The study of the processes and methods through which elements of Hegelian philosophy and aesthetics have been appropriated and adjusted to the needs of Marxist–Leninist criticism is essential for understanding Bolshevik–Marxist aesthetics in the process of its consolidation into an official doctrine in Soviet Russia. By looking at the career of the Bolshevik Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunačarskij, it is possible to discern the extent to which the process was forged by the unsanctioned presence of Goethe and Hegel. (...) The article traces their important contributions in the causes of sustaining revolutionary romanticism and its eventual overcoming in favor of the rationality and solemnity of socialist realism. (shrink)

The Communist Manifesto—rhetorical masterpiece of proletarian revolution—was published 69 years before the Bolshevik Revolution and had a complex reception history that implicated America and Russia in the long interval between. But once the Revolution shook the world, the Manifesto became indissolubly tied to it, forged together as constitutive moments of some supratemporal revolutionary dynamic. Its subsequent and further reception in America bore the marks of Bolshevik contagion, negatively in many quarters, positively in the early American communist movement. As (...) various communist parties morphed and multiplied in the 1910s and 1920s, they announced themselves in manifestoes—communist manifestoes that in form and content followed and kept centrally in view the original of 1848. This essay explores the symbioses and synergies between the Manifesto, its Anglophone reception in America, and the Bolshevik contagion that spread into an emergent medium, namely, the manifestoes of American communist parties that heralded the revolution in Russia, a century ago. (shrink)

The materialist interpretation of history dogmatically resolves all histories into one. Marx and Engels themselves thought philosophy progresses toward the ultimate truth of Marxism, and implicitly held all historical positions interesting since their development reveals contradictions generated by inadequacies. Bolshevik Marxism's official ideology does not include philosophy's dissolution. Marxist definitions of philosophy emphasizing correct conclusions neglect distinctively philosophical argument and method. The recent Soviet view of philosophy's history has changed from the history of superstructure to the history (...) of conflicting materialist and idealist theories, thereby conceding the centrality of philosophical ideas rather than trying to reduce them to class or economic interests. (shrink)

This 1991 book is a critical study of the philosophical culture of the USSR, and the first substantial treatment of a Soviet philosopher's work by a Western author. The book identifies a tradition within Soviet Marxism that has produced significant theories of the nature of the self and human activity, of the origins of value and meaning, and of the relation of thought and language. The tradition is presented through the work of Evald Ilyenkov, the man who did most (...) to rejuvenate Soviet philosophy after its suppression under Stalin. Professor Bakhurst sets Ilyenkov's contribution against the background of the bitter debates that divided Soviet philosophers in the 1920s, of Vygotsky's 'socio-historical psychology', of the controversies over Lenin's legacy, and of the philosophy of Stalinism. He traces Ilyenkov's tense relationship with the Soviet philosophical establishment and his passionate polemics with Soviet opponents. This book offers a unique insight into the world of Soviet philosophy, the place of politics within it, and its prospects in the age of glasnost and perestroika. (shrink)

Russian Marxism was fairly late to address building its own understandings of the Russian historical process. Moreover, the Bolsheviks did not have their own historiography of “Russian history” despite the fact that, beginning in 1918, they began more and more vehemently claiming not just total ideological control but also intellectual hegemony. A confrontation between “Marxist” and “non-Marxist” understandings arose. At the same time, the real disputes within the camp of Marxist historians came down to a confrontation between the versions (...) of the historical process proposed by Georgi V. Plekhanov and Mikhail N. Pokrovskii back in the 1910s. This article broadly analyzes the disputes in the Marxist camp, from pressing political implications such as attitudes toward the state to the definition of the place of “historical facts” in theory and interpretation. We also demonstrate that it was, in fact, the understandings of Plekhanov, Leon D. Trotsky, and Pokrovskii that continue, both explicitly and implicitly, the legacy of Vasily O. Klyuchevsky’s historical schema and his understanding of the “state school,” a legacy that has remained unstudied until now. (shrink)

The study examines the original work An Attempt to Get Lenin Back on His Feet (Berlin, 1974) by Rudi Dutschke, the well-known German political philosopher and leader of the youth movement in 1968, as well as the influence of the famous Hungarian philosopher György Lukács on the ideas of Dutschke. Dutschke revealed the reasons for the impossibility of socialist ideals being feasible in the 20th century, despite the heroic attempts of the Bolsheviks and Western radical socialists to realize them. The (...) revolution occurred in a country of semi-Asian stagnating capitalism and was not supported by the European anti-capitalist revolution. As a result, after the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the social system was revived with the dominance of the state bureaucracy (the fused party-state apparatus) over society. There were no universal forms of social movement (Verkehr), which led to the fact that socialism became local, up to the danger of its abolition. At the same time, according to Dutschke, it is precisely an equal alliance between the progressive intelligentsia and the working masses that can open up new ways for the transition from a society of necessity to a society of freedom, provided that the intelligentsia renounces leaderism (which was the mistake the Bolsheviks fell into). Therefore, the figure of György Lukács is most important for Dutschke since studying his creative path makes it possible to realize the basic principles of such an equal union. The study shows that the creative path of Lukács before he entered the Comintern as one of the leaders of the section of the Hungarian Communists is characterized by the desire to find a way to solve the fundamental dilemma of the revolutionary, as he believed: either, like the Bolsheviks, strive for an uncompromising victory and the implementation of their program at the cost of violence; or to make compromises with the social democratic and even bourgeois parties, at the same time being in danger of defeat and the impossibility of implementing their ideas, primarily because the socialist intellectuals fail to establish strong ties with the working masses, and the latter may not be thoroughly imbued with anti-capitalist consciousness. Thus, Lukács can survey a spokesperson for the views of the intelligentsia, and through the criticism of these views, it will be possible to comprehend how educated people can better understand the actual needs and interests of the working people in order to pursue policies that would be more in line with them and learn how to lead the masses indeed. (shrink)

The decriminalisation of homosexuality was a measure originally adopted by the bourgeois revolutions, which was abandoned by the bourgeois parties as the rise of the labour movement led the bourgeoisie to seek a compromise with landlords, clergy and monarchy in different countries. The demand to decriminalise homosexuality was therefore taken over by the Marxist workers’ parties, such as the Social-Democratic Party of Germany before the First World War and the Bolshevik Party in Russia after the Revolution of October 1917. (...) This article outlines the cooperation between the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee led by Magnus Hirschfeld and Social Democracy to decriminalise homosexuality by removing Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code before the First World War. It also describes the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia under Lenin, with the adoption of the first Soviet Penal Code in June 1922, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s relations with prominent figures of the early Soviet government such as N.A. Semashko, the first People’s Commissar of Public Health, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education. Those ties ceased with the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933, which resulted in the destruction of the institutions created by Hirschfeld, such as the Institute for Sexual Science and the World League for Sexual Reform, while in the Soviet Union itself Stalin recriminalised homosexuality in March 1934, shortly before Hirschfeld’s death, linking homosexuality and fascism. (shrink)

This paper examines the UN provisions concerning the legitimate use of force, which justified the 1991 Gulf War, and Michael Walzer's arguments, which can be read as a justification of the UN provisions. After a brief historical sketch of the approach to internationalism of Marx, Lenin, and the early Bolshevik regime, alternative internationalist criteria of Jus ad Bellum are proposed, which assume certain forms of common oppression among peoples of different states. If certain forms of common oppression can be (...) defended (in the case of Marxist theory, exploitation and imperialism), and if one shares Walzer's concern for individual rights, then the internationalist criteria for Jus ad Bellum are morally superior to the UN's and Walzer's. (shrink)

Today, Karl Kautsky is mainly remembered for his polemics against the young Bolshevik regime or as the ‘renegade’ in Lenin’sThe Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, which pillories him for his wavering stance in opposing World War I and his outright hostility to the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Kautsky’s authority as a Marxist theoretician was seriously called into question ever since Lenin’s polemic. During the Cold War in particular, a consensus emerged which suggested that Kautsky’s views of democracy, (...) organisation and revolutionary change had little or nothing to do with the political practice of Russian Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Recently, however, several studies have challenged this consensus. They highlight the profound impact which Kautsky had on the development of Russian Bolshevism and make the case that – prior to his renegacy in 1914 – thinkers such as Lenin and Trotsky viewed Kautsky as the legitimate intellectual heir of Marx and Engels. This article introduces an autobiographical essay written by Kautsky in 1924 and calls for closer engagement with his œuvre as a whole. (shrink)

This article analyzes the successes of the Communist Party's power in Russia and the methods of achieving them from the point of view of Orthodox Christianity. The relevance of the research is due to the fact that this topic is directly related to the structure of society, and there are (often acute) discussions on this issue. In this paper, a historical and theological analysis of the topic under study is carried out on the basis of a critical study of the (...) works of V. Lenin, his closest associates, historical and theological works and historical documents on the issue under study. In this article, an attempt is made to present a systematic analysis of the subject under study, an appeal is made to opponents. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that many documents are analyzed for the first time in connection with the topic under study. Also, in more detail and systematically, in relation to the available works, the analysis of this subject is carried out. The aim of the work is a critical study of historical documents, as well as historical and philosophical works on the issue under study. The article concludes that the methods of achieving the successes of the Bolsheviks in Russia are incompatible with Christianity. In addition, atheistic construction is like the construction of the Tower of Babel, stopped by God, i.e. from the point of view of Orthodoxy, the successes of Bolshevism cannot be called successes, and millions of souls forcibly torn away from God as a result of the planting of atheism repeatedly crossed off all the achievements of the USSR. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a major reinterpretation of the nature of interwar Marxist theory. It does so by offering a new reading of the work of Karl Korsch in the context of a network of ex-communist intellectuals. In Marxism and Philosophy, Korsch responded to the split in the labour movement with a radical new claim to Marxist orthodoxy. Rather than engaging in Marx exegesis, he aimed to turn the Marxist ‘method’ on Marxism's own history. In the narrative he (...) constructed, Bolshevik-inspired Communism appeared as the next logical step in the dialectic. But this argument rested on a historicisation of Marx's own writing that led to an unresolvable tension in Korsch's work that threatened to undermine its claim to Marxist orthodoxy. Once it is understood that Marxism was a political currency as much as a purely theoretical space of argument, Korsch's reluctance to resolve the tension one way or the other becomes understandable. This reinterpretation of Korsch's work challenges the ‘Western Marxism’ paradigm in which he has been read, showing that Korsch’s work presupposed a reading of revolutionary success and potential rather than defeat and that he did not advocate a turn to superstructural or cultural questions in the manner supposed. (shrink)

Circling Marx is both a window on to the forces and concerns that have shaped Thesis Eleven over four decades and an intellectual portrait of the singular post-Marxism of one of its leading thinkers. Beilharz emphasises the existence of multiple Marxes but leans towards a Marx who suggests an expanded materialism, a non-Bolshevik Marx, and a Marx of motion, rather than laws. Addressing Marxism and socialism more widely, Beilharz again underscores multiplicity, favouring those thinkers and currents that (...) acknowledged complexity and limits, that staged something of a conversation between Marx and Weber, and that took distance from the teleology, vanguardism, and hubris that has marked parts of the Marxist tradition. Moving into more clearly post-Marxist territory, through important encounters with Heller and Feher, Bauman, Smith, and Castoriadis, Beilharz’s optic prioritises place, cultural traffic, and ambivalence, combining categories of ambitious scope with epistemological and normative circumspection, criticism with world affirmation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:96 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the other hand, he tried like Ramsay to distinguish the "all being" of God from nature; he emphasized the doctrine of final causes and of God's "excellence" as man's chief end. It is possible that Edwards's enigmatic sermon on the Trinity may have been stimulated by Ramsay's speculation on this subject, though this is a mere guess. In any case, Ramsay must have made Edwards (...) aware of Berkeley, without converting him to the kind of pluralistic metaphysics which both Ramsay and Berkeley represent. Quite apart from the historical questions of influence and contacts among philosophers, Ramsay's work is a significant event in the history of ideas; it brings to direct collision the two extremes of the Enlightenment. It brings to life in the imagination of a reader today the basic philosophical issues of the eighteenth century and it makes them relevant to those aspects of the old problems that are central issues today. HERBERTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, Cali/ornia THE ORIGINS OF MARXISM Interest in the philosophical origins of Marxism is currently so widespread as to constitute something of an intellectual phenomenon in its own right. That it denotes a shift of attention away from Marx's own emphasis on human prax~ as the cure for useless metaphysical agonies, the authors here under review would not deny. A tendency to see Marxism as an historicalphenomenon--thus applying to it the criterion of judgment inherent in Marx's own critique of his predecessors -is common to them all.Such an approach is proper to a postrevolutionary age, though this description may seem oddly chosen in view of the continuing turmoil that surrounds us. To describe the present age as postrevolutionary is after all to say no more than was implied by those nineteenth-century writers who looked back upon the French Revolution. If our situation today is similar, it does not follow that we are about to enter calmer waters, though for all one knows the East-West antagonism may gradually come to resemble the rather undramatic tension which characterized Anglo-French relations during the earlier part of the Victorian era. The Russian Revolution might then at last appear as a closed chapter, and Marx himself as its Rousseau: the philosopher of one particular historic upheaval whose consequences have now been absorbed. Such an attitude presupposes that one is not unduly concerned with the intellectual claims of Soviet Marxism but treats it as the ideology of a society which has not yet acquired a self-critical understanding of its own myths. This would be quite in tune with Marx's own approach, though hardly with the Leninist belief that the Russian Revolution represents the start of a new epoch: that of consciousness raised to the level of global reconstruction. For to say that the Bolsheviks, like the Jacobins before them, unwittingly prepared the way for a new exploitative society is to say that the enterprise was a failure. At the same time, recognition of this fact validates the Marxian insight into the peculiar NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 97 mechanism whereby history has hitherto managed to accomplish its real aims. Thus the critical, or "revisionist," Marxist is able to have it both ways. What prevents the writers under review from taking this easy way out is their concern with the philosophical origins of Marxism. If Marx had been content, like Weber and Pareto, to analyze the mechanism whereby society renews itself from time to time, his position would be unassailable, but by the same token he would simply be another scholar. The perennial interest of Marxism springs from that "union of theory and practice" of which Marx himself was the first and greatest exemplar. No one who has felt the spell of the Theses on Feuerbach or the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts can fail to inquire whether these writings may not outlast the dissolution of the scholastic system constructed by Engels and the epigoni. To say this is not to range oneself on the side of romanticism in its current quasi-anarchist form, which plainly corresponds to a loss of interest in politics. It is simply to acknowledge that thinking people will go on asking... (shrink)

The paper questions an official narrative of Soviet Marxism that had been formulated both by the Bolshevik leaders and the Western European Marxists. It proposes to shift the discussion from a historically constituted understanding of Soviet Marxism as a partisanship of theory to the epistemic conditions of Marxism after the October Revolution. The paper argues that a post-revolutionary Soviet logic assumes that theory should start where Marx ended and that it should act in a Marxist fashion (...) across all conceptual and practical realms. Instead of asking ‘how’, the Soviet thought returns to the old pre-critical question of ‘what is’, and reformulates this ‘what is’ in the Marxist post-critical terms. Constructing a new critical concept of Soviet Marxism, the paper proceeds with the analysis of the post-critical status of knowledge after the revolution and recovers forgotten and repressed epistemological alternatives to orthodox Bolshevism. (shrink)

The centrally-planned Soviet command economy was one of the twentieth century’s most radical and complex economic, political and social experiments. Its establishment did not coincide with the onset of Soviet power across the former Russian Empire in 1917-1918, but instead resulted from fifteen years of shifts, readjustments and breaks, and through experiments with both quasi-socialist market economics and centralised administrative command practices. The present article surveys the conflictual relationship between Soviet planning and Marxism in this period. It demonstrates how (...) the Stalinist command economy contradicted much of the theory and practice that the Bolsheviks themselves had thought ought to characterise the new economic system. (shrink)

The most valuable political theoretical contribution made by Marx's idea of socialism is towards the resolution of the seeming opposition of mass democracy and rational government. Marx follows Hegel's redefinition of political rationalization as the actualization of the nascent self?consciousness of the existing ethical world when he uses socialism as a statement of those tendencies of bourgeois society that will create the perspectives of social awareness that allow mass democracy. This thesis is made against aspects of the interpretation of Marx's (...) relation to Hegel in Bolshevik political theory. I claim that the Bolshevik idea of socialism as the militant political intervention of the dictatorship of the proletariat develops, through Engels, a position taken with respect to Hegel's philosophy of right in Marx's Rhenish Journal articles. This idea is, however, pre?Hegelian in the sense that it is open to a democratic criticism based on the philosophy of right understood in an alternative fashion. In his writings after leaving the Rhenish Journal and up to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx makes this alternative available, and the notion of socialism he arrives at here turns on an awareness of the contradictions which make the militant political imposition of freedom impossible. Whereas for Bolshevism socialism is to be imposed on existing society, for Marx it is more the development within that society that makes possible mass democratic freedom. (shrink)

The Lukács Circle in Szeged, a spontaneous, unofficial organization of young Hungarian scholars and philosophy teachers, characteristically represented Georg Lukács' influence on young Hungarian intelligentsia in the period of late socialism. In this paper, the author recalls and critically analyses the intellectual milieu and motives that led a considerable part of young Hungarian intelligentsia of that time to make a cult of Lukács' philosophy. The key to the analysis is the ambiguous character of the political feelings and philosophical orientation of (...) many young people in the period of late socialism and the paradoxical non-bourgeois bourgeois character of Lukács' philosophy. Lukács' young followers were dissatisfied with the political conditions of real socialism and with official Marxism. However, they considered themselves Marxists and were convinced by the anti-capitalist, romantic idea of democratic socialism. In the eyes of his young followers, Lukács was a genuine philosopher whose teaching was interwoven by his wide-ranging bourgeois middle-class education, promising both a real philosophical alternative to official Marxism and a high-level philosophical foundation for a non-capitalist but democratic future human history. The author argues that Lukács' philosophy did not satisfy these expectations. In his political philosophy, the philosopher could not move away from the mythological idea concerning the leading role of the communist party and therefore could not elaborate a genuine philosophical foundation for the idea of democratic socialism. Despite the superiority of his philosophy, his methodology and approach to the history of philosophy failed to provide a real philosophical alternative to the Bolshevik tradition of Marxism. (shrink)

The "father of Russian Marxism", George Plekhanov directed most of his writings against the Russian "populist" movement to which he once belonged. He insisted that although, in principle, in semi-feudal societies such as the Russian, the first revolution would of necessity have to be a "capitalist" one. However, he noted that bourgeoisie was too weak to bring it about and thus it fell upon the proletariat to conduct "both" revolutions. However, he condemned the methods of Lenin and the Bolsheviks (...) soon after 1917. In books such as Socialism and the Political Struggle, Our Differences and On the Development of the Monist View of History, Plekhanov argued that a successful Marxist revolution could only take place after the development of capitalism. According to Plekhanov, it was the industrial proletariat who would bring about a socialist revolution. Plekhanov was strongly opposed to the political views of people who argued that it would be possible for a small group of dedicated revolutionaries to seize power from the Tsar. Plekhanov warned that if this happened, you would replace one authoritarian regime with another and that a "socialist caste" would take control who would impose a system of "patriarchal authoritarian communism. (shrink)

After the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, an attitude spread inside Marxist movements and parties, according to which every mass movement of the subaltern classes was celebrated as an ascetic redemption of the “last” and of the “poor” men, while every prosaic and “bourgeois” demand for a development of the productive forces was ignored, in a sort of messianic wait for a bourgeois society's palingenesis. Antonio Gramsci was reluctant towards this tendency. He was interested instead in building and defending the (...) new revolutionary State, being aware of the arduous and contradictory process of construction of the new social order. Hence it springs the concern of Italian historical materialism in phenomena such as Americanism and Fordism and towards the industrial production’s techniques of organization. A concern shared by Gramsci with Lenin, according to whom the revolutionary State needs to assimilate every scientific achievement as a useful tool to ensure the development of the Soviet country and to overcome a generalized misery and a backwardness that endangered its survival. (shrink)

Crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, written before and during the Bolshevik Revolution by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism. Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest (...) in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. This volume collects crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism. Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov's vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov's writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists seem newly relevant. Contributors Alexander Bogdanov, Alexander Chizhevsky, Nikolai Fedorov, Boris Groys, Valerian Muravyev, Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood A copublication with e-flux, New York. (shrink)

Alexander Herzen was the most outstanding figure in the early period of the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin claimed him as a forerunner of the Bolsheviks, and Soviet scholars have sought to establish his latent sympathy with Marxism. In the west on the other hand, he has been seen as a precursor of Solzhenitsyn, the personification of protest against all forms of oppression. Dr Acton provides a compelling intellectual biography. The focus is on the years between 1847 and 1863. Herzen's (...) ideas are set in the context of those political developments and dramatic private experiences that affected his outlook. His profound faith in human nature and in the inevitable triumph of socialism was undermined not only by the failure of the revolutions of 1848, but even more deeply by personal catastrophe - the discovery of the infidelity of his beautiful wife Natalie. This dual blow, Dr Acton shows, had a decisive impact upon Herzen's approach to Russian problems. It lay at the root of the ambivalent attitude he adopted towards peasant revolution in the critical period of Emancipation. (shrink)

A political and intellectual biographical study of Lenin which focuses on those aspects of his thought and political activities that had a bearing on the accession of the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917 and the creation of the Soviet state. The book places Lenin in the context of his times and shows his relationship to other socialist thinkers. In particular it locates Lenin within the development of Marxist thought in Russia. Its historiographical chapter reveals the political factors which (...) influenced the way biographies of Lenin were written in the Soviet Union. The book makes use of first hand materials including sources from the Russian archives. (shrink)

Following the October Revolution of 1917 the Bolsheviks embarked upon a series of initiatives in order to bring about a socialist economic order. Traditional accounts of these events?"War Communism?; and the New Economic Policy?are deficient in two respects. First, they do not consider the policy implications of early twentieth?century Marxism. Second, they do not appreciate the economic coordination problems such policies would, and did, encounter. As a result, the standard account of early Soviet socialism is distorted. This paper attempts (...) to rectify these deficiencies by discussing the Bolshevisks? own assessments of their purposes and exploring the consequences of their policies in the period 1918?1921. (shrink)

In May 1909, Lenin published Materialism and empiriocriticism, a polemical assault on forms of positivistic empiricism popular among members of the Bolshevik intelligentsia, especially his political rival Alexander Bogdanov. After expounding the core claims on both sides of the debate, this essay considers the relation of the philosophical issues at stake to the political stances of their proponents. I maintain that Lenin’s use of philosophical argument was not purely opportunistic, and I contest the view that his defence of realism (...) was designed as a philosophical rationale for revolutionary vanguardism, arguing instead that Lenin primarily saw himself as defending the world-view of ordinary rank-and-file Marxists against varieties of philosophical obscurantism. Although of marginal influence at the time of its first publication, Materialism and empiriocriticism was later celebrated as a model of philosophical excellence, as the cult of Lenin was fashioned by Stalin. As a result of the text’s subsequent prominence, Lenin’s manner of philosophizing, with its vitriol and abuse, had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of Soviet philosophical culture. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relation between Marxism and the Soviet productivist economy. While historical scholarship rarely explores the intellectual context in which the Soviet experiment unfolded, ecomarxists tend to describe the Soviet Union’s mistaken path as a result of the loss of ‘metabolic’ thinkers following the rise of Stalin. This article challenges the neat, purported divide between a ‘metabolic’ and ‘productivist’ Marxism by analysing the energy-economic thinking of Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, a (...) Bolshevik engineer and old friend of Lenin. As chairman of both the electrification commission (GOELRO) and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), Krzhizhanovskii conceptualised the energy economy as something embedded in the metabolism of nature and society and as the technical-economic basis of the socialist economy. This argument drew its strength from his idea that production is part of the general, ongoing life-process, and the hope that large-scale electrification and electro-chemistry could help govern the metabolism between nature and society more rationally – both arguments commonly found among contemporary natural scientists. Any ecomarxist attempt to recover the concept of metabolism today has to come to terms with its productivist and technocratic history. (shrink)

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in (...) late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

It is clear enough why both major propaganda systems insist upon this fantasy. Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist (...) ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist -- surely any serious Marxist -- should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism. (shrink)

The centrally-planned Soviet command economy was one of the twentieth century’s most radical and complex economic, political and social experiments. Its establishment did not coincide with the onset of Soviet power across the former Russian Empire in 1917-1918, but instead resulted from fifteen years of shifts, readjustments and breaks, and through experiments with both quasi-socialist market economics and centralised administrative command practices. The present article surveys the conflictual relationship between Soviet planning and Marxism in this period. It demonstrates how (...) the Stalinist command economy contradicted much of the theory and practice that the Bolsheviks themselves had thought ought to characterise the new economic system. (shrink)

ArgumentBy the late nineteenth century, science pedagogues and academicians became involved in a vast movement to popularize science throughout the Russian empire. With the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many now found the new Marxist state a willing supporter of their goals of spreading science to an under-educated public. In the Stalin era, Soviet state officials believed that the spread of science and technology had to coalesce with the Communist Party's utilitarian goals and needs to revive the industrial (...) sector of the economy. This resulted in a new Stalinist technologically oriented popularization campaign. In the Khrushchev era (1953–64), Soviet politicians became increasingly more aware of the competitive power of Soviet technology in the global arena and developed extensive campaigns to publicize Soviet feats for a broad domestic and foreign public audience. This was particularly true for topics such as the space program and big technologies such as nuclear power. (shrink)

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in (...) late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

Georg Lukacs's The Process of Democratization provides indispensable reading for an understanding of the revolution that swept Russia and Eastern Europe during 1989-1990. Lukacs, a spokesman for anti-Bolshevik communism, was the advance guard of anti-Stalinist reform. Written in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, his book was a precursor to many of the Gorbachev reforms. Lukacs was the leading communist intellectual in the world until his death. During his last 15 years, he embarked upon a massive effort to revive (...) Marxism as philosophy, as aesthetics, and as politics. The Process of Democratization was part of this attempt at a Marxist renaissance. He would probably be surprised to find that the Second Russian Revolution of 1989-1990 moved far beyond his reformism, overthrowing even the anti-Stalinist communism that he fought to retain. (shrink)

Georg Lukacs's The Process of Democratization provides indispensable reading for an understanding of the revolution that swept Russia and Eastern Europe during 1989-1990. Lukacs, a spokesman for anti-Bolshevik communism, was the advance guard of anti-Stalinist reform. Written in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, his book was a precursor to many of the Gorbachev reforms. Lukacs was the leading communist intellectual in the world until his death. During his last 15 years, he embarked upon a massive effort to revive (...) Marxism as philosophy, as aesthetics, and as politics. The Process of Democratization was part of this attempt at a Marxist renaissance. He would probably be surprised to find that the Second Russian Revolution of 1989-1990 moved far beyond his reformism, overthrowing even the anti-Stalinist communism that he fought to retain. (shrink)

This paper explains how A. Bogdanov changed from a left Bolshevik impatient for armed insurrection into a moderate proponent of revolution through cultural transformation by placing him in the context of a debate over epistemology among Russian Social Democrats in the early twentieth century. By relying on neo-Kantian epistemology to justify socialist revolution, N. Berdyaev actually began to turn away from Marxism. Lenin espoused a naive realism that was consistent with scientific socialism, but which did not satisfy Bogdanov. (...) Empiriomonism, Bogdanov’s neo-Positivist epistemology, led him away from violent revolution and toward a proletarian cultural revolution. (shrink)

The studying of Marx, said Gyorgy Lukäcs at the beginning of the 1920s, does not mean the uncriticised recognition of the results of his researches, nor the set in well-defined theses, the interpretation of a book. One has to become absorbed in the ceuvre of Marx, so that then, as a second step, one can commence the systematic elaboration of the problems of our age. It is unjust that in western philosophies, especially in the Anglo-Saxon concerning literature the name of (...) the old-age Lukäcs does not appear, or is present as that of some Stalinist inquisitor, the indisputable pillar of Marxism and the Bolshevik movement. Yet his late piece of labour, his vast ontology experiment convincingly shows how one can penetrate the original texts of Marx and at the same time preserve one's conceptual souvereignity, sense of reality, and one's capacity, at least in a latent way, to judge or surpass the thoughts of one's master. This study aims to interpret the problem of Lukäcs's relation to Marx through the analysis of the labour concept of Lukäcs, and would like to prove that the rereading of Lukäcs (and Marx) can serve with surprises, new meanings and morals even today. (shrink)

At the beginning of 20th century, there was a problem of establishing which version of the association of Kant’s and Marx’s ideas is correct. If some Legal Marxists more or less combined Kant and Marx, most Russian Social Democrats, especially Bolsheviks, were against such an association. Under the influence of G. V. Plekhanov, Russian Marxists announced a sharply critical attitude toward Kant’s philosophy. This position was reinforced by Russian philosophers, poets, and slavophiles who accused Kant of being militarist. During the (...) World War I, both tendencies faced each other. Plekhanov’s desperate appeal to „the simple laws or morals and justice” and Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”, which was supported by L. I. Axelrod, failed. It was rejected by the majority of Marxists both during the World War I and after the triumph of the 1917 October Revolution. (shrink)

Trotsky wrote his Terrorism and Communism in 1920, as a response to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same title of the previous year. Trotsky’s aim was to win over, to the side of the Bolshevik view of socialism, the various European socialist political parties. Trotsky’s book is a rare document in the history of political thought. It is a candid and impassioned defense of the Bolshevik view that the period of transition to socialism is incompatible with both individual (...) liberties and democratic institutions as we normally understand them, and requires instead a one-party state with unlimited powers, prepared to use instruments of terror and repression to achieve its goals. In two articles that he wrote in the late 1930s, he elaborated on this view: he sought to provide an explicitly philosophical defense of theBolsheviks’ use of terror and repression.Trotsky’s views merit examination for several reasons: first, because they illuminate the ethical underpinnings of the distinctively Bolshevik view of socialism, and second, because they force one to come to terms with the question of how intelligent, reflective, and decent individuals could have advanced policies that strike us today as ghastly. In this paper I try to piece together Trotsky’s arguments as they bear upon both the Civil War and the immediate postwar period of reconstruction. (Here I focus on his critique of democracy, his defense of terror, and his defense of compulsory labor service and the militarization of labor. This proves to be an ideal point of entry into the ethical considerations that underlie his conception of party and state.) I also examine criticisms of the policies that Trotsky was defending—criticisms that were advanced by Marxists of such disparate stripes as Kaustky, on the one hand, and Rosa Luxemburg, on the other. (shrink)

This volume offers a critical examination of the early works of Vladimir Solov'ëv, Russia's most famous and systematic philosopher. It presents a philosophical critique of his early writings up to 1881 from an immanent viewpoint and examines Solov'ëv's intended contributions to philosophy against the background of German Idealism, including Schopenhauer, and the positivism of his day. Examining contemporary reactions to his writings by leading figures of his day, such as Chicherin and Kavelin, The Early Solov'ëv and His Quest for Metaphysics (...) reveals the small but vibrant philosophical community in Russia during the immediate decades before the Bolshevik Revolution. It provides a detailed discussion of Solov'ëv's confrontation with his philosophical opponents and shows how his emphasis on developing a metaphysical ontology rather than epistemology exerted a virtual paradigmatic influence on Russian philosophy for years to come. This volume also sets Solov'ëv's writings against a detailed intellectual biography of these early years, drawing on letters to friends and relatives including reminiscences, and challenges many of the received claims concerning his actions and positions, particularly his alleged youthful mystical visions. In addition, the book features two appendices: one that sketches the early Russian reception of French positivism against which Solov'ëv reacted in the name of metaphysics and another that presents a fascinating look at the Solov'ëv family background, which produced at once intellectual as well as dysfunctional members. Presenting a rare picture of the non-Marxist intellectual scene in 19th century Russia, The Early Solov'ëv and His Quest for Metaphysics will be of interest to graduate students and researchers looking for a philosophically informed approach to this unique thinker and era. (shrink)

Georg Lukacs's The Process of Democratization provides indispensable reading for an understanding of the revolution that swept Russia and Eastern Europe during 1989-1990. Lukacs, a spokesman for anti-Bolshevik communism, was the advance guard of anti-Stalinist reform. Written in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, his book was a precursor to many of the Gorbachev reforms. Lukacs was the leading communist intellectual in the world until his death. During his last 15 years, he embarked upon a massive effort to revive (...) Marxism as philosophy, as aesthetics, and as politics. The Process of Democratization was part of this attempt at a Marxist renaissance. He would probably be surprised to find that the Second Russian Revolution of 1989-1990 moved far beyond his reformism, overthrowing even the anti-Stalinist communism that he fought to retain. (shrink)

Trotsky wrote his Terrorism and Communism in 1920, as a response to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same title of the previous year. Trotsky’s aim was to win over, to the side of the Bolshevik view of socialism, the various European socialist political parties. Trotsky’s book is a rare document in the history of political thought. It is a candid and impassioned defense of the Bolshevik view that the period of transition to socialism is incompatible with both individual (...) liberties and democratic institutions as we normally understand them, and requires instead a one-party state with unlimited powers, prepared to use instruments of terror and repression to achieve its goals. In two articles that he wrote in the late 1930s, he elaborated on this view: he sought to provide an explicitly philosophical defense of theBolsheviks’ use of terror and repression.Trotsky’s views merit examination for several reasons: first, because they illuminate the ethical underpinnings of the distinctively Bolshevik view of socialism, and second, because they force one to come to terms with the question of how intelligent, reflective, and decent individuals could have advanced policies that strike us today as ghastly. In this paper I try to piece together Trotsky’s arguments as they bear upon both the Civil War and the immediate postwar period of reconstruction. (Here I focus on his critique of democracy, his defense of terror, and his defense of compulsory labor service and the militarization of labor. This proves to be an ideal point of entry into the ethical considerations that underlie his conception of party and state.) I also examine criticisms of the policies that Trotsky was defending—criticisms that were advanced by Marxists of such disparate stripes as Kaustky, on the one hand, and Rosa Luxemburg, on the other. (shrink)

Trotsky wrote his Terrorism and Communism in 1920, as a response to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same title of the previous year. Trotsky’s aim was to win over, to the side of the Bolshevik view of socialism, the various European socialist political parties. Trotsky’s book is a rare document in the history of political thought. It is a candid and impassioned defense of the Bolshevik view that the period of transition to socialism is incompatible with both individual (...) liberties and democratic institutions as we normally understand them, and requires instead a one-party state with unlimited powers, prepared to use instruments of terror and repression to achieve its goals. In two articles that he wrote in the late 1930s, he elaborated on this view: he sought to provide an explicitly philosophical defense of theBolsheviks’ use of terror and repression.Trotsky’s views merit examination for several reasons: first, because they illuminate the ethical underpinnings of the distinctively Bolshevik view of socialism, and second, because they force one to come to terms with the question of how intelligent, reflective, and decent individuals could have advanced policies that strike us today as ghastly. In this paper I try to piece together Trotsky’s arguments as they bear upon both the Civil War and the immediate postwar period of reconstruction. I also examine criticisms of the policies that Trotsky was defending—criticisms that were advanced by Marxists of such disparate stripes as Kaustky, on the one hand, and Rosa Luxemburg, on the other. (shrink)

The state, by V.I. Lenin.--The revolutionary part played by law and the state; a general doctrine of law, by P.I. Stuchka.--The theory of Petrazhitskii: Marxism and social ideology. Law, our law, foreign law, general law, by M.A. Reisner.--The general theory of law and Marxism, by E.B. Pashukanis.--The right deviation in the Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Political report of the Central (Party) Committee to the XVI Congress, 1930, by J.V. Stalin.-- The Soviet state and the revolution in law, by (...) E.B. Pashukanis.--Socialism and law, by P. Yudin.--The fundamental tasks of the science of Soviet socialist law, by A.Y. Vyshinsky.--Report to the XVIII Party Congress, by J.V. Stalin.--The theory of the state and law, by S.A. Golunskii and M.S. Strogovich.--The Soviet state in the war for the fatherland, by A.Y. Vyshinsky.--The relationship between state and law, by I.P. Trainin. (shrink)

Despite all that has been written about Russian historiography and how it profoundly changed after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, very little is known about the historical tradition immediately before the Soviet era. This article attempts to begin to address this issue by examining the major forces that shaped the historical and sociological thought of Nikolai Alesandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927). It argues that as Kliuchevskii’s successor and as the first professional historian to eventually present a Marxist analysis of Russian history, (...) Rozhkov was not only the most important historian at that time but one whose work best represented the most significant transition in Russia’s historical tradition. The article concludes that an examination of Rozhkov’s historical methodology offers a new interpretation of the origins of Soviet historiography. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that there is — or at least there ought to be — a correspondence between theoretical and political positions. But the very labelling of it as conventional wisdom already betrays its falsity. Sure enough, any careful examination of the record readily reveals that this correspondence hardly ever obtains. No such parallel can be drawn for the Hegelians who split into Right and Left wings with qualitatively different positions, e.g., the German Young Hegelians and the British neo-Hegelians (...) at the end of the last century. Nor is that true for Marxists who bifurcated into Social Democrats and Bolsheviks, or for the existentialists who produced Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, as well as Kierkegaard and Marcel. (shrink)

For virtually all the major schools of Western opinion, the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, between 1989 and 1991, represents a triumph of Western values, ideas, and institutions. If, for triumphal conservatives, the events of late 1989 encompassed an endorsement of “democratic capitalism” that augured “the end of history,” for liberal and social democrats they could be understood as the repudiation by the peoples of the former Soviet bloc of Marxism-Leninism in (...) all its varieties, and the reemergence of a humanist socialism that was free of Bolshevik deformation. The structure of political and economic institutions appropriate to the transition from post-Communism in the Soviet bloc to genuine civil society was, accordingly, modeled on Western exemplars—the example of Anglo-American democratic capitalism, of Swedish social democracy, or of the German social market economy— or on various modish Western academic conceptions, long abandoned in the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, such as market socialism. No prominent school of thought in the West doubted that the dissolution of Communist power was part of a process of Westernization in which contemporary Western ideas and institutions could and would successfully be exported to the former Communist societies. None questioned the idea that, somewhere in the repertoire of Western theory and practice, there was a model for conducting the transition from the bankrupt institutions of socialist central planning, incorporated into the structure of a totalitarian state, to market institutions and a liberal democratic state. Least of all did anyone question the desirability, or the possibility, of reconstituting economic and political institutions on Western models, in most parts of the former Soviet bloc. (shrink)

For virtually all the major schools of Western opinion, the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, between 1989 and 1991, represents a triumph of Western values, ideas, and institutions. If, for triumphal conservatives, the events of late 1989 encompassed an endorsement of “democratic capitalism” that augured “the end of history,” for liberal and social democrats they could be understood as the repudiation by the peoples of the former Soviet bloc of Marxism-Leninism in (...) all its varieties, and the reemergence of a humanist socialism that was free of Bolshevik deformation. The structure of political and economic institutions appropriate to the transition from post-Communism in the Soviet bloc to genuine civil society was, accordingly, modeled on Western exemplars—the example of Anglo-American democratic capitalism, of Swedish social democracy, or of the German social market economy— or on various modish Western academic conceptions, long abandoned in the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, such as market socialism. No prominent school of thought in the West doubted that the dissolution of Communist power was part of a process of Westernization in which contemporary Western ideas and institutions could and would successfully be exported to the former Communist societies. None questioned the idea that, somewhere in the repertoire of Western theory and practice, there was a model for conducting the transition from the bankrupt institutions of socialist central planning, incorporated into the structure of a totalitarian state, to market institutions and a liberal democratic state. Least of all did anyone question the desirability, or the possibility, of reconstituting economic and political institutions on Western models, in most parts of the former Soviet bloc. (shrink)

Continuing the exploration of a theme that has figured prominently in previous issues of this journal, articles translated for the present issue illuminate various aspects of the fate of philosophy in twentieth-century Russia. The development of philosophy in Russia has encountered extraordinary institutional obstacles for nearly two centuries. Following the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, the tsarist authorities banned the teaching of philosophy in university classrooms as a potential source of revolutionary ideas. The ban was partially modified in 1863 only to (...) permit commentary on certain specified texts of ancient philosophy and was not lifted until 1889. During the 1920s, the Bolsheviks in authority gradually enforced increasingly strict ideological controls on the teaching and publishing of philosophy, so that by the early 1930s no doctrine other than the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy could be taught or advocated in print. (shrink)

ArgumentJacob Lestschinsky emerged as the leading social scientist in pre-1917 circles of Yiddishist Marxist nationalists, most notably the Territorialists, who sought to create Jewish statehood outside Palestine. Lestschinsky played a central role in Jewish institutions formed in Ukraine in 1918–1920. A convinced anti-Bolshevik, he lived in Germany, then in Poland, America, and eventually in Israel. He combined two careers: a popular Yiddish journalist and an influential scholar. He conducted demographic and statistical studies under the auspices of the Yiddish Scientific (...) Institute whose headquarters were in Vilna until the beginning of World War II and were later moved to New York. Lestschinsky was one of the fathers of YIVO and was associated with the organization until the 1950s. In January 1945, during a YIVO conference in New York, he was the first to estimate the number of Holocaust victims as six million. This article analyzes Lestschinsky's theoretical outlook and its transformation under the influence of the vicissitudes of Jewish life. (shrink)

The studying of Marx, said Gyorgy Lukäcs at the beginning of the 1920s, does not mean the uncriticised recognition of the results of his researches, nor the set in well-defined theses, the interpretation of a book. One has to become absorbed in the ceuvre of Marx, so that then, as a second step, one can commence the systematic elaboration of the problems of our age. It is unjust that in western philosophies, especially in the Anglo-Saxon concerning literature the name of (...) the old-age Lukäcs does not appear, or is present as that of some Stalinist inquisitor, the indisputable pillar of Marxism and the Bolshevik movement. Yet his late piece of labour, his vast ontology experiment convincingly shows how one can penetrate the original texts of Marx and at the same time preserve one's conceptual souvereignity, sense of reality, and one's capacity, at least in a latent way, to judge or surpass the thoughts of one's master. This study aims to interpret the problem of Lukäcs's relation to Marx through the analysis of the labour concept of Lukäcs, and would like to prove that the rereading of Lukäcs (and Marx) can serve with surprises, new meanings and morals even today. (shrink)

Interest in esoteric and mystical aspects of Islam in present-day Russia and its Soviet and tsarist predecessors is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The article starts with a critical discussion of Aleksandr Dugin’s interpretations of Sufism in his ambitious intellectual project Noomachia: Wars of the Intellect [and] Civilizations of Borderlands. The author then compares Dugin’s conceptualizations of Sufism with those of several Russian writers who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose portrayal of Sufism and its (...) followers is similar to Dugin’s in some important respects. These ideologically driven constructions of Sufism stand in sharp contrast to the self-consciously objective scholarly ones that emerged in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century within the Russian academic and teaching institutions specializing in Eastern religions, languages, and cultures. The author argues that Russian academic conceptualizations of Sufism mirrored those of the fin-de-siècle German Islamology and then proceeds to examine the profound changes in Russian attitudes to Sufism, and Islam generally, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state that based its legitimacy on the Marxist-Leninist concept of history with its pervasive atheism, materialism, and emphasis on class struggle. It shaped Soviet-era academic and nonacademic approaches to Sufism until the mid-1980s, when Soviet scholars began to question the Marxist-Leninist certainties of the previous six decades. (shrink)

This is a timely critique of contemporary Marxist theory, its implications for social structure, and its practical dilemmas. Three themes appear throughout: the mythologizing of Marx, the rationale of Revolution, and the significance of history for social philosophy. Contrary to the approach of many commentators, Hook emphasizes the tremendous differences between the "early" and "late" Marx. He insists that "to judge Marx’s meaning by his own intent, we must go to the published works for which Marx took public responsibility." In (...) the course of the discussion, the author criticizes contemporary Marxist theory. It has itself become an "ideology," a mythology with an uncritical belief in the seemingly universal solution to human ills offered by the socialization of the means of production through revolution. Hook emphasizes that the tone of later Marxist writings, particularly Capital, had gradually shifted away from any belief in the inevitability of violent revolution. From this perspective the author traces the ambiguities of Marx’s writings that afforded the opportunity for Leninist-Stalinist revisionism on this and other issues. Hook is suspicious of the facile and selective exegesis of Marx’s writings used to support the political bias of many commentators. Revolution itself has become a symbol, which, in the author’s view, is often taken up uncritically to support a myth of society. In this context Hook has an enlightening discussion of the putative "right" to revolution. It is essentially an extralegal power, legitimate only where the context of the historical events makes intralegal change absolutely impossible. The author is therefore disturbed by the "cult of revolution" which uses a mythologized Marx to support a program of deliberate, episodic violence as a strategy of social change. The significance of historical experience is evident throughout these later chapters, particularly where Hook undertakes a reevaluation of the Bolshevik Revolution. The historical and philosophical misconceptions underlying ideologies of violence are the most frequent subjects of his criticism. These ideologies have sought to draw moral support from legitimizing examples of history, as well as from the mythologized Marx. Hook goes to great lengths to deny them any such support. Hook concludes with an examination of the emerging scheme of human rights, insisting that they must be understood in their historical context, and that democratic principles are the key to their full realization. (shrink)