Content area
Full text
1. Dialectics and Politics
A man of politics writes about philosophy: it could be that his "true" philosophy should be looked for rather in his writings on politics. In every personality there is one dominant and predominant activity: it is here that his thought must be looked for, in a form that is more often than not implicit and at times even in contradiction with what is professly expressed. Admittedly such a criterion of historical judgment contains many dangers of dilettantism and it is necessary to be very cautious in applying it, but that does not deprive it of its capacity to generate truth.
Antonio Gramsci (1971, 403)
It is difficult to avoid the impression that Gramsci wrote these words with a view to liberating the dialectic of Lenin's political practice from what he regarded as the philosophical fetters of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. While I differ from Gramsci and, I suspect, from Robert Mayer in assessing Lenin's expressly philosophical work, I applaud Mayer's initiative in addressing Lenin's grasp of dialectics by way of his political writings instead of the more usual procedure of deducing the significance of his politics from a reading of his philosophy (Mayer, 1999). This move enables him to cast Lenin's engagement with dialectics, helpfully, as an exercise in practical wisdom and thus as a critique of abstract reason. Taking the claim that "truth is always concrete" as a guiding thread through Lenin's politics, Mayer finds in it the touchstone of an understanding of dialectics that he traces back to Plekhanov and Chernyshevskii. According to Mayer, the Russian Marxists grasped dialectics as a critique of the metaphysical subordination of politics to universalistic rules of action. The aim of the struggle - the emancipation of the proletariat - might remain unchanged, but every other aspect of political practice must be open to the contingencies of shifting circumstances. The practical wisdom signified by the concreteness of the truth is thus a pragmatic flexibility in the selection of tactics, in the adaptation of means to the end, in the subsumption of particular cases under universal rules. But the aim remains the standard - the truth of the concrete, as it were - by which the dialectical character of this flexibility is to be assessed. Although...