WE HAVE TRIED to define the situation in which Lenin’s notebooks on dialectics and imperialism were written. Let us now begin to study the nucleus of his Notebooks on Philosophy, or, more properly, his notebooks on dialectics. The core of these notebooks consists in Lenin’s commentary on Hegel’s The Science of Logic. The particular condition by which Lenin’s study is constrained—at times these notebooks seem more of an escape from the misery of his times than a theoretical necessity—fortunately and dramatically reacts thanks to our author’s overall commitment. His study of dialectics assumes an absolutely fundamental role. Dialectics finally provides a theoretical form to the Leninist ability of political inversion and reversal, an indication measured against the exigencies of the time, always followed by the support of a theoretical system. Here the paradox of Lenin’s thought is revealed and given a specific form: all of the shifts and inversions of the political line never seem opportunistic, nor are they a mere reduction of political will to the necessity of the facts that emerge from time to time. This is because there is continuity in his discourse, which is always tied to a particular class composition: Lenin’s discourse weaves the organizational and political consequences of class composition. But this is not all. Until this reading of Hegel, Lenin’s political intention was crippled and lacked an adequate theoretical substrate. Lenin interprets the general exigency of revolutionary thought in this way: as we have noted, it is not surprising that the situation repeated itself and that by 1937 another great leader of the workers’ movement, Mao Zedong, used these writings (published during the early 1930s in Russia) in his important polemical thoughts on method (his writings on practice and on contradiction), which ascribe to Lenin’s reading of Hegel an essential foundation of Marxist theoretical discourse.
So, Lenin comments on Hegel’s Science of Logic. Alongside the Phenomenology, which represents the summit and conclusion of the first period of his philosophy, this is Hegel’s most important work.1 In the context of the development of Hegel’s thought, we will try to clarify the concepts in which he grounds the science of logic and which Lenin clearly highlights in his commentary. Hegel is an idealist philosopher. An idealist philosophy is typically characterized by the affirmation that reality (being and the existence of truth) lies in the idea and that thought finds forms of realization that are more or less pure, more or less real. Idealism claims that the real world and truth inhabit a realm outside of the things offered to experience: in the mechanism of Plato and Neo-Platonism, which is the tradition of idealism and religious idealism, the real world is a mere projection of the ideal world and can participate in it to a greater or lesser extent. However, it never fully achieves truth, nor can it do so. Hegel reaffirms the principle that truth resides in the idea but distinguishes himself from all previous idealisms because for him, although each appearance of truth in the world is, indeed, transitory and partial, the movement of the idea and thought reaches totality, as a movement and as a production. Therefore, ontologically, while each fact is particular and a limited representation of the idea from the standpoint of the concrete, from the standpoint of the totality of the movement and dialectical phenomenology, the world is the totality of the idea. Idealism thus becomes dialectical: for Hegel and the Hegelians dialectics is an actualization of thought that tends toward the construction of its real totality. While at the beginning of the process being and thought do not coincide and being and truth do not initially overlap, the whole constitutes itself, in its natural and historical forms, in its relation to reality as it is given and its relation to reality as it is built through action, will, and freedom. Totality comes into being through the movement. And this leads to a further consequence: the proper definition of the mechanism of dialectics. If each appearance of being is both true and untrue, that is, true insofar as it participates in the totality and untrue insofar as it is not the totality of the truth, the entire mechanism that produces the true and thus the reconstruction of the world is one of affirmation as well as negation: an affirmation of the part of being that insists on each appearance of reality and a negation of its particularity, because each determination of the being that appears will have to be negated time and again in order to reach the totality. Only the whole is the truth, but totality must be seized within this dialectical process. From this standpoint, logic as science is none other than the methodology of a reinterpretation of all the passages through which from determinate affirmation one reascends to the truth of the whole. So, if this determinate affirmation is also the representation of a particular being, because each affirmation must be determinate and insist on an object of which it declares or negates something, then the science of logic will not be a formal science that simply studies the relations between the predicates of things, but a substantial and ontological science that follows the reality of the process through which objects come to constitute themselves in the totality.2
This is the overall framework of development of Hegel’s logic. The aim of Marxists seems to be to take this logic and stand it on its feet, to overturn it. Let’s see. Hegel’s logic, according to Marx, is a perfect tool for its inner rigor, but its defect is that it stands on its head; it pivots on the notion of absolute thought and its hegemony over reality. The young Marx, in his 1844 Manuscripts, tries to overturn the terms of the science of logic and of Hegelianism in general.3 His goal was to stand it on its feet and take as foundational the truth of singular and collective human interests rather than the truth of the abstract and the ideal, to see how dialectics can run through these interests and immediate needs and determine them in a mechanism of recomposition, to recognize on the one hand the moments when these interests are affirmed as collective ones, as reconstructions of an entity of species being, and on the other hand the moments when, in this movement, human interests reveal profound contradictions, fundamental antagonisms, and blockages to this anthropological perspective. But Lenin goes a step further and adds to what we later found in Marx’s early writings, which were not known in Lenin’s times and which were only published a century later, in 1932, by the Marx and Engels Institute of Leningrad.
What principles emerge from Lenin’s reading of The Science of Logic in a persistent, precise, almost pounding way? What is the innovative motif of his reading of Hegel with respect to Marx? What is the relevance of the reading to the concrete development of his revolutionary thought? The elements that will be noted in our clarifications of these questions are many. Let us see them one at the time.
First of all, the main aspect of Lenin’s reading is the claim that in the process of consciousness the form cannot be distinguished from the content of knowledge: there is no abstract logic that can be applied to different contents in different historical epoch. Logic, that is, the criteria of truth that we use, is completely conditioned by the whole historical reality, by the totality in which we are immersed. This hypothesis can be found at the outset of Lenin’s commentary: “But it can be only the nature of the content which stirs in scientific cognition, while at the same time it is this very reflection of the content which itself initially posits and produces its determination.”4 It keeps coming up in Lenin’s text and also represents one of the fundamental aspects of Hegel’s own thought. This is no less than Hegel’s anti-Kantian stance, and must be noted loudly and clearly, because it is the motif, or the red thread, of Lenin’s philosophical reinterpretation, the element that makes his approach consistent with the materialist foundations of Marxist theory. The issue of the unity of form and matter and of knowledge and conceptual development is analyzed in different moments of Lenin’s commentary: as the identity of form and matter (logic and epistemology) and the unity of the objective and the subjective in the process of cognition and of freedom and necessity in the process of the will. Alongside this question, Lenin also recovers from Hegel’s work a very vigorous attack on all variants of subjectivist and formalist theories of knowledge.5 He concludes:
Essentially, Hegel is completely right as opposed to Kant. Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract—provided it is correct (NB) (and Kant, like all philosophers, speaks of correct thought)—does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice,—such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality. Kant disparages knowledge in order to make way for faith: Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature, consigning God, and the philosophical rabble that defends God, to the rubbish heap.6
From this first element of Lenin’s reading of Hegel, two issues emerge. In some respects, as we noted in our discussion of his polemic against Russian Neo-Kantianism in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, one might be forgiven for thinking that Lenin is very well disposed to accept Hegel’s argument against Kant. But Lenin finds Hegel “genial” in a further respect, when he reclaims, against traditional materialism, a concept of matter that tends to merge with and touch upon that of life, while retaining a huge ontological, all-encompassing foundation that is sensitive to the intervention of praxis. We will later see how he develops these issues, but for now, we will underline that in Lenin, Hegel’s lesson is applied to the terms of mechanistic materialism and enables an expulsion, or rather, a control and recomposition, of the mechanistic component of the materialist bourgeois revolution. In this first approach, we already see the problem Hegel raises for Lenin and its philosophical definition: this is the question of the dialectical inversion of subject and object that purports a radical hegemony of the concept of the real.
On this material premise, a second order of problems opens up to Lenin: the definition of dialectic as the science of the essence and of connection. From Hegel, Lenin draws the intuition that the path of consciousness traverses the negation of the simple and the immediate only to recompose them in a process that leads to the construction of the composite real. The true proceeds through the discovery of the essence as a real connection and by deepening the levels of being that come to be gradually involved: “Negation of the simple, movement of the mind: it is along this path of self-construction alone that Philosophy can become objective, demonstrative science. The ‘path of self-construction’ = the path (this is the crux, in my opinion) of real cognition, of the process of cognizing, of movement from ignorance to knowledge.”7
Concreteness fades from the working web of allusions to immediacy, which becomes abstract and as wide as the series of elements that it needs to comprehend: from this perspective, dialectics operates an inversion and rediscovers the abstract apprehension of many connected aspects as the unity of the connection and the concreteness of the essence: “Then logic gives ‘the essential character of this wealth’ (des Reichtums der Weltvorstellung), ‘the inner nature of spirit and of the world.’ … A beautiful formula: ‘Not merely an abstract universal, but a universal which comprises in itself the wealth of the particular, the individual, the single’ (all the wealth of the particular and single!)!! Très bien!”8 Here, Lenin notes, “Cf. Capital.” Of course, the principle of determinate abstraction that Lenin had instinctively applied since his writings in the 1890s is here discovered in its logical structure! But it goes on: Lenin is led to dwell on this dialectical tension with a sort of enthusiasm. The whole of world development must be comprehended in this process, materialistically, and rigorously so: “Nonsense about the Absolute. I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically. Hegel is materialism that has been stood on its head (according to Engels), that is to say, I cast aside for the most part God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc.”9 Lenin keeps returning to the issue of the necessary nexus of reciprocal determinations in the whole:
If I am not mistaken, there is much mysticism and leeres pedantry in these conclusions of Hegel, but the basic idea is one of genius: that of the universal, all-sided, vital connection of everything with everything and the reflection of this connection, materialistisch auf den Kopf gestellter, Hegel in human concepts, which must likewise be hewn, treated, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually connected, united in opposites in order to embrace the world. Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx must consist in the dialectical elaboration of the history of human thought, science and technique.10
And as an aside, this: “And purely logical elaboration? It must coincide, as induction and deduction in Capital.”11 Subsequently, Lenin embarks on a long discussion of the logic of phenomena where he recognizes as correct the relation Hegel posits between definition of essence and connection of appearances (their unity) and thus the relation between essence and law.12 In the discussion that follows, he tends to reduce the concept of cause and effect and even the concept of mediation to the categories of connection:13 “The unfolding of the sum-total of the moments of actuality N.B. = the essence of dialectical cognition.”14 So we arrive at the threshold of a definition of a universal relationism that can be identified by the parameters of the all-sidedness of the concept of truth, the universal interdependence of concepts, and the mediatory and transacting operability of the elements. Let us open a parenthesis here. Lenin opens one too. Borne along by enthusiasm for a logic that seems to translate the materialist notion of relation (which is natural and historical, but real) into a concept of dialectic, he still senses that the operation is insufficient and slightly inconclusive. He seems disappointed not to find the Hegel he had expected: “The essence here is that both the world of appearances and the world in itself are moments of man’s knowledge of nature, stages, alterations or deepening (of knowledge). The shifting of the world in itself further and further from the world of appearances—that is what is so far still not to be seen in Hegel.”15 Well, the world does not fall out of sight, but what needs to be explained is how the dialectics, to give reason to the whole of reality, cannot simply assert that “every notion occurs in a certain relation in a certain connection with all the others.” If that is the case, “what constitutes dialectics?”16 In fact, although it excluded and overcame rigid mechanisms, it did not provide a new definition of the concept of matter, nor did the reduction of all categories of change to those of relation give meaning to the leaps, to the novelty produced, to the dialectical synthesis, especially when faced with praxis. The outcome of this part of his reading of Hegel is a sort of Spinozism that innovates on the notion of reality but is incomplete and one-sided.17 The problem is primarily logical in the proper sense. As a student of Marx, Lenin thought it necessary to make sense of the logical move that is the productive leap of knowledge from determinate abstraction to the method of the tendency. As he writes: “Aphorism: 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!!”18
N.B. Concerning the question of the true significance of Hegel’s Logic: The formation of (abstract) notions and operations with them already includes idea, conviction, and consciousness of the law-governed character of the objective connection of the world. To distinguish causality from this connection is stupid. To deny the objectivity of notions, the objectivity of the universal in the individual and in the particular, is impossible. Consequently, Hegel is much more profound than Kant, and others, in tracing the reflection of the movement of the objective world in the movement of notions. Just as the simple form of value, the individual act of exchange of one given commodity for another already includes in an undeveloped form all the main contradictions of capitalism, so the simplest generalization, the first and simplest formation of notions (judgments, syllogisms, etc.) already denotes man’s ever deeper cognition of the objective connection of the world. Here is where one should look for the true meaning, significance and role of Hegel’s Logic. This N.B.19
Here lies the problem. The uncertainty of dialectical relationism needed to be matured and overcome to discover the key to the dynamic transformation of the logical and real connection. The series essence-connection-movement needed to be translated into essence-movement-production because only the latter could represent dialectics at a higher level and directly turn it into a tool not only of materialism but also of the proletariat. “‘The truth of Being is Essence.’ Such is the first sentence, sounding thoroughly idealistic and mystical. But immediately afterwards, a fresh wind, so to speak, begins to blow: ‘Being is the immediate.’”20 Here the two series are still indistinct, but the immediate is already in the position to triumph over mediation (as simple relation) and manifest itself as an “inner pulse,” “self-movement and vitality.” This occurs as soon as Lenin shifts his analysis to Hegel’s “principle of contradiction.” Here the dialectical framework is presented as expansive, fresh, and warmed by a reality that has recovered the key to its self-determining qualitative movement.
Movement and “self-movement” (this N.B.! arbitrary (independent), spontaneous, internally-necessary movement), “change,” “movement and vitality,” “the principle of all self-movement,” “impulse” (Trieb) to “movement” and to “activity,” the opposite to “dead Being,” who would believe that this is the core of “Hegelianism,” of abstract and abstrusen (ponderous, absurd?) Hegelianism?? This core had to be discovered, understood, hinüberretten, laid bare, refined, which is precisely what Marx and Engels did.21
To sum up, the first set of problems Lenin confronts in his reading of Hegel is the definition of the unitary fabric of dialectical knowledge of the real. A second set of problems lies in the definition of a dialectical tool of reduction of the complexity of the real to connection. But in his analysis a third set of questions emerges concerning the dialectical definition of the true as movement and production.
This comes with a fourth set of problems, the critique and the inversion of the spiritual foundation of Hegel’s logic, but the third set of questions concerning the definition of the dialectics as production is the highest point of Lenin’s analysis. To conclude, we will underline the formidable originality of this reading of Hegel. It is both fresh and warm, and its depth is unequalled, especially when, as we shall see in the next conversation, Lenin uses a paradoxical practical translation of dialectics that allows him (and later Mao) to turn it into a weapon of the proletariat. In this step, the entire probability of Lenin’s interpretation of dialectics reaches an intensity that is even greater than the use Marx made of it.
NOTES
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969); and Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). I suggest the Italian translations by A. Moni (1925) and E. De Negri (1960).
2. Those who want to make contact with Hegel’s theory can do so by reading, in particular, G. Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, trans. R. Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1975); K. Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben [Hegel’s life] (Berlin: Verlag, 1944); E. Weil, Philosophie politique [Political philosophy] (Paris: Vrin, 1971); T. W. Adorno, Three Studies on Hegel, trans. S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994); and B. De Giovanni, Hegel e il tempo storico della societá borghese [Hegel and the historical time of bourgeois society] (Bari: De Donato, 1970).
3. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. M. Mulligan, in Marx and Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 5:229–348.
4. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, trans. C. Dutt, ed. S. Smith, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 38:87.