The catalogue calls this a book of 1979, and the copyright page, as it survives in scanning, reads "© Progress Publishers 1979". The book itself says otherwise on almost every page of its social chapters. It quotes the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU — held in February and March 1981 — at least six times, and cites it from the printed Documents and Resolutions. It reports that "by early December 1981 there was a total of 8.5 million unemployed in the USA", notes the Thirty-Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain of November 1981, follows Brezhnev's visit to West Germany of 23–24 November 1981, and projects world unemployment forward "by mid-1983". Brezhnev is alive throughout, "that tireless fighter for peace"; he died in November 1982. A manuscript cannot cite a congress two years after its own copyright date. What a reader holds is the revised English edition of 1982, prepared after the Twenty-Sixth Congress and closed in the last full year of Brezhnev's life, whatever date the front matter carries. That is the date this introduction argues from, because it is the date the text keeps.
Placing it there matters, because it fixes what the book is for. This is the standard Soviet textbook of dialectical and historical materialism — diamat and histmat, the philosophy every Soviet student sat examinations in — issued under the name of the academician F. V. Konstantinov, who had headed the official manuals of Marxist-Leninist philosophy for a quarter of a century, and written, as its title page concedes with "et al.", by a committee of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Philosophy. It is orthodoxy in its most systematic and official form, refreshed for the horizon the Twenty-Sixth Congress had just reaffirmed: "developed socialism", "mature socialism", a society that had reached its settled adult state and was advancing, without further upheaval, toward communism. The book uses the phrase thirteen times. It is the horizon of the whole volume, and, as we shall see, the point at which its method stops.
That fixed date also explains what the second half of the book is doing. A treatise on matter, consciousness and the categories has no obvious need of the current five-year unemployment forecast, yet the social chapters are dense with it: the December 1981 American jobless total, the debts of the developing countries "in 1981", the "Peace Programme for the 1980s" the Twenty-Sixth Congress "proposed", Brezhnev's replies to Der Spiegel. The philosophy is a container; the current Party line is the contents, decanted fresh at each congress. This is the deepest sense in which the book had ceased to think — not that it argues badly, but that its content is renewed on a political schedule while its form never moves. Between one printing and the next the statistics change, the congress number rises, the peace programme is updated; the twenty-two chapters, the three laws, the settled answers, stand exactly where Stalin's generation left them. A living philosophy revises its questions. This one revises only its footnotes.
The book announces itself, in its Preface, as the opposite of a catechism. Marxist philosophy "is a creative, revolutionary doctrine, a doctrine that is constantly being enriched and tested by historical practice. It is opposed to any kind of dogmatism." Chapter I calls Marxism-Leninism "a harmonious, integrated theory" whose "unity, the wholeness, and consistency … are acknowledged even by its opponents." Note the pairing. A doctrine advertises itself as anti-dogmatic in one sentence and as harmonious, whole and consistent in the next — and it is the second set of adjectives the book actually delivers. Twenty-two chapters proceed from the basic question of philosophy through matter, consciousness, the three laws of dialectics, the categories, the theory of knowledge, and then the whole of history, to end with two chapters demolishing contemporary bourgeois philosophy and sociology. Every question has an answer. Every answer has a quotation certifying it. There are no open problems, no unfinished arguments, nothing the authors confess they do not know.
This is the form Leszek Kołakowski called "the philosophy that had ceased to think" — a living method frozen into a syllabus. Its architecture is not Konstantinov's invention. The numbered laws, the lettered categories, the examinable body of settled doctrine, are the shape Stalin gave the discipline in the 1938 chapter "Dialectical and Historical Materialism", the single most reproduced philosophical text of the Soviet century. Konstantinov's volume inherits that shape three decades on, and the inheritance is visible in Chapter V, which opens by calling dialectics "the heart and soul of Marxism-Leninism, its theoretical foundation" and then sets out, as laws, propositions that Marx and Engels advanced as a method of inquiry.
To its credit — and an honest introduction must say so, because the easy version of this criticism is wrong — the book knows the danger and names it. Expounding the negation of the negation, it warns that the law "is often reduced to a purely formal and external device by means of which all the richness and complexity of objective development is arbitrarily subordinated to a rigid scheme", and insists: "Materialist dialectics is fundamentally opposed to any such formalistic approach or schematisation … it merely guides inquiry in the right direction." It even enlists Hegel against the thesis–antithesis–synthesis trinity. This is not the writing of men who do not understand the objection. It is the writing of men who understand it perfectly and cannot act on it, because the one inquiry a state textbook may not guide is the inquiry into the state that publishes it. The disclaimer against schematism is itself recited, in the place where the schematism is at its most exposed, and then the exposition proceeds exactly as before.
Dialectics, as this book teaches it, is the science of contradiction, negation and supersession. Everything that exists carries the seeds of its own overcoming; quantity accumulates until it converts into quality; every established order "logically prepares its own negation" and gives way to a higher form. The book applies this with real energy across the whole of nature and the whole of history — to the primitive commune, to slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, which "reveals itself in the cataclysms of the spontaneous capitalist economy". The question that decides everything is whether the method is ever turned on the society the authors live in.
The crude expectation — that a Soviet textbook simply denies contradiction under socialism — is false, and it is worth being precise about why, because the truth is sharper than the caricature. Konstantinov's book does not deny that socialist society has contradictions. It affirms them, at length, and it attacks the denial as an error. "The historical practice of the development of socialism," it says, "has revealed all the harmfulness of the illusion that in the new conditions society is liberated of all contradictions." There arise "in the process of development of socialist society itself certain contradictions that are peculiar to that society; in fact, there could be no progress without them." It even invokes, against complacency, "socialist criticism and self-criticism". Error is admissible. The book will concede that mistakes were made, that policy can go wrong, that Soviet society is not yet perfect.
What is not admissible is the category. The concession is made safe in advance by a single doctrinal device: the contradictions of socialism are non-antagonistic. They "arise between classes, between social forces whose conditions of life determine the community of their fundamental goals and interests"; they can be overcome "gradually, by means of planned economic activity … by means of educational work, and so on." And the crucial sentence, which fixes the limit of the whole book: "It may be assumed that only with the building of developed socialism will non-antagonistic contradictions never turn into antagonistic." Developed socialism — the horizon of 1982, the stage the USSR has reached — is precisely the stage at which contradiction loses the power to become antagonism. From there Chapter XIII draws the conclusion the method has been steered toward all along: "The contradictions arising in socialist society are resolved without social revolution."
There is the suspension, stated in the book's own words. Negation of the negation, the transformation of quantity into quality, the supersession of every existing order — the machinery runs through primitive communism, antiquity, feudalism and capitalism, and switches off on contact with the society doing the analysis. Capitalism prepares its own negation; developed socialism does not. Every prior order was a transient moment in a process; the Soviet order is the process arriving at its rest. The word "contradiction" is retained, and even multiplied, but it has been drained of the one property that made it dialectical — its tendency to burst the form that hosts it. A contradiction that cannot, by definition, become antagonistic, and is resolved without revolution by planning and education, is not a contradiction in Marx's sense at all. It is an administrative problem with a reassuring name.
The Fourth International's philosophical tradition answered this argument in the act of making it, and from inside the same categories. In "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics" — written in December 1939, at the height of his defence of dialectics against those in his own movement who wished to drop it — Trotsky put the point that Konstantinov's book is built to avoid: "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, "must apply the idea of evolution to his own forms of thinking" and to his own state; whoever "has learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself … is a dialectician, as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists." The vulgar evolutionist, by contrast, recognises development "in only certain spheres" and treats the rest as fixed. Konstantinov's textbook is a monument of exactly that selective evolutionism: development everywhere, except at home.
Trotsky drew the reflexive conclusion the textbook forbids in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the book against which every Soviet account of Soviet society must be read. The USSR, he argued, is "not a socialist regime, but a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to socialism", and precisely because it is transitional "its development does not proceed harmoniously, but in contradictions. Economic contradictions produce social antagonisms, which in turn develop their own logic, not awaiting the further growth of the productive forces." Where Konstantinov guarantees in advance that the non-antagonistic will never turn antagonistic, Trotsky insists the outcome cannot be guaranteed at all: it "depends upon a struggle of living social forces … not on a national scale, either, but on an international scale." And he named the contradiction the textbook cannot name — the privileged bureaucratic stratum itself: "Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other." One can accept or reject Trotsky's specific diagnosis. What cannot be denied is that it is the dialectical method carried through to its own society, and that Konstantinov's book, for all its chapters on contradiction, declines to carry it there.
The suspension has a concrete institutional form, and it is the one every reader of Marx would test first: the state. Marxism holds that the proletarian state is transitional and prepares its own dissolution — it withers away. The Soviet state of 1982, on the book's own account, was doing the reverse. Chapter XII reports that "the political organisation of society under socialism is preserved, acquiring an ever greater role in social life", and then makes the move that gives the whole doctrine away: "This by no means contradicts the thesis on the withering away of the state." A state growing more powerful is squared with a theory that it should be growing weaker by the simple expedient of postponing the withering to "the relatively distant future, in conditions of developed communism", and by redescribing the present growth, in Brezhnev's words quoted approvingly, as a process in which "our statehood is gradually being transformed into communist social self-government." Set that beside Trotsky's flat observation of the same institution: the Soviet state "does not die away, but grows more and more despotic", the bureaucracy "rises above the new society". Konstantinov's authors see the identical fact — a state of ever greater reach — and are obliged by their office to read its growth as its withering. The dialectical category of the transitional state, which points toward its own supersession, is preserved as a phrase and inverted in substance.
A textbook on the birth and development of Marxist philosophy might be expected to say something about the development of Marxist philosophy in the country that made it a state doctrine. It does not. The great philosophical battle of the Soviet 1920s — between the "Mechanists", who wanted to dissolve philosophy into natural science, and the Deborinites around Abram Deborin, who defended the Hegelian dialectic, before both schools were liquidated by the Party intervention of 1930–31 that branded Deborin's group guilty of "Menshevizing idealism" — has left no trace in these pages. Deborin's name occurs zero times. The nine appearances of "mechanist" are all about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialism or "theories of equilibrium"; not one concerns the Soviet debate in which the phrase acquired its lethal charge. The history of Soviet philosophy is told as a smooth ascent from Lenin to the present, with the decade in which philosophy was actually subordinated to the Party line simply removed.
The removal has a companion in the way the book handles the men that decade destroyed. Here Konstantinov's volume is more forthcoming than its sibling textbooks — A. P. Sheptulin's Marxist-Leninist Philosophy of 1978 prints the names Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Deborin exactly zero times each — and the difference is instructive, because naming turns out to be another way of containing. Stalin appears, but only as the "cult of personality": a phenomenon the CPSU "severely criticised … as something that contradicted the nature of socialism and the principles of Marxism-Leninism, as a departure from Leninist standards of inner-party life", traceable to "the negative traits in Stalin's own character … rudeness, disloyalty to comrades, intolerance of criticism". This is the reflexivity failure in miniature. The largest catastrophe in Soviet history is admitted as error — a matter of one man's character, certified against Lenin's Testament — and by the same stroke sealed off from the system: it "contradicted the nature of socialism", so socialism itself is never in the dock. The Terror becomes a personality defect. Nobody who stayed inside the Party is ever assigned to a category the book cannot recuperate.
Bukharin fares similarly. He appears four times, always as a foil for Lenin's philosophical corrections — the marginal notes on his Economics of the Transition Period — and never as a man shot in 1938. Trotsky appears three times. Once as the title of a Lenin polemic; once bracketed with Herbert Marcuse and the anarchists as a purveyor of "ideas derived from anarchism" (the characterise-but-never-cite treatment the whole series has learned to watch for — no work of Trotsky's is quoted or footnoted anywhere in the book); and once, substantively, in the chapter on the individual in history, where "the opposition in the party, led by Trotsky, maintained that the attempt to build socialism in one country, and a backward one at that, confronted by conservative Europe, was a hopeless task." This is the standard amalgam, and it disposes of an argument Trotsky never made. His position was not that building socialism in the USSR was "hopeless" but that it could be begun nationally and only completed internationally — that the fate of an isolated workers' state hung on the world revolution. The two decisive theses of The Permanent Revolution (1930) say exactly this: the revolution "begins on the national arena … and is completed on the world arena." The Soviet operation, here as elsewhere in this catalogue, is to collapse completion into beginning, so that a theory of the international dependence of socialist construction can be read out as a denial that construction is possible at all. The Revolution Betrayed is the sustained reply, and it turns the textbook's own boast — socialism achieved in one country — into the question the textbook cannot ask: at what cultural and material level, and with what social consequences, was it achieved?
One erasure the book does not commit deserves recording, because the honest credit is what makes the criticism trustworthy. The brief for this series expected the Hegelian, questioning Lenin of the Philosophical Notebooks to be suppressed in favour of the canonised, polemical Lenin of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In citation frequency that is true — the Notebooks are named once, Empirio-Criticism thirteen times. But the book does not hide the Notebooks; it honours them, explicitly, as "of tremendous significance", the place where Lenin "gives us some splendid examples of how to elaborate the laws and categories of materialist dialectics", and it praises "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" — Lenin's call for an alliance with natural science and for "the critical and creative assimilation of … Hegel's dialectics" — as "his philosophical testament". The open Lenin is not denied. He is embalmed. His programme for the further development of the theory of knowledge is quoted as a completed achievement rather than taken up as an unfinished task, which is precisely the difference between a method and a catechism.
None of this makes the book worthless, and a reader told that everything in it is propaganda would be misled twice over. Marxism is a philosophy, and worth teaching as one; where this volume expounds it rather than polices it, it has real content.
Its strongest ground is the defence of materialism against idealism and, especially, against positivism — the argument it was built to win. Drawing steadily on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, it holds the line that the objects of knowledge exist independently of consciousness, and it does so against live opponents: Bertrand Russell, for whom "the spiritual and the material are merely logical constructs"; the "physical" idealism read out of the crisis in early twentieth-century physics; the neopositivism and structural-functionalism dissected in the closing chapters, where Talcott Parsons's sociology is fairly identified as an apparatus for representing "the 'integrity' and 'stability', the equilibrium of the system of capitalist social relations". Whatever one thinks of the verdicts, these are arguments with named positions, and the reduction of philosophy to the logic of science is a real target the book hits.
Its treatment of the concept of matter is genuinely careful — the insistence that there is "no 'matter as such'" behind concrete objects, no "primary structureless substance", is a real philosophical advance over mechanical materialism and is argued, not asserted. Hegel is engaged seriously and often (some sixty times), not merely name-checked; the exposition of causality as reciprocal rather than one-directional, and of chance and necessity against Laplacean determinism, has the texture of thought rather than recitation. And on contradiction under socialism the book does draw, accurately, on the genuine dialectical Lenin — the marginal remarks on Bukharin in which Lenin distinguished antagonism from contradiction and held that "the former disappears under socialism while the latter remains". The tragedy of the volume is legible in that very citation: the authors possessed the living material and used it to build a wall. They took Lenin's real distinction and made of it a guarantee, where Lenin had left a warning.
That is the measure to leave a reader with. Set beside George Novack's An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism — the anti-Stalinist tradition's own lectures on the same subject, delivered in 1942 and insisting throughout on "the living spirit of dialectics as a method of thought" — or beside Trotsky's dictum that "the dialectic is not a magic master key for all questions … but it directs this analysis along the correct road", Konstantinov's Fundamentals reads as the same philosophy with its motor removed. The parts are all present and many of them are sound. What has been taken out is the one operation that made it dialectics: the readiness to turn the method on oneself. A book that finds negation and supersession in every order of nature and history, and exempts a single order — its own — has not made a small local exception. It has suspended its method at the exact point where the method would have cost something. That the authors saw the danger, named it, and could not escape it, is the most eloquent thing about the book, and the truest record it leaves of the year it was written.