PHILOSOPHICAL CORRESPONDENCE ON LENIN'S <i>NOTEBOOKS ON HEGEL</i>

I decided to translate the Philosophic Notebooks on the Science of Logic in toto as excerpts cannot avoid the appearance and actuality of being forced.¹ Here is the first section, dealing with the Prefaces, Introduction and Doctrine of Being. Note that the Leap (translated by Hegel's translators as Jump) you made so famous in your Notes is not in Quality but in Measure. It is the climax, that is, to entire first volume.² He³ began by objecting to the pedantry which listed the title of the Observation to the Nodal Line of Measure-Relations: (Examples of Such Nodal Lines; natura non facit saltum⁴) in the contents pages but not in the text itself. He then proceeds to introduce his conclusions with "gradualness explains nothing without leaps", then he repeats the title of the Observation "as if Nature did not make Jumps" which he emphasizes further by repeating the word "Leaps!" at a side, then softly emphasizes "Interruptions to gradualness" and ends with quoting pages 389-90, "It is said, natura non facit saltum" and two more Leaps! follow that.⁵ You would think at this point that he feels gaily and can transit to Essence easily. No, he complains here that the end of Vol. I. "Transition of Being to Essence is analyzed doubly obscurely". How much that man knew and how much more he was searching for!

You will enjoy the notes on Being which you practically skipped over in your hurry to get to Essence. It seemed to me one of the reasons was the necessity to begin with simplest categories, because both in philosophy, economics, politics and what have you those simple categories "contain in germ the whole". An excellent example of this firm grasp of the dialectic at its simplest is his remark, after complaining that Hegel is unclear, or rather he is unclear about Hegel's full meaning in "Die Objectivitat den Scheins, die Notwendigkeit des Widerspruchs"⁶ (inherent negativity):

No wonder that man could write of appearance so profoundly! "Imperialism: A Popular Outline".⁹ Need I harp on my favorite peave: compare to this analysis of appearance to Rosa's analysis of essence in her Accumulation.¹⁰

Another thing that struck me anew was emphasis on Method, Method, Method "the dialectic which it has in itself"¹¹: The first reference to Capital occurs here when he quotes Hegel "not a mere abstract Universal, but as a Universal which comprises in itself the full wealth of Particulars".¹² When you add to his emphasis on the development of thinking through "its own necessary laws",¹³ his attack against "using" forms of thought "as a means",¹⁴ the attacks both on Kantianism and his "thing-in-itself"¹⁵ and Transcendental Idealism and its "subjectivism",¹⁶ you can see that the concretes which Lenin had in mind when he was reading Logic were both the economic conditions - Capital¹⁷ plus the Imperialism¹⁸ he was going to work out - and Ideology of the Bernsteins, Kautskys and, yes, Rosa Luxemburg¹⁹ since in that very period he also made notes on her book. What rich years were 1914-1916 for Lenin in his "study room"!

Evidently for the first time he was struck also by the fact that in the back of Hegel's mind when he worked out the "self-development of concepts" was the whole history of philosophy.²⁰ (He had made these notes before those on Hegel's History of Philosophy²¹). Along with this was the emphasis on how "materialistic" rang the sound of Hegel's statement "What is first in science has had to show itself first historically".²² Lenin gave a very, rather truly materialistic interpretation of history as it meant to him also the economic foundations of society. At the same time he contrasts "Sophistry and Dialectic" in general when he quotes Hegel: "For sophistry is an argument proceeding from a baseless supposition which is allowed without criticism or reflection; while we term dialectic that higher movement of Reason where terms appearing absolutely distinct, pass into one another because they are what they are, where the assumption of their separateness cancels itself".²³ Both Hegel and Lenin hit at "baseless assumptions"; this is very important for our work, of course.

Among the "baseless assumptions" are those that divide finite from infinite by an impassable barrier, or, as Hegel would put it, by making one "a this-sidedness" and then establishing an "other-sidedness", a beyond. It is at this point that he deals with "Ought and Barrier as moments of the finite",²⁴ but very briefly: I went back to Hegel very carefully on that, and the correspondence with G²⁵ on the relation of this to the general contradiction of capitalism you are acquainted with. I will return to that again at another time.

No one reading Lenin can resist temptation to quote him on the dialectic, although they know the reader is all too anxious to stop reading this to get to Hegel himself, so here goes: This come after Hegel's "The things are, but the truth of this being is their end.

All-sided universal flexibility of concepts-flexibility reaching to the identity of opposites. This flexibility, subjectively applied = eclecticism and sophistry. When this flexibility is objectively applied, i.e., reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, then it is dialectic, it is the correct reflection or the eternal development of the world".²⁷

Have fun with Lenin and be patient about his Notes on Essences since this is a very large section and I do this between many other activities.

Editor's footnotes

¹ Prior to undertaking her complete translation of Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks on Hegel, Dunayevskaya had provided translations of various extracts to other members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT). Some of this work helped to inform CLR James's Notes on Dialectics (written in 1948, and circulated amongst JFT members, but not published until 1980). Dunayevskaya's translation of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel are available on the MIA in pdf format. A version of The Philosophic Notebooks on The Science of Logic, (the Clemence Dutt translation, not the translation by Raya Dunayevskaya), is archived on the Marxist Internet Archive as: V. I. Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel's book The Science of Logic, (1914).

² The "first volume" that Dunayevskaya is referring to, is the first volume of Hegel's, two volume, Science of Logic, (Larger Logic).

⁶ German: translation into English: "the objectivity of appearances, the necessity of contradiction".

⁷ 'Wesen' translates into English as 'Being'. 'Schein' most commonly translates into English as 'shine', but in this context would be translated as 'Appearance'. For more on Hegelian terminology, see the Glossary of Terms page of the Hegel section of the MIA website.

¹⁰ Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913). Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), was a major figure in Second International. She was one of the few major figures in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who actively opposed World War I as an imperialist war. She broke with the SPD over its leadership's stance on the War. Her major work on Marx and political economy, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), was influential amongst her Marxist contemporaries, but was criticised by Lenin.

¹⁹ Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) and Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) were two of the most senior figures in the Second International. Bernstein had collaborated with Engels, and became his literary executor when Engels died in 1895. After Engels' death he began to advocate a reformist revision of Marx, a stance which was vigorously debated by members of the Second International. Kautsky, who was considered by many to be a leading theorist of the Second International, (and was a major influence on Lenin prior to 1914), opposed Bernstein's revisionism (see e.g. 'Bernstein's old articles and new afflictions'). At the outbreak of World War I, both Kautsky and Berstein equivocated on the issue of opposing the war. Neither supported the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. Kautsky wrote a pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918), in which he condemned the Bolsheviks and argued that their rule was dictatorial, whereas socialism should use democratic means to govern. Lenin's pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), was written as a response to Kautsky's pamphlet.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) helped establish the Polish Social Democratic Party, and became a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party. She was on the left-wing of the party, and was an early critic of Bernstein and Kautsky. Her pamphlet, Reform or Revolution (1900), was an early and influential critique of Bernstein and reformism in the Social-Democratic movement. In 1910 she engaged in a critique of Kautsky's views on the mass strike, in the pages of Die Neue Zeit (a leading publication of the German Social-Democrats). (In 1980 these articles were collated and translated by David Wolff and published in English as Theory and Practice, by News & Letters, the organisation established the former members of the JFT who sided with Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1955 split). Luxemburg wrote the Junius Pamphlet in protest at the German Social-Democratic Party's (SPD) betrayal on the question of supporting the German nation or the international working-class at the outbreak of the First World War. She left the SPD and went on to help set up the anti-war party, the Spartacus League.

Johnson-Forest Tendency

Philosophic Correspondence on Lenin's Notebooks on Hegel, 1949-51

1. Feb, 18, 1949, Dunayevskaya to James on Lenin's Notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic, (Doctrine of Being)

Editor's footnotes