The "Eastern" or Communist Philosophy

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (International Publishers, 2022

Why a new edition of a book written more than a century ago already translated into many languages and published in multiple editions? On the morning I received an e-mail asking me to write a foreword to this edition, I then scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed to find an update where a young intellectual posted about another young intellectual who lived decades before him: "He erupted into a meeting of the Moral Science Club [Cambridge] with a copy of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, bubbling over with enthusiasm about it and reading out passages about the class basis of philosophy. Some thought he had gone crazy. Cornforth did not. The scene had made a great impression on him. He went home, read the book and decided to join the CPGB." 1

G. Lukács' transcendental philosophy of Marxism in "History and Class Consciousness", and the reasons of its rejection by Komintern

A monograph by the Chinese academia expounding on basic opinions of Marxist philosophy, evealing the ignored or forgotten views by the classical textbook system of Marxist philosophy and ystematically demonstrating the opinions that Marx has ever expounded but not sufficiently developed with the view of practical philosophy; meanwhile coinciding with major contemporary issues in order to upgrade them into the basic opinions of Marxist philosophy and highlighting the modernity and contemporary significance of Marxist philosophy and comparison with postmodern thought. Focusing on the studies of the basic features and opinions of Marxist philosophy, the first part puts Marxist philosophy into the grand theoretical backgrounds of history of western philosophy and modern western philosophy, including postmodernism, to explore anew its theme, system features and contemporary significance. Part Two reinvestigates the historical process and thinking logic of Marx in founding historical materialism, explores the evolution of the ontology of Marxist philosophy after Marx, and analyzes, from Marx's point of view, the western philosophy of history, methods of western social science, postmodernism, post-colonialism, and the thought changes of Husserl and Derrida, with a view to highlighting the contemporary significance of Marxist philosophy.

Those wanting learn more about the history, geography, and varieties of Marxism should consult David McLellan's Marxism after Marx (4 th ed., 2007), as the bibliographies at the end of each chapter come close to providing a comprehensive compilation of titles for "Marx and Marxism" (see too the Marxists Internet Archive). This bibliography presumes some prior acquaintance with Marxism generally, and while I have a preference for so-called "analytical Marxism" (insofar as it serves on the order of a 'prescribed' or 'controlled' burn in the forest management lexicon of chaparral ecology), there are numerous works of economic, historical, political, and philosophical value outside, strictly speaking, that rubric (in other words, the former approach, while illuminating, is a necessary yet not sufficient condition toward fulfilling the promise of a full-figured assessment of what is living and what is dead in the Marxist worldview and tradition). This is far from an exhaustive compilation, thus I am happy if it fairly represents much of the better literature on Marxism in English. I welcome suggestions for additional titles. As for my own bias, much-thus not all-of my lifeworld is Marxist (other parts are Liberal, Buddhist, Jain …); in brief, it is a bit of a hodgepodge (others might describe it as replete with inconsistencies and contradictions), although I strive for coherence if only because I suspect there is a defensible-perhaps complementarydivision of intellectual, moral, and spiritual labor in this regard. "The working class contains the vast majority of human beings on the planet. In their struggle for greater freedom, power, and autonomy-for the conditions of fulfilling life-they battle for recognition that the world around them is one they have made through their laboring and that they can make anew. To reason about what the life of our species ought to be, about what we ought to do, and about how we ought to treat one another is ethical reasoning. It is necessary in order to imagine a world beyond the one we now know. And so against the capitalist insistence that there is no alternative, a working-class perspective reveals that another world is possible. But Marxist theory offers no creed of self-abnegation. That it leaves to the bourgeois ideologues preaching 'Patience.'" -Vanessa Christina Wills, Marx's Ethical Vision (Oxford University Press, 2024): 12  Collected Works (English trans.): Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works.

Communist manifesto is one of the most influential political pamphlets in the history of the world which has been commissioned by the communist league and written by one of the major communist theorist Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. The book contains Marx and Engels' theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Engels, 1848). The genre of this publication is history, sociology and philosophy.

Lenin Philosophical notebooks, 1916

We began our preparation of this volume using the Fourth Printing, having assumed that this edition marked an improvement over the previous one. Only much later did it become clear, after some spot-checking with the Third Printing , that in certain very important respects the newer printing reflected a carelessness that rendered it inferior to its the inconsistent use of Greek and German characters for the same words which introduced unnecessary confusion; there were also instances where verticle lines that Lenin placed in the margins adjacent to his comment were omitted. On a couple of other ocassions small blocks of text were reordered , and while such practice can clearly fall within the purview of editorial discretion, there were also a couple of places where a few lines of text are repeated, word for word, with no ac-where there were disrepancies between the Third and Fourth printings, be they substantive or merely annoying, the greater confidence in the Third Printing prevailed. Notwithstanding such carelessness, we proceeded to use the Fourth Printing as the basis for the formatting, layout and pagination of this digital edition. The afore-mentioned faux pas were removed and this required some reformatting, and this proceeded on the basis of the 1972 printing. Perhaps it is worth noting that neither edition was particulaly generous in translating into English the German expressions and phrases Lenin's frequently used in the body of the texts. Nor companying editorial note to indicate that such a faux pas the problem was with the editorial staff). In nearly all cases had its source in Lenin's reading notes (which suggests that predecessor. For example, in the Fourth Printing there was source: marxists.org/english

Stasis, 2017

Sovietica, 1997

Academic studies are not the mechanical result of library visits or archive research. They are also, one way or another, related to personal experience. When I first visited Moscow, capital of the USSR, in 1984, I could not foresee the many ways in which the encounter with Soviet philosophy would determine my life and academic career. The confrontation with the Soviet way of doing history of philosophy has proved to be a very fruitful experience. The desire to understand the difference with my own academic background without declaring the latter 'normal' , but at the same time evading the relativist temptation, has forced me to analyze Soviet philosophy in general, and Soviet historiography in particular, as a form of philosophical culture, one concrete answer to the question 'What is philosophy?' It has never been obvious, in Western academic philosophical culture, to study Soviet philosophy, and this research could never have been done without the lasting support and critical interest of teachers, colleagues and friends. I want to mention here the following persons: Ludwig Heyde, who made me struggle with Hegel; Edward Swiderski, whose confidence often kept me going; and Machiel Karskens, whose support in every respect has been indispensable. Also, I want to thank Tim Baerwaldt and Wilfried Simons for their professional help in the final preparation of the manuscript. A word of gratitude is due to the Soviet historians of philosophy, the aspiranty, the students, and others in Soviet Russia, esp. at the department of history of 'foreign philosophy' at Moscow State University and at the sector of history of Western philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences, who helped me conduct my research and patiently answered questions that must often have appeared very strange to them. When I first was their guest in 1984, at the height of 'stagnation', I was pleasantly surprised by the hospitality and helpfullness of the people working in my field of interest. The encounter with the complexity of Soviet philosophical culture as it actually existed has remained a source of inspiration, to which later changes, during perestrojka and thereafter, have added their impetus, rather than replacing the initial intuition that this was a topic of considerable interest. This book has served, in a longer version, as my Ph.D. thesis. The present version has been shortened, revised, and improved in many points, but I have seen no ground to make substantial changes to my analyses and conclusions. On the contrary: reactions, reviews, and recent publications have, in the main, confirmed them. In this respect, this book concludes my life as a student in philosophy, and therefore this is the place to express my gratitude to my dear parents, my mother and my late father, whose support made it possible to study philosophy to begin with. Finally, this book would have been unthinkable without the endurance and patience of three beloved ladies: my wife Vera, and my daughters, Judith and Tanja. A happy home is the basis of this work. vii The subject of this study is Soviet historiography of philosophy, istorikofilosofskaja nauka-IFN, as I shall abbreviate it-, which literally means 'historicophilosophical science' or 'scientific history of philosophy,' i.e. the account and interpretation of philosophy's past as produced by Soviet historians of philosophy, as well as the theories about the history of philosophy developed by Soviet specialists. IFN was both quantitatively and qualitatively an important part of Soviet philosophical culture, one of its many specialist branches, and not the least interesting one: it often served as a place where philosophical culture was preserved in an hostile environment, and it was, in building up considerable competence in the history of philosophy, one of the factors in the improvement of the level of Soviet philosophical culture as a whole. However, like the other disciplines within Soviet philosophical culture, IFNhad its specific nature and background. It is not only a Soviet philosophical discipline, but also an example of an historiography of philosophy, comparable in this respect to its Western counterpart, and it was, through its Marxist background, strongly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. Therefore, the first chapter of this book briefly discusses, in the first place, history of philosophy as a specialist discipline, secondly, Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy, important for the discipline in general and for IFN in particular, and, in the third place, the theoretical impulses contained in the legacy of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, important for IFN as for any branch of Soviet philosophy. After this preparation of the ground, the second chapter is dedicated to a concise historical survey and philosophical analysis of Soviet philosophical culture as it existed and developed from 1920 to the late 1980s, and in doing so tries to assess its nature. To my knowledge, it is the first attempt to do so after the disappearance of the Soviet system and its philosophical culture. The next four chapters make up the central body of this monograph. The third chapter sketches the historical development of IFN, from its foundation in the 1930s to its mature stage in the 1980s, showing both the limitations and the possibilities of this discipline. The fourth chapter discusses the place, function, form, and content of IFN as a part of Soviet philosophical culture in the so-called period of 'stagnation', which was, for IFN, a period of unprecedented bloom. The next, fifth chapter, consists of a necessarily selective, but representative survey of the work done by Soviet historians of philosophy in six different fields, from Greek Antiquity to the 'history of the philosophy of the peoples of the USSR,' showing sometimes *Cf. the backside of several volumes of the Sovietica-series in which this book is appearing, too. x 'Hegelian roots' of Soviet philosophy, this means that the texts that form the source material of this study are often difficult to render in English. To tackle this problem, I have added, when this seemed useful, the original Russian word between square brackets, and sometimes the corresponding German word, too. The most notorious case in this respect is the typically Hegelian-and Marxist!concept of Aufhebung. 15 Having a twofold meaning in colloquial German, in philosophical terminology 'aufheben' acquires, as Kojeve pointed out, a triple meaning: to cancel [supprimer, annuler], to preserve [conserver, sauvegarder], and to bring to a higher level [sublimer, elever].16 Russian 'snjatie' preserves this threefold meaning, and like the German is related to a verb: snimat'-snjat'. While Hegel was pleased to find in the German language a word that fitted his speculative thinking, and Russian philosophers freely use 'snjatie', translators have a hard time finding an appropriate equivalent. The English equivalents 'to sublate' and 'sublation', seem to be widely accepted. 17 But they are also criticized for being artificial and, in fact, not even adequate.I 8 Therefore, I have employed 'sublation' in order to obtain a continuous text, but I have inserted the Russian or German equivalent between brackets. Russian words and names have been transliterated in accordance with the ISOtransscription system, which has the great advantages of a one-to-one correspondence with the Russian and of being equally difficult for speakers of all main European languages. The only concession to the standard English transliteration is the use of 'kh' for Russian 'X'. This procedure has also been applied to widely used personal names like Gorbacev or Dostoevskij-rather than Gorbachev and Dostoyevskibecause any line drawn between familiar and unfamiliar would be arbitrary. When a name is introduced for the first time, I give the full name, including Christian name and patronymic, indicating stress, as well as dates of birth and death. xv Chapter One Three Perspectives on IFN Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx must consist in the dialectical elaboration of the history of human thought, science, and technology.