Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study.

G.W. Smith, University of Lancaster

In creedal movements, theory frequently becomes an urgently practical matter. This was never more true than for Lenin, when in 1914 the unexpectedly nationalistic behavior of the working classes of the belligerent states struck at the very foundations of Marxian doctrine, bringing into doubt the basic principle of international proletarian class struggle and sending the Marxist political compass spinning. In these terms Lenin's ensconcing himself in the library in Bern between August and December, although superficially at odds with the popular Napoleonic on s'engage et puis on voit image of the great revolutionary's consummate political pragmatism, is by no means odd. What is puzzling is his choice of reading matter, namely, Hegel and, of all his writings, the rebarbative and icily abstract System of Logic. Out of this encounter came Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, the pivot of Kevin Anderson's Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism.

Anderson's explanation is that the events of 1914 convinced Lenin that international society had entered a period of convulsion far too seismic to be grasped in the mechanical categories of Second International orthodoxy. Only the cataclysms of the great French Revolution bore comparison with contemporary developments, and it was …