Publication Details

Abstract

Lenin’s practical-revolutionary and theoretical activity is in literature usually referred to as an application or concretization of Marx’s teaching and especially of Marx’s dialectics. This, of course, is not wrong, but in such a formulation Lenin’s creative contribution to knowledge and to application of dialectics disappeares. The present essay concentrates upon this creative enrichment of Marxist dialectics. In Lenin’s work there are three important stages of forming the dialectical conception of reality and the dialectical method. They are, at the same time, three important stages in the development of he revolutionary movement in old Russia. The first stage comprises the period before the revolution of 1905 when Lenin, immediately before the turn of the century, entered the revolutionary movement and saw the chief condition of its successful development in the truthful knowledge of the Russian conditions in the scientific identification of the decisive force of this motion, but also of the whole structure of all its components. Lenin’s economic, juristic and sociological studies of this period theoretically flowed into the work „Who Are the Friends of the People?“ where Lenin presents a penetrating analysis of the contradictions of the halffeudal conditions and parallelly with the critique of mechanicism and ecclecticism of the narodnik theories he formulates the principles of the dialectical method as the only one that can secure truthful knowledge. The second stage comprises the period of building up the revolutionary party of the working class and may be taken for a stage of a theoretical, ideological armament of the main subject of revolution — the working clase and its organized vanguard — the revolutionary working-class party. The theoretical principles of materialism as the working- class view-of-the-world was defeded by Lenin in the clash with the subjectiveidealistic streams of empiriocriticism and empiriomonism. His work „Materialism and Empiriocriticism“ by means of developing the dialectics of absolute and relative truth as well as of dialectical matter and consciousness defeded materialistic monism of the revolutionary view-of-the-world. The richest contribution to the knowledge of dialectics is represented by Lenin’s works from the period of immediate preparations for the Great October Socialist Revolution, especially „Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism“ and „Philosophical Notebooks.“