Lenin’s Further Development of Materialist Dialectics
1.
Dear colleagues, dear comrades!
Lenin’s work in the ideological field has so far received the least attention in the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement.
Yet it is the “secret” of Lenin’s gigantic achievements in the theoretical and practical fields!
After the bloody defeat of the revolutionary uprising in 1905, Lenin investigated the ideological roots of temporary dejection among the masses and the emergence of liquidationism in the party.
In his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, he recognized in 1908 that especially in times of defeat and reactionary developments, ideological questions take top priority and also influence the revolutionary working-class movement.
He polemicized against petty-bourgeois intellectuals who pretended to be Marxist and who, disappointed but also boastful, renounced dialectical materialism and “under the guise of Marxism are offering something incredibly muddled, confused….”1
With their theory that “matter disappears” and that “sensations are primary and matter is secondary,” the Machists slipped into pure idealism.
Lenin exposed this as an attempt to reconcile materialism and idealism.
This tendency to try to reconcile materialism and idealism became a main feature of bourgeois ideology in the age of imperialism.
It often makes it difficult to see clearly through the complicated issues of the time.
Lenin polemicized against the alleged impossibility of recognizing objective reality: Instead, he qualified matter as a scientific concept “denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, … while existing independently of them...”2
Instead of petty-bourgeois intellectual world-weariness over the cruel reality of imperialism or pompous justification of capitulation, Lenin proved that human thinking is fundamentally capable of coming ever closer to absolute truth through dialectical assimilation of the new phenomena in nature, society and human thought.
While the defeat of the 1905 revolution led the liquidators to skeptically question, even deny, the leading role of the working class and of Marxism, these bitter experiences inspired Lenin.
His consequence was the Bolshevization of the revolutionary party of a new type.
This included, among other things
systematic ideological-political work of the party in the struggle against dogmatic rigidity, pragmatic actionism and revisionist falsification;
democratic centralism as organizational principle of the party instead of a conglomeration of opportunistic currents and factions;
firm organization in party cells as opposed to the opportunistic conception of purely electoral parties;
and last but not least, concentration on winning over the industrial proletariat in large-scale enterprises and working in factories and trade unions, instead of one-sided concentration on residential areas.
Without this preliminary ideological battle of Lenin’s proletarian ideology against bourgeois ideology, a new upswing of the revolution in Russia with the climax of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible.
2.
Dear friends and comrades,
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed “dialectics … [as] the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought.”3
They found three main dialectical laws of motion in Hegel’s philosophy: “The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; The law of the interpenetration of opposites; The law of the negation of the negation.”4
This objective dialectics is inherent in all motion and development and makes it possible to recognize them, generalize them, and influence reality.
Lenin was tireless in his efforts to master the dialectical method of Marx and Engels.
He studied it systematically, using Marx's Das Kapital, among others, and applied it creatively.
But he was not satisfied with that.
With the rise of imperialism, the world and the class struggle had become incomparably more complicated.
In 1914, the contradictions in the imperialist world system came to a head.
German imperialism unleashed the First World War.
Lenin was prompted by this to begin his main work on the further development of materialist dialectics.
Even though he was unable to complete this important work because political events came thick and fast, his scientific “Conspectus of Hegel’s book The Science of Logic” remains.
There he discovered new fundamental “elements of dialectics” and their further detailing.5
This deepening, concretizing and refining of materialist dialectics enabled Lenin to make inexhaustible progress in dialectical knowledge through “unfolding of the sum-total of the moments of actuality.”6
For example, with the help of his “elements of dialectics” he significantly developed further the political economy of Marxism in his 1916 work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
He exposed Karl Kautsky’s transformation from Marxism to social-chauvinism, Kautsky concealing that old and new imperialist countries develop in a contradictory way.
He developed the ingenious thesis of “imperialism [as] highest stage of capitalism”7 and “eve of the socialist revolution”.8
The “elements of dialectics” also served Lenin as a guide for the further development of the strategy and tactics of the proletarian class struggle.
He wrote The State and Revolution in August 1917 in the midst of the feverish action of the immediate preparations for the October Revolution.
He taught us that every great qualitative leap in the class struggle necessarily has to be assimilated theoretically and ideologically.
Any worship of spontaneity leads the revolution to a dead end.
Lenin started from Marx’s and Engels’ doctrine on the state and, in the ideological struggle with Karl Kautsky’s opportunism, enlightened the workers and the broad masses about “what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.”9
In this book he focused strongly on the fact that the workers can only consolidate their rule after the proletarian revolution if they lastingly overcome capitalist bureaucratism.
To do this, they must smash the old bureaucratic state apparatus in the proletarian revolution and establish their dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin also dealt with this question after the victorious October Revolution, when he recognized the main danger for the restoration of capitalism in the emergence of a petty-bourgeois bureaucracy.
In 1919, he explained at the Eighth Party Congress of the RCP (B):
“We can fight bureaucracy to the bitter end, to a complete victory, only when the whole population participates in the work of government. …
Here we are confronted by a problem which cannot be solved except by prolonged education.”10
Lenin thus came very close already to the decisive question for the victory of socialism: the mode of thinking.
3.
Dear friends, colleagues, and comrades
The mastery of the dialectical-materialist method following Lenin’s example is the scientific core of the proletarian mode of thinking:
In interaction with this, Lenin possessed an unshakeable proletarian class standpoint and a Marxist loyalty to principles, which he was able to apply extremely flexibly.
He relentlessly waged an ideological struggle against any deviation from Marxism, against opportunism, which, in his words, “means sacrificing the long-term and permanent interests of the proletariat for flashy and temporary interests.”11
Lenin called for the ideological-political unification of the party instead of formal unity without a foundation in principles.
4.
Dear colleagues, friends, and comrades,
When significant changes in nature and society occur, not only political economy and the doctrine of class struggle, but also dialectical materialism must be further developed.
Stalin summarized dialectical and historical materialism in his book, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), as a guide to the highly complicated leadership of socialist construction in a country under the condition of being encircled by imperialist powers.
However, he ignored Lenin’s further development of materialist dialectics and so departed from the issue of the mode of thinking. This led to some mistakes in the treatment of contradictions in socialist construction.
Mao Zedong recognized the great importance of the dialectical method and developed it further in his writings On Contradiction and On Practice.
These works became ideological foundations for the successful strategy of the new-democratic revolution in China as part of the international socialist revolution.
Mao’s mobilization of the masses with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 to prevent the seizure of power by petty-bourgeois degenerate bureaucrats around Deng Hsiao Ping and Lin Shao Tschi was only possible because he had developed the dialectical method further, especially for the correct handling of contradictions in socialist society.
But that was not all:
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong initiated a mass movement encompassing millions of people to learn and apply the dialectical method.
Since the beginning of its construction as a party of a new type, for 56 years the MLPD has made the conscious application of the dialectical method the fundamental method of its ideological-political and practical work and its education of cadres.
That is not easy!
Even Willi Dickhut wrote:
“When I first held [Lenin’s] ‘elements of dialectics’ in my hands…, I pondered for days on what the individual points meant and what was behind them.
Then the scales fell from my eyes.
In all important questions I used them….
The more thoroughly this is done, the more accurate, i.e. error-free, it becomes.”12
Based on this he wrote in 1974:
“Whoever wants to become a communist must thoroughly adopt the dialectical method and constantly apply it, for only in this way can a correct communist practice be carried out.”13
The proletarian class standpoint is the basis for gaining access to the dialectical method, for the proletarian ambition to learn it and the ability to apply it in practice.
We thus drew fundamental conclusions from the low regard for ideological work in the old communist movement.
Since the 1990s, the imperialist world system has entered a new phase with the reorganization of international production.
A social system of the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking has become the imperialist world system’s central instrument of deception and domination for the purpose of demoralizing, disorganizing and disorienting proletarian class consciousness.
The mode of thinking of the working class and the broad masses determines how objective reality is assimilated and what conclusions are drawn.
To establish the superiority of the proletarian mode of thinking in the struggle with the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking, we developed the doctrine of the mode of thinking.
For this we developed some new elements of dialectics in the spirit of Lenin.
These are, in particular, five new dialectical categories of the doctrine of the mode of thinking:
concrete analysis of the concrete situation at the level of the doctrine of the mode of thinking;
strategy and tactics in the struggle over the mode of thinking;
proletarian culture of debate to solve the problems of the mode of thinking in party building, in the class struggle and in the preparation of the international socialist revolution;
scientific working as dialectical unity of Marxist working style, proletarian methods of work and scientific organization of work;
and proletarian control and self-control with the aim of avoiding mistakes.
Through systematic training in the systematic application of these five categories, we can cope successfully with the petty-bourgeois metaphysical and petty-bourgeois dogmatic modes of thinking, can detect new phenomena and essential changes in nature, society and human thought in a differentiated way, and can systematically organize a progress of knowledge for the higher development of class struggle, party building and the preparation of the international socialist revolution.
This is, in general, a great challenge for the revolutionaries of the world who are faced with the gigantic task of preparing and carrying out the international socialist revolution, the worldwide construction of socialism and communism.
Thank you very much for your attention.
1Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 20
2 ibid., p. 130
3Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 131
4Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 356
5 Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, pp. 221–223
6Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 158
7Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 238
8Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 187
9Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 388
10Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 183 – emphasis by the author
11Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 54
12Briefwechsel über Fragen der Theorie und Praxis des Parteiaufbaus (Letters on Questions of the Theory and Practice of Party Building), p. 218
13ibid., p. 119