Communism: Later Philosophical Developments

Extract

Fruitful discussion between persons who accept different philosophic systems postulates a point of contact, an area of agreement in terms of which one system can translate the terms of another system. This is so because any highly developed system has its own terminology.

So far as Marxism goes, we are like the spectators of a strange and complicated game, whose players speak a foreign language. For the Marxist philosophy is not a contemplative activity, it is not a system in the sense that Hegelianism is a system; it is simply the deduction of positive knowledge from the world through our minds. Any philosophic statement is simply the best approximate account of a given situation which is valid relative to this or that point in the historical process. The situation is constituted by matter and its laws translated into the human head. This is not an ‘insight into’, but a mirroring of, environmental conditionment.

The difficulty is that words like ‘peace’, ‘justice’, and so on, have the same sound for Marxists and ourselves but mean quite different things. For the Marxist there is no meaning about the word ‘justice’ save as it receives definition in relation to one or other stage in the historical process. Indeed, only statements formulated in terms of matter in motion can be true. Hence the philosophic opinions of others are interpreted by him in relation to their exponents’ social conditionment and only affect him as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’.

For Lenin, all ‘abstractions must be taken back into the concrete, for they are only true in so far as they reject the history of developing production’. He saw his philosophic task as that of a guardian of the Marx-Engels theory in its purity.