The Thinking Reed

despite the bureaucratic support of the Soviet state for dialectical materialism, a number of able Soviet scientists have created intellectual schema [sic] within the framework of dialectical materialism that are sincerely held by their authors and that, furthermore, are intrinsically interesting as the most advanced developments of philosophical materialism. These natural scientists are best seen, just as in the case of the fourteenth-century scholastic thinkers, not as rebels against the prevailing philosophy, but as intellectuals who wish to refine the system, to make it more adequate as a system of explanation.46

At first glance this testimonial may not seem, to the Soviet reader, a very flattering one, but Graham is trying to underline the merits of the Soviet philosophy of nature. An important factor needs to be mentioned here. Engels’s theory of the dialectics of nature, being most remote from the interests of the social struggle, was the least distorted aspect of Marxist theory in Soviet textbooks. These ideas were not subjected to any special ‘reworking’ — unlike, for example, the Marxist theory of the state. It was thus possible to do serious philosophical work, up to a certain stage, on problems of the natural sciences within the framework of the official ideology. Doubts exist, to be sure, as to the correctness of Engels’s approach to the study of nature. These doubts were voiced by Lukács and by the Praxis philosophers in Yugoslavia (who saw in Engels’s ideas a revival of Hegel’s philosophy of nature), but in my view their attacks on Engels were groundless, dogmatic and extremely abstract. In any case, the fruitful development of Engels’s ideas by Soviet scholars can serve as a very strong argument against the views of the Praxis group.

Dialectical materialism, based on the ideas of Hegel and Engels on the philosophy of nature, was a powerful weapon in the hands of scientists battling against Lysenkoism. It is interesting that in the discussion about genetics both Stalin and Khrushchev showed themselves equally hostile to materialist dialectics (just as the Soviet system as a whole, with its single party, which rules out any possibility of the dynamic resolution of contradictions, is ignorant of the dialectical principles of history and is consequently doomed to eventual collapse). The lack of dialectical thinking on the part of the rulers obviously set them against scientific cognition, which requires that the world be seen in all its contradictoriness. It is therefore not surprising that in scientific debates the rulers often supported plainly un-Marxist views, and the fact that these views turned out to be ‘also’ incorrect produced a particularly grotesque situation. ‘Nothing in the philosophical system of dialectical materialism lends obvious support to any of Lysenko’s views’, observes Graham.47 It was no accident that such a prominent role in the fight against Lysenko was played by the Marxist dissident Zhores Medvedev. In situations like these the ideas of Engels, even if debatable, proved their scientific worth and ideological usefulness. Thus the dialectics of nature is used by scientists for theoretical self-defence against the voluntarism of the statocracy and is a genuinely living doctrine in the USSR. ‘Marxism as methodology and socialism as the structure of social life are not the political ideas which Soviet scientists believe because of official education only’, Zhores Medvedev rightly observes. ‘These ideas have a logic and scientific appeal which could attract scientists — and not in the USSR alone.’48 Graham came to similar conclusions: