The Thinking Reed

in my view, can be sharp, one can ‘incriminate’ an opponent for breaches of logic, for contradicting himself, one can even wax ironical at his expense, and so on, but such discussion must not transgress the ethical standards of a scientific dispute: opponents must not be accused of writing what they have not written. Such methods as that merely hinder the development of Marxist philosophy. The time has come, at last, for everyone to understand this, but some are set in their ways… In words they are for development, but any new idea causes them to tremble. In short, they are ‘for’ development, but… without development.27

The official ideological interpretation of dialectics stripped it of every element of critical method. What suffered especially, it was said, was the principle of dialectical negation, which was reduced to a set of examples in books on ‘diamat’. Altogether, dialectical thought was formalized and subjugated, adapted to the requirements of the conservative, statocratic state: in the words of J.N. Findlay, the ‘Hegelian machinery’ was forced ‘to operate… with a quite alien and unsuitable fuel’.28 Nevertheless, in the sixties, and even more in the seventies, some quickening of dialectical philosophical thought was observable in our country.

A certain role in this was played by Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, which, under Khrushchev, were included in the ‘canonical’ texts of official ‘Marxism-Leninism’. On the one hand they helped to revive interest in Hegelian dialectics; but on the other they imposed upon Soviet philosophers a kind of universally obligatory way of interpreting Hegel, even though it is clear that Lenin’s treatment of him is not the only one possible.

Lenin, of course, did not know, when making his transcripts from notes on Hegel, that these would be transformed into a universally obligatory philosophical gospel for future generations. He did not regard himself as a philosopher. But in the perspective of Soviet philosophy Lenin pushes Marx into the background and casts his shadow over Hegel. Consequently, as we shall see, serious works on dialectics usually include a hidden polemic with Lenin — with the Philosophical Notebooks or with Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

Of substantial importance, too, was the criticism of Stalin in philosophy which began after the Twenty-Second Party Congress. However, on the whole this criticism was unproductive and abstract. Soviet philosophers were not allowed to go as far as Lukács or the Yugoslav journal Praxis, let alone the ‘Frankfurt School’.29

A serious stimulus to the development of dialectical thought was given by F. Il'enkov’s works, especially his book The Dialectics of Abstract and Concrete in Marx's ‘Capital’, published in 1960. Later, in the view of many philosophers, E. Il'enkov failed to follow up his own conclusions but tried instead to reconcile his dialectics with the official schemas, mitigating its critical sense of the negation of reality. From this standpoint his book Dialectical Logic (1974) was already a step back. All the same, Il'enkov’s works served as a school of critical thinking for a whole generation of Soviet Marxists.30 It is highly significant, too, that in his book On Idols and Ideals, this Soviet philosopher arrived, on many points, at the same conclusions as the ‘Frankfurt School’ when they dealt with the problem of the alienation of the personality and the humanistic tasks of socialism. It is hard not to compare his works to those of Erich Fromm: a similarity can be observed not only in the general ideas but even in the style.