Philosophy and Religion, Part 7b
How
Stalin buried Marx
Cyril Smith is very effective in dealing with the phrase “dialectical
materialism”, which was never used by Marx, was invented by Kautsky and
Plekhanov, and was turned into a catch-phrase by Stalin. The attached item is Chapter 2, “How the
Marxists Buried Marx” (linked below), from Cyril Smith’s “Marx at the
Millennium”, published in 1998. On the third page of that chapter, Smith wrote:
“… it is appropriate to begin with one of the most widely
circulated philosophical statements of the twentieth century. It starts like
this:
“Dialectical
materialism is the outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called
dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its
method of apprehending them is dialectical, while its interpretation of the
phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is
materialistic.
“Historical
materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to
the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical
materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society
and of its history.”
“This stuff appeared in 1939. In my view, its method,
standpoint, dogmatic style and conclusions are all utterly opposed to
everything that Marx stood for.”
The author was J. V. Stalin. A little later Smith writes (and he could
have been writing about “Dialego”):
“Let us bring ourselves to look briefly at the way the
Stalinist catechism of 1939 hitched up a highly mechanised materialism with
something called ‘dialectics’. On the one hand, ‘Nature, being, the material
world, is primary, and mind, thought, is secondary.’ What does this word
‘primary’ mean? Does it mean ‘first in time’ or ‘first in importance’? Or does
it mean that matter ‘causes’ changes in ‘mind’? Nobody can tell, and precisely this ambiguity conferred mysterious power.”
Smith shows how even Lenin had been fooled by the catch-phrase:
“In the preface to his 1908 book Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism, Lenin declared: ‘Marx and Engels scores of times termed
their philosophical views dialectical materialism.’ He was so sure about this,
that he felt no need to give any references.
“In fact, there is not one! Marx never employed the
phrase in any of his writings. The term ‘dialectical materialism’ was
introduced in 1891 by Plekhanov, in an article in Kautsky’s Neue Zeit. He
thought wrongly, I believe, that he was merely adapting it from Engels’s usage
in Anti-Duhring and Ludwig Feuerbach.”
Cyril Smith did a good job. His work can help those who would wish to
liberate themselves from the dead hands of Plekhanov, Kautsky and Stalin.
Cyril Smith also does not spare Trotsky, with whom he otherwise appears
to have had some sympathy. The most serious deficiency he finds in Trotsky,
however, is not any of Trotsky’s sins of omission or dissembling, but Trotsky’s
lack of philosophy, and his failure to get any of his followers to make up his
own deficiency. While Lenin made great progress in philosophy, Trotsky failed
altogether, writes Smith.
What Smith is saying is that in the last analysis, it was the inability
to overcome the Philistine, Stalin, through full command of philosophy, which
led to the degradation of the Russian Revolution and its eventual reversal.
Philosophy is the keystone. Without it, the other stones are bound to fall.
Smith says of the Trotskyists:
“But they never had the theoretical resources to
penetrate to its philosophical core. The best they could do was to show that
Stalinist policies and distortions were contrary to the decisions of Lenin’s
party and the teachings of ‘Marxism’.”
The Trotskyists were trapped within the same hall of mirrors that they
had helped Stalin to construct.
The practical work of philosophy is, crucially, to weed out or clip off
the words, dead of meaning, that encumber and trip us in our work; or
otherwise, if possible, to restore their freshness. Some of those words in our
present time might be: “hegemony”, “accumulation”, and “elements of socialism”.
The full Cyril Smith archive on MIA can be found here.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: How the Marxists Buried Marx, 1998, Smith,
Part 1 and Part 2.
