‘THE concept of law,’ wrote Lenin in 1914 in his Philosophical Notebooks, ‘is one of the stages of the cognition by man of unity and connection, of the reciprocal dependence and totality of the world process . . .
‘Law and essence are concepts of the same kind (of the same order), or rather, of the same degree, expressing the deepening of man’s knowledge, of phenomena, the world . . .’ He added later: ‘Hegel actually proved that logical forms and laws are not an empty shell, but the reflection of the objective world. More correctly, he did not prove, but made a brilliant guess.’
In these and other passages of the Notebooks Lenin was intently studying – with the aid of Hegel – what Marx and Engels understood by a law; i.e., what a law is, in what way it is objective, in what way therefore the law of value is more truly objective than, for example, the law of supply and demand. It was the history of crucial advances such as these that he chose to focus on, when exiled from Russia during the 1914-18 war, as he thoroughly studied Hegel’s Science of Logic in the library of the Swiss capital, Berne.
And the relevant first and second passages above, like so many in Hegel, concerned the limitations of Kant’s subjective idealist philosophy; with its view that the world outside of thought was a ‘thing-in-itself’ which could never be certainly known by human consciousness. It is easy for us to see that, in its variously revived ‘Neo-Kantian’ forms, that is exactly the ‘philosophy’ that capitalists and their governments like to propagate today – alongside the idea, of course, that we can never be sure whether any other system of society could really be better than capitalism.
Kant’s concept of the Thing-in-itself, Hegel wrote, ‘is not supposed to contain in itself any determinate multiplicity . . . ( – The Thing-in-itself has colour only in relation to the eye, smell in relation to the nose, and so forth.) . . .’ But this meant, he went on to say, that Kant’s idealism ‘clings to the abstract Thing-in-itself as to an ultimate determination; it opposes Reflection, or the determinateness and multiplicity of the Properties, to the Thing-in-itself; while in fact the Thing-in-itself essentially has this External Reflection in itself . . . whence it is seen that the abstraction of the Thing, which makes it pure Thing-in-itself, is an untrue determination . . .
‘Many different Things are in essential Reciprocal Action by virtue of their Properties; Property is this very reciprocal relation, and apart from it the Thing is nothing . . .’
As is evident, Hegel’s meaning of ‘reflection’ is entirely different from Marxism’s materialist meaning; and his passage seems at first to be a wordy way of saying what has by now long been known to science – that the colour or smell of a thing is an objective part and property of it in its relation to other existing things, and not at all something imposed on it by differing perceptions of different individual subjects. But there is more to it than that; and in any case, as an idealist early19th-century philosopher who leant necessarily on Kant as the greatest of his German predecessors since Leibniz a century earlier, Hegel had to counter to Kant’s philosophical language a suitable one of his own.
So to say that alone is to omit two much more important factors. The first is that Hegel’s actual purpose in the Science of Logic was, as Lenin put it, to establish a logic ‘the forms of which would be forms with content, forms of living, real content, inseparably connected with the content’. He explained this as follows: ‘In Kant, the Thing-in-itself is an empty abstraction, but Hegel demands abstractions which correspond to the essence: “the objective concept of things constitutes their very essence”, which correspond – speaking materialistically – to the real deepening of our knowledge of the world.’
The second factor it omits is the full meaning of the second paragraph – in which Hegel pointed out that, considered apart from its properties and its ‘external reflections’, the ‘Thing-in-itself’ is reduced not just to abstraction, but to ‘nothing’. That is exactly why, when Hegel’s dialectical method and outlook is turned on its feet and understood materialistically, his recognition of such a reduction is so important. He may have ‘guessed’ rather than proved it; but nevertheless Hegel did decisively reject the idealist logic with which Kant implied that the objective world amounted in fact to nothing at all.
Engels, for his part, explained it this way: ‘The Neo-Kantian agnostics . . . say: “We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself.” To this Hegel, long since, has replied: “If you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but that the said thing exists without us, and when your senses have taught you that fact you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself”. . . To which it may be added that in Kant’s time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious thing-in-itself. But one after another these ungraspable things have been grasped, analysed, and, what is more, reproduced by the great progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as unknowable.’
It was Lenin who finally added: ‘Consequently, Hegel is much more profound than Kant, and others, in tracing the reflection of the movement of the objective world in the movement of notions. Just as the simple form of value, the individual act of exchange of one given commodity for another, already includes in an undeveloped form all the main contradictions of capitalism, – so the simplest generalisation, the first and simplest formation of notions (judgments, syllogisms, etc.) already denotes man’s ever-deeper cognition of the objective connection of the world. Here is where one should look for the true meaning, significance and role of Hegel’s Logic. This NB.’
It is there also that one must look in order to understand what Engels meant in 1885, when he wrote of Marx’s discovery of ‘the great law of motion of history’. For although every law is partial, and is, in Lenin’s words, ‘narrow’ and ‘approximate’ in relation to the objective conditions from which it is inseparable – e.g. the law of value will cease to be a law at all after capitalism is fully overthrown and value ceases to exist in its present form – nevertheless the full understanding of these two laws can definitely be of great assistance to workers and youth wanting to overthrow capitalism and greatly improve, as far as the vast majority of people worldwide are concerned, the course of human history.
It was sometime in the early summer of 1850, according to Engels’ 1895 introduction to the Class Struggles in France 1848-50, that Marx found the time to carry out more detailed economic studies of events during the previous ten years; and it was that work, of course, that eventually resulted in his decision to give some two decades of his life to the uncovering and proof in detail the correctness of the law of value ; that is to say, to the writing of Capital and the texts and research that led up to it.
But Engels was also making another point here. As a result of that work of 1850, he went on to explain, ‘what he had hitherto deduced, a priori, from gappy material, became absolutely clear to him from the facts themselves, namely, that the world trade crisis of 1847 had been the true mother of the February and March Revolutions, and that the industrial prosperity, which had been returning gradually since the middle of 1848 and attained full bloom in 1849 and 1850, was the revitalising force of the newly strengthened European reaction.
‘That was decisive. Whereas in the first three articles (the first three chapters of The Class Struggles in France 1848-50 as reviewed in these articles, MD) . . . there was still the expectation of an early new upsurge of revolutionary energy, the historical review written by myself and Marx for the last . . . which was published in the autumn of 1850, breaks once and for all with these illusions: “A new revolution is possible only in the wake of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this crisis.”
‘But,’ continued Engels, ‘that was the only essential change which had to be made. There was absolutely nothing to alter in the interpretation of events given in the earlier chapters, or in the causal connections established therein . . .’
In that is revealed the great strength of Marx’s dialectical materialist method: that even though there had been no possibility of access to certain kinds of information about the economic background to the 1848 events, the Marxist analysis had proved essentially true and had withstood the test of time. As Engels put it in 1895, (he was then living in Manchester): ‘Even today, when the specialised press concerned provides such rich material, it still remains impossible even in England to follow day by day the movement of industry and trade in the world market and the changes which take place in the methods of production in such a way as to be able to draw a general conclusion, for any point of time, from these manifold, complicated and ever-changing factors, the most important of which, into the bargain, operate a long time in secret before they suddenly make themselves violently felt on the surface . . .
‘It is self-evident that this unavoidable neglect of contemporaneous changes in the economic situation, the very basis of all the processes to be examined, must be a source of error. But all the conditions of a comprehensive presentation of contemporary history unavoidably include sources of error – which, however, keeps nobody from writing current history.’
Marx had subjected his 1848 analysis to a ‘double test’, Engels went on to say; he’d been able to leave the earlier sections of his book unaltered even though he’d changed his mind as to where events were headed, and he’d re-examined the whole period over again following Bonaparte’s December 1851 coup d’etat and had still altered ‘very little’.
But nevertheless, the Communists of 1848 had been mistaken in the following respect: ‘History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent, and has caused big industry to take real root in France, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and, recently, in Russia, while it has made Germany positively an industrial country of the first rank, – all on a capitalist basis, which in the year 1848, therefore, still had great capacity for expansion.
‘But it is just this industrial revolution which has everywhere produced clarity in class relations, has removed a number of intermediate forms handed down from the period of manufacture and in Eastern Europe even from guild handicraft, has created a genuine bourgeoisie and a genuine large-scale industrial proletariat and has pushed them into the foreground of social development. However, owing to this, the struggle between these two great classes, a struggle which, apart from England, existed in 1848 only in Paris and, at the most, a few big industrial centres, has spread over the whole of Europe and reached an intensity still inconceivable in 1848 . . .’
Turning back to the development of France following Bonaparte’s electoral coup, he continued: ‘The reversion to empire in 1851 gave new proof of the unripeness of the proletarian aspirations of that time. But it was itself to create the conditions under which they were bound to ripen. Internal tranquillity ensured the full development of the new industrial boom; the necessity of keeping the army occupied and of diverting the revolutionary currents outwards produced the wars in which Bonaparte, under the pretext of asserting “the principle of nationality”, sought to hook annexations to France. His imitator, Bismarck, adopted the same policy for Prussia; he made his coup d’etat, his revolution from above, in 1866, against the German Confederation and Austria, and no less against the Prussian Chamber then in conflict with the government.
‘But Europe was too small for two Bonapartes and the irony of history so willed it that Bismarck overthrew Bonaparte, and King William of Prussia not only established the little German Empire [i.e., Germany without Austria – MD], but also the French republic.
‘The general result, however, was that in Europe the independence and internal unity of the great nations, with the exception of Poland, had become a fact. Within relatively modest limits, it is true, but, for all that, on a scale large enough to allow the development of the working class to proceed without finding national complications any longer a serious obstacle. The grave-diggers of the Revolution of 1848 had become the executors of its will. And alongside of them already arose threateningly the heir of 1848, the proletariat, in the shape of the International.’
• Continued tomorrow
