Re: Exchanges on Marxism and ecology

[David Bruce <dave_bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 21/10/99, Carrol Cox wrote:

>This carries on a tradition which I first encountered back in the '70s
>in a *Radical America* writer, who referred to "Lenin's philosophically
>embarassing *MEC*." But all these references to Lenin as a poor
>philosopher assume the priority of philosophy to all other forms of
>thought and action. In fact, referring to Lenin as a poor philosopher
>is like referring to Einstein as a poor designer of electric stoves.

Nonsense. Einstein never claimed to design stoves - you are trivializing
the issue.

Lenin wrote and published a book that claimed to be a philosophical polemic
- and we are entitled to judge it as such. Its problem was twofold. First,
as you yourself stress, it tried to solve political problems with
philosophical weapons. This assumes that there is a one-to-one
correspondence between a political and a philosophical position - the
mother and father of an assumption that will generally fail. It led him to
misrepresent the position of his opponents in a variety of ways. As they
have all but disappeared, this possibly matters little, although as a
Marxist I have a weakness for defending the defenceless.

I certainly do not assume the priority of philosophy to all other forms of
thought and action - I am a materialist - but I do defiantly assert the
independence of philosophy from day-to-day political polemic. (BTW, Soviet
philosopher Ilyenkov, in a very double-edged "defence" of MEC,  pays
poignant tribute to Bogdanov's personal courage - something no-one else
bothered to do.)

But (and this is the second problem with the book) Lenin also trivialized
the philosophy of Kant, Berkeley and others. Worse, he vulgarized the
philosophical premises of materialism. The irony was that he formed a
"philosophical bloc" with his political opponent Plekhanov to inflict a
political defeat on errant tendencies in his own ranks. Lenin was
indifferent to Bogdanov's philosophy until he developed political
differences with him and remained uncritical of Plekhanov's philosophy
until the day he died. One can argue that he began to make amends in the
"Notebooks". I don't, but that's another discussion.

What you cannot argue was that Lenin had any real grounding in the
philosophical basics in 1908. Politically, economically and socially Lenin
was a Marxist. Philosophically, he did not know what he was talking about.

Plekhanov was the inventor of the phrase "dialectical materialism" - I defy
you to find it in Marx or Engels' writings. His was a static and moribund
(if scholarly) materialism which was, as Engels expressed it elsewhere, " .
. . the shallow, vulgarized form in which the materialism of the eighteenth
century continues to exist today in the heads of naturalists and physicians".

Without a critique of Plekhanov, Lenin could never make a full critique of
the Machists. And a critique of Plekhanov's philosophy was something Lenin
was neither willing nor able to make. And so, inexorably, philosophy in the
Marxist movement began to become, not a small but crucial component of
humanity's emancipation, but a cudgel.


>If one reads *MEC* as an attempt to prove materialism -- i.e.
>as a doctoral thesis in the Harvard philosophy department -- then
>it is indeed "poor philosophy" as an article by Einstein would be
>a poor manual for the manufacture of electric stoves. But it is
>a political work within the marxist tradition, the burden of which
>is to demonstrate that certain bourgeois philosophical currents,
>when adopted by marxists, dissolve marxism from inside.


That, leaving the repeated banality about stoves to one side, may have some
truth. The issue as to whether it succeeds is a different question. I argue
that it doesn't because Lenin was out of his depth.


>It is all one large "If ... then" proposition: "If one adopts an idealist
>position and within that position tries to assert marxism, one will
>come up with nonsense." The book splendidly performs what it
>promises to perform. I recommend Sebastiano Timpanaro's work
>as a medicine to the political wooliness (or is it merely fear of
>having professors call you vulgar) that hastens to dismiss Lenin's
>book without knowing the book's purposes.


I confess it is a while since I read Timpanaro - but it is a damn sight
longer since I so much as spoke to a professor and I am indifferent to what
they call me. I move in less exalted circles. You must do better than to
suggest that people only disagree with Lenin because they are cowards or
politically suspect. I have studied MEC at length and I concluded that the
book is a failure. I do not say this as an "anti-Leninist". I respect his
political work and writings - but I am damned if I will therefore
uncritically endorse his crude "philosophical" polemics just to win the
approval of self-appointed Marxist "anti-professors".


>Since contemporary western bourgeois thought is in the midst of one
>more Return to Kant it is again worthwhile to note the futility of
>attempting to give us Kantianism as the latest word in human
>thought.


That may well be true but it is irrelevant to this discussion.


Dave


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