Corinna Lotz - Ilyenkov’s cry from the heart
Evald Ilyenkov’s last book, Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism, was published in 1980 shortly after the author’s tragic demise. In it he celebrates the 70th anniversary of Lenin’s still controversial Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909). Like Lenin’s own book, this final contribution by Ilyenkov is too often dismissed as mere polemic. But as Soviet/Russian philosopher Lev Naumenko noted in the preface: “the fires of the ideological struggle have not weakened”. Ilyenkov’s cri de coeur still stands as a call to the future, our future, as a foundation demanding further development towards a contemporary theory of knowledge for the purpose of social transformation.
Under the protective shield of “Leniniana” Ilyenkov set out his own approach to materialist dialectics as both the science of logic and the logic of revolution. The paper will probe Ilyenkov’s motives, the place of Leninist Dialectics within his oeuvre and why the original manuscript was censored by the Politizdat publishers. Ilyenkov’s defence of Lenin’s view of Marxist philosophy and his challenge to the myth of “two Lenins” was a thinly-disguised attack on the technocratic anti-humanistic ideology that prevailed in the late 1970s Soviet Union.
The paper will explore how Ilyenkov may have directed his work at those in the Soviet bureaucracy who embraced Bogdanov’s viewpoint in relation to the economy. The paper explores Ilyenkov’s conclusion that “dialectics is also the totality of the forms of natural and social-historical development in its universal form” and how he developed Lenin’s concept that Marxist philosophy is cast from a “single piece of steel”, as defined in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. The paper suggests that Ilyenkov’s contribution to materialist dialectics, far from being an historical artefact, can provide philosophical as well as practical avenues to explore, in developing contemporary theories of knowledge. Finally, the paper will discuss how we can take forward Ilyenkov’s conclusion that “the essence of the matter consists in revealing dialectics as the system of the laws of motion of cognition”.
Corinna Lotz co-founded the International Friends of Ilyenkov. Her principal interest is in the development of a Marxist theory of knowledge that can contribute to a revolutionary approach to thought, political transformation and artistic creativity. She created the philosophy component of Rethinking Our Future, an online education course for the Real Democracy Movement, which campaigns for a democratic revolution. Writings include: A Theory and Practice of Cognition for Our Time: Building on Ilyenkov’s Dialectical Logic (Marxism and Sciences Vol.2 Issue 1. 2023); Finding Evald Ilyenkov: How a Soviet Philosopher who stood up for dialectics continues to inspire (Lupus Books, 2019); Time’s Up for Neoliberalism (co-author, 2018); She holds a BA Honours degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute, London University.