A note on the date, because the front matter does not settle it and the text does. The copyright page, as it survives in scanning, prints a tangle: "First printing 1975", "Second printing 1978", "© Издательство «Прогресс», 1977", "English translation © Progress Publishers 1978". A first English printing of 1975 is impossible for the book actually in hand, because this book knows things that had not happened in 1975. It quotes the Soviet Constitution "adopted in 1977", names its Article 48, and cites Leonid Brezhnev's report "The Great October Revolution and Mankind's Progress", delivered on the sixtieth anniversary of the revolution in November 1977. It measures history by "the development of history over the past sixty years" — sixty years from October 1917. Whatever the "1975" line refers to, perhaps a shorter Russian original, the text a reader holds was closed after October 1977 and printed in English in 1978. That is the date this introduction argues from.
The date fixes what the book is. 1977 was the high noon of what Soviet doctrine called "developed socialism" — the formula, repeated across these pages, for a society that had reached its settled adult state and was moving toward communism without further upheaval. It was the year of the new Constitution, the sixtieth-anniversary festivities, the last long plateau of the Brezhnev era before the doubts of the 1980s. Into that moment Progress issued this small book: a popular essay — populyarny ocherk, the title page says in Russian — on dialectical and historical materialism, written by a collective of five Soviet philosophers (B. M. Boguslavsky and four colleagues, doctors and candidates of philosophical science) and, in its own words, presenting "in a popular form the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist philosophy". It is not a textbook and does not pretend to be. Its sibling in this catalogue, the Konstantinov Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, is the same doctrine at academic length, in twenty-two chapters, examinable. This is the same doctrine reduced to its "ABC" — the mass-market entry point, addressed in the Foreword to "many people" who are "trying their best to grasp the meaning of the rapid changes occurring before their eyes" and want to "form a scientific, Marxist world outlook". The book was for the widest possible audience, and it is precisely the reduction to an ABC that makes it worth reading closely. Where the textbook can bury its assumptions in qualifications, the primer must state them plainly. What a doctrine chooses to teach a beginner is what it most wants believed.
The title is not neutral, and no reader of the anti-Stalinist tradition can pass it without a start. In December 1939, in the middle of the faction fight that produced In Defense of Marxism, Trotsky wrote a short polemic titled "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics". Its argument was that dialectics is a method — a way of holding every concept open to the change that will one day burst it — and that whoever treats its categories as "fixed abstractions" has abandoned it whatever words he keeps. Thirty-eight years later, the Soviet state's own export publisher issued a book called ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism that does the opposite of everything Trotsky's essay asked. The coincidence of title is almost certainly innocent. The opposition of method is total, and it is the subject of this introduction.
For this book is a catechism in the exact sense: a body of doctrine organised as questions with settled answers, to be learned. Open the contents and the chapters break into sections phrased as questions — "Faith or Knowledge?", "Is There Matter Without Motion?", "Does Motion Without Matter Exist?", "Can Matter Exist Outside Time and Space?", "Is the World Cognisable?" The prose keeps the same rhythm. A typical passage poses the question and disposes of it in a breath: "Which then derives from which? The material from the spiritual, or vice versa? Does matter originate from consciousness or consciousness from matter? Which is primary, spirit or nature?" — and the two camps of philosophy are named, the materialist and the idealist, and the reader is told which is true. The questions are real questions, and some of the answers are good answers. But they arrive as answers, closed and certified, each with its quotation from Marx, Engels or Lenin appended like a seal. There are no open problems in this book. There is nothing the five authors confess they do not know. Every question has been asked before and answered already; the reader's task is not to think but to receive.
This is the form Trotsky's essay was written against, and it is worth setting his words beside the book they seem to indict in advance. "Vulgar thought," he wrote, "operates with such concepts as capitalism, morals, freedom, workers' state, etc as fixed abstractions… Dialectical thinking analyses all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which 'A' ceases to be 'A', a workers' state ceases to be a workers' state." The dialectician, he insisted, is the one who has "learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself"; the "vulgar evolutionists" are those "who limit themselves generally to recognising evolution in only certain spheres, [and] content themselves in all other questions with the banalities of 'common sense'." Recognising development in only certain spheres — that is the precise anatomy of this book, and the next two sections show where the spheres end.
Dialectics, as the ABC teaches it, is the science of change through contradiction. This is its central and repeated claim, argued with real vigour: everything that exists is a "unity of opposites"; the "source of any object's movement lies in the interaction ('conflict') of opposites which are inherent in it"; and — the book's own summary of the law — "the unity, the equal effect of opposites, is temporary and relative, whereas their conflict is eternal and absolute." Nothing is exempt. Buds break into leaf, seeds burst into plants, quantity accumulates until a "leap" converts it to a new quality, and every mode of production carries within it the antagonisms that will destroy it. The book runs this machinery through the whole of nature and the whole of class history: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and above all capitalism, whose "conflict in the mode of production must sooner or later… be expressed as antagonism and conflict between these classes", bringing "social revolution". Conflict is eternal and absolute. It is the engine of everything.
Everything, that is, until the analysis reaches the society the authors live in, at which point the eternal and absolute conflict simply stops. Here the ABC is starker than its own textbook siblings, and the starkness is the finding. The Konstantinov Fundamentals and the Krapivin primer at least retain the word "contradiction" for socialist society and defang it with a category — the non-antagonistic contradiction, resolved without revolution by planning and persuasion. This book does not even bother with the hedge. The phrase "non-antagonistic" does not occur in it at all. Socialism appears not as a society of managed contradiction but as a society from which contradiction has been abolished: "A socialist society," the book states flatly, "is one in which there are no irreconcilable differences and no struggle is waged between the workers and the peasants, and between these two classes and the people's intelligentsia." Under socialism "society has attained moral and political unity"; the "social basis" of acute struggle "disappears"; the Soviet people has become "a new historical entity… cemented by the unity of its vital interests, political views and moral standards", and "this unity rules out the possibility of class struggle within the people." Conflict eternal and absolute in every prior form of society; unity, pure and unbroken, in this one. The one reality the dialectic of contradiction may not touch is the state that publishes the dialectic.
The suspension has a date and a document, and they are the sharpest thing in the book. Tracing the Soviet state's development, the ABC declares: "The best documentary proof of this process as it developed in the USSR was the adoption of the 1936 Constitution — the Constitution of triumphant socialism." The transition from proletarian dictatorship to "the state of the whole people", it continues, "was completed in the early 1960s as the result of the complete and final triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union." Read those two sentences with a calendar. The 1936 Constitution — "the Constitution of triumphant socialism" — was promulgated in the year the first Moscow show trial opened, and its adoption was followed not by triumph but by the Yezhovshchina, the mass executions of 1937–38, the shooting of the majority of the delegates to the Party congress that had approved the line. Between "the Constitution of triumphant socialism" and the smooth arrival of "the state of the whole people" in "the early 1960s" lies the largest political massacre in the history of a socialist movement, and in this book it does not exist. It is not denied, minimised or explained. It is simply not there. The catechism has no question to which the Terror is the answer.
The Fourth International's tradition answered this book's claim in the act of its being made. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) — written in the very year the ABC dates the triumph of socialism, and the book against which every Soviet account of Soviet society in this series must be read — Trotsky devoted a chapter, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution", to exactly the document the ABC celebrates. He read the same charter and saw the opposite of unity. Its return to "universal, equal and direct" suffrage was, he argued, "a matter… of juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat", dissolving a class in "the nation" politically "long before it is economically dissolved in society"; its guarantees of freedom had "the form either of a heavy muzzle or of shackles upon the hands and feet"; and its abolition of the old inequalities meant, in a line that answers the ABC's "moral and political unity" directly, that "the equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy." Where the ABC finds a people "cemented by the unity of its vital interests", Trotsky found a stratum: "The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which… exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism." One may accept or reject that diagnosis. What cannot be denied is that it is the ABC's own method — contradiction, antagonism, the class content of a state — carried through to the ABC's own society, and that the ABC, for all its chapters on the eternity of conflict, refuses to carry it there. The book even supplies the analytic tool and declines to use it: expounding the state, it describes the special case in which "the warring classes reach an equilibrium which allows the state to become relatively independent of both classes and to act, to all appearances, as a go-between for them" — Bonapartism, the exact category Trotsky used for the Soviet bureaucracy — and applies it only to Bourbon France. The primer names the concept and quarantines it abroad.
An erasure of events implies an erasure of people, and the ABC's is comprehensive. Searched in full, the book contains the name Trotsky zero times, Stalin zero times, Bukharin zero times, Deborin zero times. (These are true absences, not scanning damage; the checks were run.) The absences are worth taking one at a time, because each removes something the book would otherwise have to explain.
Trotsky is absent from a book that celebrates the October insurrection and even quotes Lenin's note of 24 October 1917 demanding it be launched "this very evening" — an insurrection Trotsky, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, organised. The man is unnameable even where the event is his. Stalin is absent in a way that outdoes even the candid Soviet volumes: the Konstantinov textbook at least admits "the cult of personality", contains and neutralises it as a defect of one man's character, and moves on. The ABC does not perform even that ritual. There is no cult of personality here because there is no Stalin, no Terror, no 1937 to require the concept. The primer's solution to the hardest fact in Soviet history is not apology but silence. And Deborin and Bukharin are absent from a book whose whole first half narrates the "revolution in philosophy" and the development of dialectical materialism — a development in which the great Soviet philosophical battle of the 1920s, between the "Mechanists" and the Deborin school, both liquidated by Party fiat in 1930–31, was the decisive Soviet episode. The word "mechanist" occurs nine times in the book, every one of them attached to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialism; not one concerns the Soviet debate in which the label became a sentence. The history of Soviet philosophy is told as an unbroken ascent from Lenin to the present, with the years in which philosophy was actually subordinated to the state removed from the record.
There is a subtler erasure in the book's handling of Lenin himself, and it cuts the other way from what one might expect. The series has learned to watch for the suppression of the open, questioning, Hegelian Lenin of the Philosophical Notebooks in favour of the canonised, polemical Lenin of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In this book the suppression is nearly total. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is named and quoted approvingly — twice at least, deployed against Mach and against "energism" — as the authority that "conclusively proved" the materialist reading of the crisis in physics. The Philosophical Notebooks are named not once. And yet their substance leaks in anyway: the book's definition of the law of contradiction rests on Lenin's line that "dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites… This embodies the essence of dialectics" — which is from the Notebooks, from the fragment "On the Question of Dialectics". So the open Lenin is present after all, but stripped and repurposed: his most exploratory text is mined for a single finished formula and never named as what it is, a working philosopher's notebook full of provisional marks and questions to himself. The catechism can use the living Lenin only by embalming him, taking a note he made in the course of thinking and setting it in the wall as a certified result. That operation — a method turned into an inventory — is the whole book in miniature.
None of this makes the book worthless, and a reader told that everything in it is propaganda would be misled about the thing that matters most: Marxism is a philosophy, materialism is a defensible position, and over long stretches this little book teaches both competently. Credibility about the erasures depends on saying so plainly.
Its strongest ground is the elementary case for materialism against idealism, and against the religious and positivist evasions that a beginner will actually meet. The chapter "Faith or Knowledge?" is a clean, patient argument that science reaches the "invisible world" the theologian reserves for faith, and that "ignorance is no argument" — a genuinely useful thing to put in front of a young reader. The account of the crisis in physics around 1900 is honest and clear: the atom proved divisible, the electron's properties proved mutable, and materialists who had bolted their philosophy to a particular physical picture watched it come loose. The resolution the book offers is Lenin's real one and a real advance over the mechanical materialism it supersedes — that matter is a philosophical category, not a commitment to any inventory of ultimate particles, so that "there were no immutable things or properties, no immutable form of motion to which motion at all levels could be reduced", and "the electron is as inexhaustible as the atom." The treatment of necessity and chance is better still, and argued rather than asserted: against both fatalism and the mechanistic determinism that "knocked the bottom out" of itself once science met "more complex things than trajectories of individual bodies", the book insists that chance is real and law-governed together, and illustrates it with a detail no catechist would invent — the 1962 American Venus probe destroyed in flight because "a hyphen had been omitted from the computer programme." That is teaching. It earns its abstraction by cashing it out in the world, and a reader who worked through these chapters would come away better equipped to think.
The tragedy of the book is legible in exactly these passages, because they show that the authors possessed the living material and knew how to use it. They could hold a concept open when the concept was matter, or causality, or the crisis in physics. They could not hold it open when the concept was their own society. The same men who insisted that no form of motion is immutable, that every category must yield to the change it cannot contain, wrote that socialist society is "one in which there are no irreconcilable differences" and let the sentence stand. The method was alive in their hands until the moment it would have cost something, and then it went rigid.
The fair counterweight to a primer is not a treatise but another primer, and one exists. In 1942, in New York, while the leaders of his party were being prosecuted under the Smith Act, George Novack delivered nine elementary lectures on dialectics to activists — published as An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (5th ed., New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971, from the lectures of 1942). Like the ABC, they are popular, oral, addressed to beginners rather than academics. They are the exact comparison, and they open by refusing the ABC's central move. "We shall approach dialectics not as a closed system," Novack tells his audience. "On the contrary it is an open system and therefore our approach is elastic, concrete, more informal." And the sentence that the whole ABC is built to avoid: "Dialecticians recognise that all formulas must be provisional, limited, approximate, because all forms of existence are transient and limited. This must also apply to the science of dialectics and to the formulations of its laws and ideas." Both men teach the same three laws and the same paired categories; the laws can be taught. The difference is whether they are handed over as an open method a reader is meant to use, including on the society that teaches them, or as a closed inventory a reader is meant to recite. The ABC is the recitation. Trotsky's "ABC of Materialist Dialectics", whose title it unknowingly borrowed, is the method — and the method, applied to a workers' state, is precisely the thing the Soviet primer forbids.
So the book should be read, and kept in print, as two things at once. It is a competent elementary exposition of materialism and of a dialectical view of nature, from which a reader can genuinely learn, and it is a near-perfect specimen of what happens to a critical method when a state adopts it as scripture. The two are not separable; they are the same pages. The ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism teaches, correctly, that everything that exists carries the seeds of its own overcoming — and then names one society, its own, in which nothing does. That single exemption is the book's whole politics, and everything else follows from it: the missing Terror, the four missing names, the missing word "contradiction" in the one place a dialectician was bound to use it. A method that finds negation in every order of the world and suspends it at home has not made a small local exception. It has stopped being a method at the exact point where being one would have mattered.