Philosophy in The Soviet Union - Philosophical and Political Struggles in The Soviet Union

Philosophical and Political Struggles in The Soviet Union

Further information: Dialectical materialism and Marxist theory

Dialectical materialism was first elaborated by Vladimir Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908) around three axes: the "materialist inversion" of Hegelian dialectics, the historicity of ethical principles ordered to class struggle and the convergence of "laws of evolution" in physics (Helmholz), biology (Darwin) and in political economics (Marx). Lenin hence took position between a historicist Marxism (Labriola) and a determinist Marxism, close to what was later called "social Darwinism" (Kautsky). Lenin's most important philosophical rival was Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), who tried to synthesize Marxism with the philosophies of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Richard Avenarius (which were violently criticized in Materialism and Empiriocriticism). Bodganov wrote a treatise on "tectology" and was one of the founders of Proletkult after the war.

Following the 1917 October Revolution, Soviet philosophy divided itself between "dialecticians" (Deborin) and "mechanists" (Bukharin, who would detail Stalin's thesis upheld in 1924 concerning "socialism in one country"), was not a "mechanist" per se, but was seen as an ally. The mechanists (A.K. Timartizev, Timianski, Axelrod, Stepanov...), came mostly from scientific backgrounds, claimed that Marxist philosophy found its basis in a causal explanation of Nature. They upheld a positivist interpretation of Marxism which asserted that Marxist philosophy had to follow the natural sciences. Stepanov thus wrote an article flatly titled "The Dialectical Understanding of Nature is the Mechanistic Understanding". To the contrary, "dialecticians", whose background was Hegelian, insisted that dialectics could not be reduced to simple mechanism. Basing themselves mainly on Friedrich Engels' Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, they maintained that the laws of dialectics could be found in nature. Taking support on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, they responded that the mechanists' conception of nature was too restricted and narrow. Deborin, who had been a student of Georgi Plekhanov, the "father of Russian Marxism", also disagreed with the mechanicists concerning the place of Baruch Spinoza. The latter maintained that he was an idealist metaphysician, while Deborin, following Plekhanov, saw Spinoza as a materialist and a dialectician. Mechanism was finally condemned as undermining dialectical materialism and for vulgar evolutionism at the 1929 meeting of the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Institutions. Two years later, Stalin settled by fiat the debate between the mechanist and the dialectician tendencies by issuing a decree which identified dialectical materialism as the philosophical basis of Marxism-Leninism. Henceforth, the possibilities for philosophical research independent of official dogmatics virtually vanished, while lysenkoism was enforced in the scientific fields (in 1948, genetics were declared a "bourgeois pseudoscience"). However, this debate between "mechanists" and "dialecticians" would retain importance long after the 1920s.

Otherwise, David Riazanov was named director of the Marx-Engels Institute, which he had founded, in 1920. He then created the MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamt-Ausgabe), which was supposed to edit Marx and Engels' complete works. He also published authors authors, such as Diderot, Feuerbach or Hegel. Riazanov was however excluded from any political functions in 1921 for defending trade unions' autonomy.

During the Fifth Comintern Congress, Grigory Zinoviev condemned for "revisionism" the works of Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923) and of Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy. History and Class Consciousness was disavowed by its author, who made his self-criticism for political reasons (he thought that, for a revolutionary, being part of the party was the priority). It became however a leading source of Western Marxism, starting with the Frankfurt School, and even influenced Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927). Lukács then went to Moscow in the beginnings of the 1930s where he would continue his philosophical studies, and returned to Hungary after World War II. He then took part to Imre Nagy's government in 1956, and was closely watched afterwards.

Lev Vygotsky's (1896-1934) studies in developmental psychology, which opposed themselves to Ivan Pavlov's works, would be expanded in the activity theory developed by Alexei Nikolaevich Leont'ev, Pyotr Zinchenko (a member of Kharkov School of Psychology), and Alexander Luria, a neuropsychologist who developed the first lie detector.

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