Salvaging Soviet Philosophy (1)

by Ralph Dumain

The philosophical legacy of the defunct USSR (and the other Soviet bloc nations) should not be left for dead without a serious salvaging operation to assess what it did and did not accomplish and to preserve what was valuable in it.

First, what can we expect of Soviet philosophy? One way to approach the subject would be to divide Soviet Marxism-Leninism into the three areas to be found in innumerable introductions and textbooks: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific communism. The further we move away from the first of these, the less worthwile the literature is likely to be. The regime had an incentive to showcase its goods in the one area in which it could at least potentially manifest some dimension of superiority, in the philosophy of science, i.e, an area in which creativity could be tolerated with the least threat to the regime. When we move into historical materialism, we enter a rigid framework and schema for the analysis of historical development and social structure, though it is still possible to be scientific up to a point as well as overly scientistic in pretension. And when we get to scientific communism, we can dismiss it as apologetics for the Stalinist regime.

Another approach would be through various schools of thought over the decades. One could follow schools of thought in philosophy proper, or one could follow schools of thought in the special sciences, including the human sciences, such as psychology and semiotics. One cannot overestimate the historic import of the work of Lev Vygotsky in psychology, for example.

What about the shortcomings in the core areas of philosophy? First, there is a lot of propagandistic work, and quite a bit of formulaic and unoriginal work, as one might expect from coercive bureaucracies. Secondly, there is a certain narrowness, most telling in the tendentious and dishonest treatment of schools of Marxist thought disapproved of by the regime, including much of what gets classified as "Western Marxism", dissident and anti-Soviet schools of Marxist thought.

However, there are some nuances here. There were original and not entirely "orthodox" philosophers who managed to survive in the Eastern bloc and in Western Communist Parties whose work was thus not completely excluded from the tradition, such as Lukács in Hungary and Gramsci in Italy. In the Soviet Union itself certain tendencies flourished or at least survived which share common ground with dissident and non-orthodox schools elsewhere, such as the work of the most influential Soviet philosopher of our era, Evald Ilyenkov. And, because of the abstract nature of the subject, certain aspects of subjectivity and dialectics could be treated in an interesting fashion without being fingered as dissident, such as the concept of the ideal in Soviet philosophy.

If it did nothing else, Soviet philosophy played a critical role in the critique of various schools of bourgeois philosophy, whether irrationalist or positivistic, esp. when in those cases where it shed the crudity of the Stalin era. Again, this is an area in which there would be a great incentive to show superiority of a Marxist philosophical perspective over the world views promoted in the West.

On a positive note, there would also be an incentive to develop areas in philosophy of science, epistemology, logic, semiotics, various special sciences, and related topics. While there is a limited amount of this work available in English, there is some worth reading, and presumably much more that was never translated, as well as a large body of mediocre work.

Finally, because of the inherently sociological conception of philosophy inherent in Marxism, one can expect some interesting work in the historiography of philosophy itself.

My main task for now is a bibliographical one. Let me outline very informally how I conceive of approaching it.

First, there is the language question. I want to concentrate on the material published—mostly in translation—in English, as I don't read Russian. I would also leave to the side for the time being works published in other languages such as French or German, whether translations or originals. There is much that was never translated from Russian, much of it good as well as bad. It is reasonable to suppose that, in choosing material for translation, there was an incentive to highlight some of the better and more prominent Soviet philosophers, as well as to pass on propaganda and hack-work.

Also, the intellectual life of the Soviet Union, of which most of us are acquainted with small pieces if anything at all, involves more than the official, dominant Marxist-Leninist tradition. There is also highly specialized, untranslated work in the areas of mathematics and the sciences, that was allowed to proceed apart from the main channels of production and dissemination of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Then of course there are underground pedagogical and intellectual efforts.

There is also the question of comparable works published in the Soviet bloc, in Yugoslavia, and perhaps other "socialist" countries, in a variety of languages. In Eastern Europe, in addition to officially sanctioned or tolerated schools of thought, there is the huge category of dissident Marxist schools, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere, reviled and persecuted by their respective regimes.

Then there is the question of periodization. There is pre-revolutionary (marxist) philosophy—and its relation to 19^th century Russian thought—much of which continues through the early Soviet years, including Lenin, Deborin, and many others. I don’t know whether this can be sharply separated from the period of the early Soviet regime up through 1930, in which competing Marxist schools (in the 1920s, chiefly the Deborinists vs. the Mechanists) flourish until Stalin and his henchmen institute the New Turn in 1931. There is then the largely sterile period of Stalin's totalitarian grip on the cultural life of the nation. Then in the 1950s after Stalin's death the field begins to blossom again, gaining new life in the 1960s until the demise of the USSR. There is also the need to assess the course of philosophy in the post-Soviet period in Russia and the other post-Soviet states.

Limiting ourselves now to the English language, there are further subdivisions one can make in the pursuit of bibliographical aims.

Bibliographies, reference guides, dictionaries and encyclopedias are always entry points into the literature.

There are/were at least two English-language journals devoted to Soviet philosophy, and a few more of relevance.

In book form there are several surveys of Soviet philosophy, written by a variety of people ranging from sympathizers to opponents, covering the whole range up to the date of publication, or various periods, or topics, or individual thinkers, or various Eastern bloc nations. A few of the names that appear in this category are Wetter, Jordan, Scanlan, Bakhurst. There is a voluminous series, Sovietica, now published by Springer.

There are Soviet and Eastern European authors appearing via Western publishers, in journals, conference proceedings, and monographs. Just to give one interesting example, various technical philosophical works from Eastern Europe, some authored by dissidents, were published in the series Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, or in the Synthese Library.

There are a few outfits in the USSR that published Soviet philosophical literature in English (translation), but most of the books came from Progress Publishers in Moscow. The USSR Academy of Sciences published symposia and conference papers. Raduga Publishers put out a number of works on aesthetics. First I will concentrate on Progress Publishers.

Let me break down the literature into a number of sub-categories for my purposes:

1. reference books (esp. dictionaries)
2. textbooks, introductions to philosophy, Marxism, dialectical materialism, specific philosophers, and related topics
3. various works of a propandistic nature for the general public
4. various works seemingly specialized in character, but either propagandistic or vacuous in content
5. classic authors: Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, etc., and favored thinkers of the pre-revolutionary era
6. works in social sciences, political economy, law, education, linguistics, psychology, history
7. serious works in what are for me hard-core (and overlapping) areas of philosophy:
1. core philosophy: epistemology, ontology, logic, semantics, etc.
2. (other) Marxist philosophy
3. philosophy of science
4. history of philosophy (general and specific topics and philosophers)
5. aesthetics

I want to concentrate first on #7. Aesthetics is a big category by itself, and the quality of publications in this area is so wildly uneven, ranging from indigestible propagandistic trash up to serious works, I wish to put this aside until later.

I want to begin with Soviet philosophers of the contemporary era, from the 1960s onward, and I want to approach them first via Progress Publishers, whose publications are not easily at hand in local bookstores in the USA. So in the first installment of my bibliography I will concentrate on my core areas, excluding aesthetics, specialized non-natural sciences, dictionaries and other reference works, introductions and textbooks, classic authors, books of propagandistic or otherwise dubious import, books not published by Progress Publishers, non-book items such as journal articles, and all surveys of Soviet philosophy not by Soviet philosophers themselves. After that, I will proceed onward as time and opportunity permit.

It is impossible for me to establish this site as a headquarters for the study of Soviet philosophy. That belongs to much more ambitious projects in this area, such as the Marxists Internet Archive. It is even more difficult to cover all the interesting schools of Eastern European Marxist thought, such as the Hungarian school, the Praxis School of Yugoslavia, the Poznan school of Poland, etc., and a panoply of dissident philosophers such as Karel Kosik of Czechoslovakia. However, this being a resource of obscure and neglected sources, I do want to provide some entry points into what is for Americans the most obscure of all the areas of Eastern European thought: Soviet philosophy.

I welcome the suggestions and collaboration of my readers in developing this project here and/or on other sites.

Addendum: Please note that the links below are not limited to Soviet philosophy, but include related Eastern European philosophy as well as dissident and anti-Stalinist thinkers not considered part of the same Marxist tradition.

ON THIS SITE:

By R. Dumain:

Soviet Historiography of Philosophy: Review Essay 

New Year's Resolution: Exploring Philosophical Cultures (December 2003 - January 2004)

Evert van der Zweerde & Ralph Dumain: Correspondence on autodidacts & Soviet philosophical culture

Review of John Ryder, Interpreting America: Russian and Soviet Studies of the History of American Thought 

Review of David-Hillel Rubin, Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge  

Running thoughts on Merab Mamardashvili 

"Cultural Impasse & the Changing Forms of Ideality"

Jevgenij Zamjatin pri Revolucio, Entropio, Dogmo & Herezo (quotes translated into Esperanto / trad. R. Dumain)

Lenin on Aristotle (Bibliography)

V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Volume 38: Philosophical Notebooks: selections from writings of 1914-1916

Lenin on fantasy & cognition

Pisarev, Lenin, & dreaming

Plato’s Idealism (1861) by D. I. Pisarev

V.I. Lenin: Their Abstraction & Ours

V.I. Lenin on Idealism & the Spiral of Knowledge

Plekhanov on “Bourgeois” Science

“Amor Dei Intellectualis (Baruch Spinoza)” by Nikolai Bukharin

“Mad Prophet (Friedrich Nietzsche)” by Nikolai Bukharin

‘The Colossal Old Fellow’ (Hegel) by Nikolai Bukharin

“Crisis of Capitalist Culture” (1934) [Excerpts] by Nikolai Bukharin

Nikolai Bukharin on oriental & racial mysticism & fascism

Marxism and Modern Thought by N. I. Bukharin et al

The Contemporary Crisis of Capitalism and the Ideology of Fascism by A. M. Deborin

Spinoza’s World-View by A. M. Deborin

"Reader Know Thyself" by Nicholas (Nikolai Aleksandrovich) Rubakin

“Dialectic and Logic Since the War” by Herbert Marcuse

Short Handbook of Communist Ideology: Contents

Short Handbook of Communist Ideology: The Philosophic Principles of The Marxist-Leninist World-View

The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Postcommunism in Eastern Europe (Contents) edited by Raymond Taras

Dialogues on the Philosophy of Marxism (Contents), edited by John Somerville & Howard L. Parsons

David-Hillel Ruben on Materialism & Praxis

On Merab Mamardashvili (from "Where Does Meaning Come From?") by Mara Stafecka

Evald Ilyenkov, V. A. Lektorsky, the Ideal, & Activity Theory:

For a more complete listing, see:

Evald Ilyenkov & Activity Theory: Bibliography of Writings in English (includes all Ilyenkov on this page, maybe more)

Evald Ilyenkov & Mikhail Lifshits: Aesthetics, Symbolic Mediation, & the Ideal: Selected Bibliography

"The Concept of the Ideal" by E. V. Ilyenkov

"The Universal" by E. V. Ilyenkov

"From the Marxist-Leninist Point of View" by E. V. Ilyenkov

"Humanism and Science" by E. V. Ilyenkov

“Lenin and the Hegelian Conception of Thinking” by Evald Ilyenkov

“Markso kaj la okcidenta mondo” de E. V. Iljenkov, trad. Yury Finkel (in Esperanto)

Galvano Della Volpe on E. V. Ilyenkov

Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited

"On Trends in the Status of Dialectical Logic: A Brief Study of Lefebvre, Ilyenkov and Wald" by Claude M. J. Braun

The Problem of the Ideal: Contents by David Dubrovsky

The Problem of the Ideal: Introduction

The Problem of the Ideal (Extracts)

Subject, Object, Cognition: Contents & Preface to the English edition by V. A. Lektorsky

Idealised and Real Objects by V. A. Lektorsky

The Collective Subject. The Individual Subject by V. A. Lektorsky

"Cognition in the Context of Culture" by Vladislav Lektorsky

Activity Theory: A Marxist Approach to Psychology by Carl Shames

Theodore Oizerman:

Alternatives to Positivism by Igor Naletov (entire book)

"The Image of Science and Metaphysics" by Nina Yulina

"The Relationship Between Science and Morality (Philosophical Aspects)" by A. Arsenyev