 20th century, despite the heroic attempts of the Bolsheviks and Western radical socialists to realize them. (...) The revolution occurred in a country of semi-Asian stagnating capitalism and was not supported by the European anti-capitalist revolution. As a result, after the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the social system was revived with the dominance of the state bureaucracy (the fused party-state apparatus) over society. There were no universal forms of social movement (Verkehr), which led to the fact that socialism became local, up to the danger of its abolition. At the same time, according to Dutschke, it is precisely an equal alliance between the progressive intelligentsia and the working masses that can open up new ways for the transition from a society of necessity to a society of freedom, provided that the intelligentsia renounces leaderism (which was the mistake the Bolsheviks fell into). Therefore, the figure of György Lukács is most important for Dutschke since studying his creative path makes it possible to realize the basic principles of such an equal union. The study shows that the creative path of Lukács before he entered the Comintern as one of the leaders of the section of the Hungarian Communists is characterized by the desire to find a way to solve the fundamental dilemma of the revolutionary, as he believed: either, like the Bolsheviks, strive for an uncompromising victory and the implementation of their program at the cost of violence; or to make compromises with the social democratic and even bourgeois parties, at the same time being in danger of defeat and the impossibility of implementing their ideas, primarily because the socialist intellectuals fail to establish strong ties with the working masses, and the latter may not be thoroughly imbued with anti-capitalist consciousness. Thus, Lukács can survey a spokesperson for the views of the intelligentsia, and through the criticism of these views, it will be possible to comprehend how educated people can better understand the actual needs and interests of the working people in order to pursue policies that would be more in line with them and learn how to lead the masses indeed. (shrink)

In their criticism of Maoism, contemporary Soviet philosophers follow the basic structure of the orthodox presentation of Marxism -- Leninism and use the whole panoply of polemical tools which the Leninist heritage offers them. Thus far, this anti--Maoism is generally maladroit and often self-contradictory.