Soviet Marxism
TUCKER, ROBERT C.
Soviet Marxism Dialectical Materialism. By Gustav A. Wetter. Praeger. 609 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Robert C. Tucker Associate Professor of Government, Indiana University THE STORY OF Russian...
...Perhaps the most dramatic death scene of a discipline was that of genetics...
...The English translation by Peter Heath has been made from the current and revised fourth German edition, and is the most up-to-date as well as thorough and useful exposition of Soviet Marxism available in the English language...
...Dialectical materialism in its present-day official Soviet form, he maintains, bears a far greater resemblance to the Scholastic system of ideas than to Hegelian dialectics, notwithstanding the persistence of certain Hegelian terms and concepts in the Soviet system...
...Interestingly, one of the fruits of this relaxation of political discipline is the emergence of a very strong and positive interest in cybernetics...
...The essay was a piece of hack-work, a lack-lustre primer of no intellectual worth or interest, written in the semi-catechistic manner which its author learned at the theological seminary in Tiflis where he studied as a boy...
...And judging by the current articles in the official philosophical journal, I would add that they now have greater latitude than formerly to pursue technical philosophical topics in a professional philosophical vein...
...In contrast to both schools, the new state-controlled system restored philosophy to a status which it has not held in the West since the medieval period...
...It is not easy to determine the exact moment when philosophy expired in Stalin's Russia...
...And since it is the essence of Socrates' discipline that it freely questions the world and everything in it, what the journal was saying is that philosophy must not be tolerated in Soviet Russia...
...They are free to rearrange the order of presentation of their material...
...The evolution and content of this official system form Gustev Wetter's main subject in the present work, which was originally presented as a course of lectures at the Papal Oriental Institute at Rome in 1945...
...Yet for the new bureaucratized Soviet philosophy it became the supreme "Marxist-Leninist classic," and so absolute was its dictatorship in the field that all philosophical textbooks published in Russia after 1938 followed not only its views but even the order of presentation of its subject-matter...
...As the official philosophical journal expressed it in 1955, "We cannot and must not tolerate those 'schools' and 'movements' which attempt a revision of Marxism-Leninism and follow in the wake of bourgeois ideology...
...Wetter's account suggests that Stalin's passing has made a difference, but that so far this is primarily a difference of atmosphere rather than substance...
...He thought it needed one more injection of partiinost—conscious subjugation to political concepts and concerns...
...The "mechanist" school, which was dominant in the 1920s, tended to dispute philosophy's right to independent existence as a special discipline over and above the positive sciences...
...One obliging official philosopher on that occasion pictured Soviet philosophy as a battery of ideological "artillery," and beseeched the Party, in the person of Zhdanov, to give it the "targets" and set the range...
...In opposition to the mechanists, Deborin and his group fought for philosophy's right to existence alongside the sciences, but restricted the scope of philosophy to "dialectic" regarded as a methodology or "theory of scientific knowledge...
...Before it suc-sumbed to the bureaucratic regime, and so long as Russian Marxist philosophers were able to express and debate their real views in the open, the status of philosophy as a discipline was not very secure...
...Further, he stresses the analogy between Soviet philosophy and theology, quoting with approval the remark of the emigre Russian philosopher, Ber-dyaev, that Soviet philosophy is "a sort of godless 'theology.'" Soviet philosophy, he says, is typically theological in its method: The basic assumption is the existence and continuously felt presence of an "infallible" source of doctrine...
...Reviewed by Robert C. Tucker Associate Professor of Government, Indiana University THE STORY OF Russian thought in the Soviet period is, in one of its aspects, a series of obituary notices on the death of intellectual disciplines...
...The treatment of the subject is highly objective...
...And its tolerance of discussion among the philosophers stops short of tolerance of any open questioning of the official world view...
...Somewhat paradoxically, it was only after the death of philosophy in Soviet Russia that the discipline attained full recognition...
...As late as 1947 he commissioned a Party politician, Andrei Zhdanov, to give the philosophical discipline a final going over: Philosophy was still not ideological enough to suit him...
...But in the final analysis, the parallelism is merely "formal," he concludes, and the opposition between atheistic Soviet dialectical materialism on the one hand and all forms of Christian theology on the other is irreconcilable...
...After destruction, they lived a kind of after-life as ideology, i.e., as official thought-systems regulated and supervised at every step by Party bureaucrats...
...Stalin personally provided the official system of philosophy with its authoritative text in the form of an essay, "On Dialectical and Historical Materialism," written in 1938...
...No important changes in the content of the official system have taken place, although one can see a tendency toward greater stress on dialectical as against formal logic, and perhaps more broadly toward a revival of the Hegelian element...
...But the fundamental thing—the relation between philosophy and the Party—remains unchanged...
...Wetter thinks not, and in an interesting postscript to the work argues that there is "a very wide-ranging correspondence between certain fundamental categories of thought and lines of inquiry in Soviet philosophy on the one hand, and those of Scholasticism, or even Thomism, on the other...
...Whatever their faults, even from a Marxist standpoint, both these schools were schools of thought as distinguished from the bureaucratized facsimile of thought which grew up in the later '30s and '40s as the official system of "Soviet philosophy...
...The Party still arrogates the right to guide the philosophy by which it is supposed to be guided...
...Genetics was only one of a number of disciplines which suffered such a fate...
...Soviet philosophers no longer have to labor under the yoke of Stalin's crude primer...
...But the decisive blow to live Marxist philosophizing had been administered many years earlier, in 1931, when the Central Committee issued a decree proscribing the "mechanist revision of Marxism," whose leader was Nikolai Bukharin, and the "idealist distortion of Marxism," whose leader was Deborin...
...Wetter, writing as a Catholic philosopher, sets it down to the credit of Soviet official philosophy that it reasserted philosophy's right to existence as an independent and centrally important discipline...
...It occurred in August 1948, when the anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who enjoyed the support of Stalin, announced to the assembled Soviet biologists: "The Central Committee of the Party has examined my report and approved it...
...Philosophy became a positive metaphysical theory of the universe to which all other disciplines were subordinated, an official world-view of the Soviet State and Communist movement...
...But is the analogy methodological only...
...And what of Soviet official philosophy after Stalin...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 34
